Well between all us old folk, we have cleared up the issue.

The question is, how did things go so far off the rails? Was the text imported from a PDF?

Egg - I am not sure what you are referring to. I found three sets of body copy, two overlapping on the page and one floating well above the page on the pasteboard. But I did not have any problems selecting the text, or double, triple, or quadruple clicking to select a word, line, or entire paragraph. Near as I can tell, the text was in one text area. Ctrl A selected the entire block of copy.