TWICE IN TIME

MEET THE AUTHOR — A Journey in Time

TO begin with, I defy anyone to prove that “Twice in Time” is NOT true.

Because every important character, save one (find him—or her—for yourself), is taken straight from history; the chief national and c o m -munity events dealt with happened substantially as here of the scenes and set forth; even most speeches are authentic.

I will say that you'll look hard before you find the Fortress of Santi Pelagrini on any map, and perhaps the Pazzi conspiracy is credited to another master mind by the textbooks; but otherwise things fell out just as I have them, and perhaps my scientific explanations are as believable as any alternates you can offer.

This is my most pretentious effort at a time-travel novel to date, and I will admit, in advance, all the obstacles that bob up in the path of such a story. In fact, the first chapter sets forth the biggest of these: the visualization of a person with three dimensions of space and one of time being a figure so many feet high, so many inches broad and thick and so many years deep.

If he travels in time, he must be two such figures—he must be twice in time.

But if one can achieve such a journey, where better could he go than to Florence in the Quatrecento, a city and age perhaps nowhere else equalled, unless in Athens of the Golden Age?

I have worked hard to make the place live again, and even at that I have barely flicked the fringes of it.

Mr. Virgil Finlay’s illustrations go far toward making the setting and action as real as they should be.