"Well. Guess I'll get a bunch and whenever I want to figure one out I'll try some questions with known answers."

"Yeah. Sure would be handy to have one of those people rumoured to have an intuitive understanding of the meanings, though."

"I'm not sure those are real, they sound like something someone would make up a story about for plot convenience and then, like, of course they'd be hard to find, most people never even see an alethiometer so how would you know if you had the ability."

"Yeah pretty much, but a boy can dream."

"Hey, if you find one..."

"You'll be the first one I'll tell about it."

"Thanks!"

He laughs. "No problem. Not like I'd tell the Louvre about it."

"If I were going to look for an intuitive reader I'd look in the Louvre, actually."

"—okay that's a valid point, yeah."

"I wonder if the Louvre would kick them out if they set up lemonade-stand style to read what the thing was babbling about."

"I think if they set up an actual stand, probably, but I doubt they'd care if it was just some rando talking there. I guess if they attracted too much of a crowd and made it hard to walk around the place?"

"Yeah, maybe. The Louvre might be uptight though, I don't know."

"Never been there, shared continental provenance notwithstanding, so no idea either."

"Anyway, if the existing dictionaries are no good we can make our own."

"They're probably any good, they did agree for the first couple of meanings per symbol, but yeah, we can."

"They may have done something annoying like get the first few all from the same source and then completely made up the rest. Like, with whom exactly could doing that affect their sales?"

"I was under the impression they were mostly for scholarly research rather than for sales, really. At least two of them were written by Professors at the University of Oxford, and the University has one, right?"

"Maybe those are legit and the rest are for people to put on their shelves and look nice like the I Ching and Tarot books they also never open."

"Well as far as I know the Tarot and I Ching don't actually work so at least the people with alethiometer books in their shelves can paint a picture of themselves as more worldly and sceptical."

"Fair enough."

"Although it would actually be pretty funny if those did work and no one had noticed, but presumably someone would ever have tried to do a study on that. At least after the invention of the alethiometers."

"Hm, they're fuzzy enough that I'm not sure it'd be easy to tell."

"Well, fair enough. ...alethiometers don't really do 'yes-or-no' questions very well, do they? I feel tempted to try to ask."

"A regrettable drawback. Numbers and yes-or-no."