ROL

49 Possibilities: IV - Simple biblioscopy

• Leo Talamonti:

  «He brought us both into his well stocked library, and he asked us to choose as many books as we wanted for an experiment.
  We randomly chose books in different languages, and we then followed him into a larger room, where our host was standing seven/eight meters from us; here some things occurred that no positivist could ever believe.
  I randomly indicated one of the closed books that the young man was holding under his arm by pointing with my finger, at the same time asking our host to "read" a certain page and certain line; and the photographer did the same thing after me, indicating the books that I had brought with me. Each time, Dr. Rol, with confidence and precision, would read the indicated part of the closed book, and immediately afterwards we would check if he did it correctly. We could never find a single mistake.
  [3.] To prevent that the possibility that he could mentally force us to choose certain pages, we established the page numbers based on the numbers of certain cards randomly chosen from a well shuffled deck. We would alternate the selection of books; we repeated the experience until we were tired. We finally gave up in the face of his total precision».

• Giovanni Serafini:

   «Now he asked Dino Biondi to choose a random book from the library. After a couple moments of concentration, Rol "read" the first line of a page we selected at random. We were speechless. Rol, cool as a cucumber, ate another pastry».

• Alfredo Gaito:

   «One day I met Rol on the street. I was holding a book that I had just purchased. It was still in its packaging. Rol did not know which book it was. Upon my urging, he "read" the first line of a page chosen by me. He could not have seen those words before, because I unwrapped the book only after Rol had "read" it».