Salt, says Peter Handke, belongs alongside love, anger, or madness to the words "with which the great old stories were told and without which there are no stories." This book is about such great stories: In five thematic chapters - natural salts, faith salts, language salts, body salts, and relationship salts - Thomas Strässle traces the path that white gold has taken through the history of literature, from its beginnings to the present: from the Old Testament to Paul Celan, from Homer to Dürrenmatt, from Cicero to Peter Weiss. An extraordinary richness of meanings emerges, which literary texts attribute to this elemental substance.