“So Caxton found a house in the country for them, and this also served as a library for parts of his own collection. He even established a means of continuing to fund the library after he was gone, one that continues to be used to this day. Basically, we mark up what should be marked down and mark down what should be marked up, and the difference is deposited with the Trust.”
“I’m not sure that I understand,” said Mr. Berger.
“It’s simple, really. It’s all to do with ha’pennys and portions of cents or lire, or whatever the currency may be. If, say, a writer was due to be paid the sum of nine pounds, ten shillings, and sixpence ha’penny in royalties, the ha’penny would be shaved off and given to us. Similarly, if a company owes a publisher seventeen pounds, eight shillings, and sevenpence ha’penny, they’re charged eightpence instead. This goes on all through the industry, even down to individual books sold. Sometimes we’re dealing in only fractions of a penny, but when we take them from all round the world and add them together, it’s more than enough to fund the Trust, maintain the library, and house the characters here. It’s now so embedded in the system of books and publishing that nobody even notices anymore.”
Mr. Berger was troubled. He would have had no time for such accounting chicanery when it came to the Closed Accounts Register. It did make sense, though.
“And what is the Trust?”
“Oh, the Trust is just a name that’s used for convenience. There hasn’t been an actual trust in years, or not one on which anyone sits. For all intents and purposes, this is the Trust. I am the Trust. When I pass on, the next librarian will be the Trust. There’s not much work to it. I rarely even have to sign checks.”
While the financial support structure for the library was all very interesting, Mr. Berger was more interested in the question of the characters.
“To get back to these characters, they live here?”
“Oh, absolutely. As I explained, they just show up outside when the time is right. Some are obviously a little confused, but it all becomes clear to them in the days that follow, and they start settling in. And when they arrive, so too does a first edition of the relevant work, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. We put it on a shelf and keep it nice and safe. It’s their life story, and it has to be preserved. Their history is fixed in those pages.”
“What happens with series characters?” asked Mr. Berger. “Sherlock Holmes, for example? Er, I’m assuming he’s here somewhere.”
“Of course,” said Mr. Gedeon. “We numbered his rooms as 221B, just to make him feel at home. Dr. Watson lives next door. In their case, I do believe that the library received an entire collection of first editions of the canonical works.”
“The Conan Doyle books, you mean?”
“Yes. Nothing after Conan Doyle’s death in 1930 actually counts. It’s the same for all of the iconic characters here. Once the original creator passes on, then that’s the end of their story as far as we, and they, are concerned. Books by other authors who take up the characters don’t count. It would all be unmanageable otherwise. Needless to say, they don’t show up here until after their creators have died. Until then, they’re still open to change.”
“I’m finding all of this extremely difficult to take in,” said Mr. Berger.
“Dear fellow,” said Mr. Gedeon, leaning over and patting Mr. Berger’s arm reassuringly, “don’t imagine for a moment that you’re the first. I felt exactly the same way the first time that I came here.”
“How did you come here?”
“I met Hamlet at a number 48B bus stop,” said Mr. Gedeon. “He’d been there for some time, poor chap. At least eight buses had passed him by, and he hadn’t taken any of them. It’s to be expected, I suppose. It’s in his nature.”
“So what did you do?”
“I got talking to him, although he does tend to soliloquize, so one has to be patient. Saying it aloud, I suppose it seems nonsensical in retrospect that I wouldn’t simply have called the police and told them that a disturbed person who was under the impression he was Hamlet was marooned at the 48B bus stop. But I’ve always loved Shakespeare, you see, and I found the man at the bus stop quite fascinating. By the time he’d finished speaking, I was convinced. I brought him back here and restored him to the safe care of the librarian of the day. That was old Headley, my predecessor. I had a cup of tea with him, much as we’re doing now, and that was the start of it. When Headley retired, I took his place. Simple as that.”
It didn’t strike Mr. Berger as very simple at all. It seemed complicated on a quite cosmic scale.
“Could I…?” Mr. Berger began to say, then stopped. It struck him as a most extraordinary thing to ask, and he wasn’t sure that he should.
“See them?” said Mr. Gedeon. “By all means! Best bring your coat, though. I find it can get a bit chilly back there.”
Mr. Berger did as he was told. He put on his coat and followed Mr. Gedeon past the shelves, his eyes taking in the titles as he went. He wanted to touch the books, to take them down and stroke them like cats, but he controlled the urge. After all, if Mr. Gedeon was to be believed, he was about to have a far more extraordinary encounter with the world of books.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
In the end it proved to be slightly duller than Mr. Berger had expected. Each of the characters had a small but clean suite of rooms, personalized to suit their time periods and dispositions. Mr. Gedeon explained that they didn’t organize the living areas by authors or periods of history, so there weren’t entire wings devoted to Dickens or Shakespeare.
“It just didn’t work when it was tried in the past,” said Mr. Gedeon. “Worse, it caused terrible problems and some awful fights. The characters tend to have a pretty good instinct for these things themselves, and my inclination has always been to let them choose their own space.”
They passed Room 221B, where Sherlock Holmes appeared to be in an entirely drug-induced state of stupor, while in a nearby suite Tom Jones was doing something unspeakable with Fanny Hill. There was a brooding Heathcliff, and a Fagin with rope burns around his neck, but like animals in a zoo, a lot of the characters were simply napping.
“They do that a lot,” said Mr. Gedeon. “I’ve seen some of them sleep for years, decades even. They don’t get hungry as such, although they do like to eat to break the monotony. Force of habit, I suppose. We try to keep them away from wine. That makes them rowdy.”
“But do they realize that they’re fictional characters?” said Mr. Berger.
“Oh yes. Some of them take it better than others, but they all learn to accept that their lives have been written by someone else, and their memories are a product of literary invention, even if, as I said earlier, it gets a bit more complicated with historical characters.”
“But you said it was only fictional characters who ended up here,” Mr. Berger protested.
“That is the case as a rule, but it’s also true that some historical characters become more real to us in their fictional forms. Take Richard III: much of the public perception of him is a product of Shakespeare’s play and Tudor propaganda, so in a sense that Richard III is a fictional character. Our Richard III is aware that he’s not actually the Richard III but a Richard III. On the other hand, as far as the public is concerned he is the Richard III and is more real in their minds than any products of later revisionism. But he’s the exception rather than the rule: very few historical characters manage to make that transition. All for the best, really, otherwise this place would be packed to the rafters.”