The Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus spins tall tales note through words, but through pictures based on patents. Starting with the text of a best-selling book, the Apparatus parses out key words, then looks up those words in the United States Patent and Trademark Office. When it finds a match — essentially, a link between the words in a book and the words in a patent — the machine begins tracing the drawings f those patents. Most patents link older, related patents, called “prior art,” so the machine then jumps to those patents and begins drawing a new, creating a sequence of related imagery. This raises the inevitable question: How long until the Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus gets patented?