In previous posts I have written about Connie’s previous novels: Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, Blackout and All Clear.
Jim is in New York doing publicity for his blog, Gone for Good, (in which he apparently welcomes the disppearance of things such as payphones and VHS tapes). Taking a walk before his next interview, he runs across a second-hand bookstore called Ozymandias Books which he ducks into to escape a downpour.
The inside was exactly what you’d expect: an old-fashioned wooden desk and behind it, ceiling-high shelves crammed with books streching back into the dimness. The store was only wide enough for a bookcase along each wall, one in the middle, and a space between just wide enough for a single customer to stand. If there’s been any customers. Which there weren’t. The only thing in the place besides the guy sitting hunched over the desk- presumably the owner – was a gray tiger cat curled up in one corner of it.
Jim cannot make sense of the way that the books are positioned on the sehelves which seems completely at random with no rhyme or reason. Then he notices a attractive blonde young woman disappearing into the back of the shop, except there is no back. He finds a door and cannor resist going through, first going up and then down into a vast room below street level awash with books.
The blonde stood next to the carousel with a clip-board, supervising three burly workmen in overalls who were scooping the books up and piling them onto big metal library carts. But not fast enough. They were working at top speed, but they still weren’t able to keep up. Books were piling up on the carousel adn beginning to fall over the edge.
The woman is named Cassie and takes a Jim on a tour of the facility, which is neither a bookstor nor a library, as Cassie is at pains to inform him
....libraries are one of the biggest reasons we’re here…they destroy hundreds of thousands of books a year. They don’t call it that, of course. They call it ‘retiring books” or ‘pruning” or ‘culling’. Or ‘de-acquisition.’
The books are categorised in different ways, from hoarders, attics, garages, closed bookstores and libraries that have been destroyed by fire or flood. Then there are sections for books left on beaches, dropped in the bathtub, torn up by a toddler, scribbled in etc..
Jim thinks he has grasped what is going on.
It was an endangered -book archive, like those gorillasand elephant sanctuaries or those repositaries for rare type of seeds, to keep them from going extinct. And it was the scarcity of the book that determined its place here, not its collectible value or literary quaiity.
But he hasn’t quite got it right. Whereas we, the readers, by now probably have. You’ll need to read this novella to find out for yourself, through.
Connie has written a paean of praise to books in all their scruffy, tattered, coffee-stained, dog-eared glory. Long may they continue.
Oh, and the ending calls to mind a short story by H G Wells, The Door in the Wall.
Fantasies of Possibility 