The Man in The High Castle, #1

'Well I'll tell you,' he said. 'This whole damn historicity business is nonsense... I'll prove it.' Getting up, he hurried into his study, returned at once with two cigarette lighters which he set down on the coffee table. 'Look at these. Look the same, don't they? Well, listen. One has historicity in it. Pick them up. Go ahead. One's worth, oh, maybe forty or fifty thousand dollars on the collectors' market.'
    The girl gingerly picked up the two lighters and examined them.
    'Don't you feel it?' he kidded her. 'The historicity?'
    She said, 'what is "historicity"?'
    'When a thing has history in it. Listen. One of these two Zippo lighters was in Franklin D. Roosevelt's pocket when he was assassinated. And one wasn't. One has historicity, a hell of a lot of it. As much as any object ever had. And one has nothing. Can you feel it?' He nudged her. 'You can't. You can't tell which is which. There's no "mystical presence", no "aura" around it.'
    'Gee,' the girl said, awed. 'Is that really true? That he had one of those on him that day?'  
    'Sure. And I know which it is. You see my point. It's all a big racket; they're playing it on themselves. It's in here.' He tapped his head. 'I used to be a collector. In fact, that's how I got into this business. I used to collect stamps.'
    The girl stood at the window, her arms folded, gazing out at the lights of downtown San Francisco. 'My mother and dad used to say we wouldn't have lost the war if he had lived,' she said...

p 65-66, The Man in The High Castle, by Philip K. Dick, 1962