DUMAS, ALEXANDRE—THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO
The boy returned at ten-thirty on a Tuesday morning. It’s official library policy to report truants to the high school, because the school board felt we were becoming “a haven for unsupervised and illicit teenage activity.” I happen to think that’s exactly what libraries should aspire to be, and suggested we get it engraved on a plaque for the front door, but then I was asked to be serious or leave the proceedings, and anyway we’re supposed to report kids who skip school to play League of Legends on our computers or skulk in the graphic novel section.
I watched the boy prowling the shelves—muscles strung wire-tight over his bones, soul writhing and clawing like a caged creature—and did not reach for the phone. Agnes, still wearing her oh honey expression, declined to reprimand me.
I sent him home with The Count of Monte Cristo, partly because it requires your full attention and a flow chart to keep track of the plot and the kid needed distracting, but mostly because of what Edmund says on the second-to-last page: “… all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,—‘Wait and hope.’”
But people can’t keep waiting and hoping forever.
They fracture, they unravel, they crack open; they do something desperate and stupid and then you see their high school senior photo printed in the Ulysses Gazette, grainy and oversized, and you spend the next five years thinking: if only I’d given her the right book.
ROWLING, JK—HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE
ROWLING, JK—HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS
ROWLING, JK—HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN
Every librarian has Books she never lends to anyone.
I’m not talking about first editions of Alice in Wonderland or Dutch translations of Winnie-the-Pooh; I’m talking about Books so powerful and potent, so full of susurrating seduction, that only librarians of the second sort even know they exist.
Each of us has her own system for keeping them hidden. The most venerable libraries (the ones with oak paneling and vaulted ceilings and Beauty and the Beast-style ladders) have secret rooms behind fireplaces or bookcases, which you can only enter by tugging on a certain title on the shelf. Sainte-Geneviève in Paris is supposed to have vast catacombs beneath it guarded by librarians so ancient and desiccated they’ve become human-shaped books, paper-skinned and ink-blooded. In Timbuktu, I heard they hired wizard-smiths to make great wrought-iron gates that only permit passage to the pure of heart.
In the Maysville branch of the Ulysses County Library system, we have a locked roll-top desk in the Special Collections room with a sign on it that says, “This is an Antique! Please Ask for Assistance.”
We only have a dozen or so Books, anyhow, and god knows where they came from or how they ended up here. A Witch’s Guide to Seeking Righteous Vengeance, with its slender steel pages and arsenic ink. A Witch’s Guide to Falling in Love for the First Time, for Readers at Every Stage of Life!, which smells like starlight and the summer you were seventeen. A Witch’s Guide to Uncanny Baking contains over thirty full-color photographs to ensorcell your friends and afflict your adversaries. A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies has no words in it at all, but only pages and pages of maps: hand-drawn Middle Earth knock-offs with unpronounceable names; medieval tapestry-maps showing tiny ships sailing off the edge of the world; topographical maps of Machu Picchu; 1970s Rand McNally street maps of Istanbul.
It’s my job to keep Books like this out of the hands of desperate high-school kids with red backpacks. Our school-mistresses called it “preserving the hallowed and hidden arts of our foremothers from mundane eyes.” Our professors called it “conserving rare/historic texts.”
Both of them mean the same thing: We give people the books they need, except when we don’t. Except when they need them most.
He racked up $1.50 on The Count of Monte Cristo and returned it with saltwater splotches on the final pages. They weren’t my-favorite-character-died tears or the-book-is-over tears. They were bitter, acidic, anise-scented: tears of jealousy. He was jealous that the Count and Haydée sailed away from their world and out into the blue unknown. That they escaped.
I panicked and weighed him down with the first three Harry Potters, because they don’t really get good until Sirius and Lupin show up, and because they’re about a neglected, lonely kid who gets a letter from another world and disappears.
GEORGE, JC—THE RUNAWAY PRINCE
Agnes always does the “we will be closing in ten minutes” announcement because something in her voice implies that anybody still in the library in nine minutes and fifty seconds will be harvested for organ donations, and even the most stationary patrons amble towards the exit.
The kid with the red backpack was hovering in the oversize print section (gossipy, aging books, bored since the advent of e-readers with changeable font sizes) when Agnes’s voice came through the speakers. He went very still, teetering the way a person does when they’re about to do something really dumb, then dove beneath a reading desk and pulled his dark hoodie over his head. The oversize books gave scintillated squeals.
It was my turn to close, so Agnes left right at nine. By 9:15 I was standing at the door with my NPR tote on my shoulder and my keys in my hand. Hesitating.
It is very, extremely, absolutely against the rules to lock up for the night with a patron still inside, especially when that patron is a minor of questionable emotional health. It’s big trouble both in the conventional sense (phone calls from panicked guardians, police searches, charges of criminal neglect) and in the other sense (libraries at night are noisier places than they are during the daylight hours).
I’m not a natural rule-follower. I roll through stop signs, I swear in public, I lie on online personality tests so I get the answers I want (Hermione, Arya Stark, Jo March). But I’m a very good librarian of either kind, and good librarians follow the rules. Even when they don’t want to.
That’s what Agnes told me five years ago, when I first started at Maysville.
This girl had started showing up on Sunday afternoons: ponytailed, cute, but wearing one of those knee-length denim skirts that scream “mandatory virginity pledge.” I’d been feeding her a steady diet of subversion (Orwell, Bradbury, Butler), and was about to hit her with A Handmaid’s Tale when she suddenly lost interest in fiction. She drifted through the stacks, face gone white and empty as a blank page, navy skirt swishing against her knees.
It wasn’t until she reached the 618s that I understood. The maternity and childbirth section trilled saccharine congratulations. She touched one finger to the spine of What to Expect When You’re Expecting (618.2 EIS) with an expression of dawning, swallowing horror, and left without checking anything out.
For the next nine weeks, I sent her stories of bravery and boldness, defying-your-parents stories and empowered-women-resisting-authority stories. I abandoned subtlety entirely and slid Planned Parenthood pamphlets into her book bag, even though the nearest clinic is six hours away and only open twice a week, but found them jammed frantically in the bathroom trash.