The glass wall of the reading room was etched with quotes from writers in the library’s collection. Fiona Coyle let the back of her fingers brush the edges of the letters as she walked past, reading off the frosted detail of the words that encircled her readers; thoughts and ideas held elsewhere in the building, inscribed here with a divine turn on what a prayer might feel like.
Most mornings, as the sun shone through the muted glass, the shadowed words moved around the room, with the softened quotes coming to settle around the back and shoulders of different readers. Fiona Coyle took this as a sign that the light about the academy had, through some combination of words and space, come to wreathe the room in an immutable balm, like the distant, easy laughter of a childhood memory; the immediate and solid riven with some forgiving potential from the past. She liked to think that as the words alighted, some awareness might seep with the moment, that the reader would become present to something beyond the page, which when brought to sensibility might somehow crystallise anew the words they were reading; an original thought forming like a vibration in the light, glimpsed momentarily, and which might be snatched and rendered still in concentration.
This is what made the reading room a different place from the rest of the library. Nowhere else could the words of the scientists, philosophers and writers held in Rare Books and Special Collections be seen in quite the same, unique way. Thoughts lit through the refraction of words cast in light, intensely alive, bringing you closer to their original writer, to some unique moment of creativity. A light that also helped her decide which of her readers she would share this with.
“I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.”
The quote from Isaac Newton was caught in the light today, whose glow, to her pleasure, had settled on the numismatist. A parrot-faced man in a Panama hat who was studying money. This, she had discovered, was what a numismatist did. That the words of Isaac Newton had come to settle on him was doubly pleasing. Not only was he reading the diaries of the famous physicist, but the quote was one she had suggested when the reading room had been refurbished a couple of years ago. It captured one of the themes of the collection: The Enlightenment, science and medicine. The latter contained important books, investigations and early treatises on madness and mental illness. Motion and madness. The two defined the beginning and the end of the collection. From the rise of rational thought to comprehending its demise. Funny how one was born of the other. In an earlier age, she suspected her own mind may have been the subject of some kind of brutal investigation. Her conversations misunderstood amongst a febrile mix of superstition and chimerical whimsy. Indeed, even today there was the risk that some whispered eccentricity might be more than her colleagues could bear. She was far from the first to consider books as the mortal remains of the souls who produced them. However, her regular conversations with their writers, holding the book as others now talked to a screen? Well, even her mother might not consider that. So she only indulged when she was alone. Not that it was a lonely job. There had always been plenty of readers. This was one of the best things about being the Rare Books and Special Collections Librarian. The reader filled in the call slip, you brought them the book or manuscript, then you got to watch them reading it, often talking to them about it, not infrequently working with them on some project, especially given her reputation. It was better than any reading group. And today she had Mr. Numismatist, overlooked by Isaac Newton, reading his own diary of 1716 when, as master of the mint, he had been tracking counterfeiters. It was too precious a moment to miss.
She had developed a reputation in charting bibliographic history, digging in the interstices, uncovering more about lost motives, new evidence and possible meetings that brought life to a particular manuscript, book or codex. This, of course, enlivened her conversation with the writer of that work when she was alone with it. For she could interrogate them about what she had learned, what was missing, what might have been and what they might change, if like her, they were alive to reconsider – and possibly rewrite – their work centuries after their death. She enjoyed testing out the answers they left her with. Introducing them into conversations with readers upon which particularly auspicious quotes had settled. She would do this with the full aura of her twenty years of bibliographic expertise. Letting her name on the bookshelves behind her desk foreshadow her words, with the discoveries, insights and revelations her detection had led to, further freighting what she was about to reveal. It often only took a suggestion, something she’d just recalled, passed to her from a colleague whose name she could not reveal as yet, due to the finely balanced nature of their research, as yet uncatalogued, and which might be on the cusp of peer review. But maybe they might look into it anyway. You never know. A hint and a wink, that she’d just given away a game she would not have done otherwise if it weren’t that she clearly thought you had something about you.
Ah, how she loved the light in their eyes when she told them that. It would enliven them for a few days. She’d say how maybe she’d contact a distant colleague, who knew a friend of a friend of the librarian at a far off institution. See what she could do. This was especially pleasing when it seemed the reader might have become frustrated with their progress. Was that not what libraries were for? Inspiring the progress of research? And who was to know the stories her writers told her were not the truth? Might indeed have followed that path? Sometimes, of course, like the good academics they were, they’d start checking for themselves. So access to the metadata and search algorithms, that became useful. Flagging information as more reliable than it ought to be, adding the credence of institutions and academics that had verified and referenced it, add it to some reading lists, and send some automated software tweeting across the academisphere, all easier and easier to do as companies created seamless programmes that populated information automatically from one platform to another. This was a game worth playing, especially watching the face of a reader who had come to believe their own dust jacket; that what they’d heard was essentially their own idea. And as the results come back? Confirmation of what they wanted to believe in the first place, is that not what we all want?
My first published novel: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cringe-Bruce-Sinclair/dp/1516971728
Bruce Sinclair - writer 