Bill Bailey’s Library

Information

22 July 2020

The Librarians

Being born in a library was a lucky break, when civilisations tumbled after the joint shocks of  Chixit and the electron-phage pandemic, which wiped out 120 years of post James Clerk Maxwell technology.

Tom found he could use books to make chairs, beds, walls, and even big mazes in which to play hide-and-seek with his friends.

The leaves were good for toys, darts, waterbombs and, of course, to burn for heat and light.The spines could be used for shoes, and the covers were sometimes OK if the binding was unpicked, and they were  re-sewn into clothes.

Some of the books had pictures in, and Tom would never get tired of looking at the one with the Cat gradually disappearing, until there was nothing left of it save its grin.

As Tom got older, his carers (he'd never known his parents, as they had died of book fungus phage toxin, inhaled when working on their unsuccessful  experiments to try to render the leaves of the books edible), allowed him to travel to the upper reaches. Here were the most amazing collections of huge tomes of strange works with very large runes on the outside, and many tiny pictures of people on the inner leaves. Sometimes the same person would show up in many leaves and  then further along, would be gone. Tom tried to make up stories about them, imagining their lives in a world that,truly, had become unimaginable to him. If only someone could explain the runes to him, but all those people were gone. No-one was sure where, but the Librarians, as they were known, had made themselves scarce. Nevermind, less mouths to feed. But it would have been nice, Tom thought, to know what runes were- decoration, ritual, music, mad scratching of tame cats and rats (mmm, dinner), or maybe the remains of the Librarians themselves - perhaps that's what happened when people passed on, they lay down on one of the long lines of shelves, and slowly morphed into a volume, smaller or greater, thicker or thinner.

Tom's carers made sure to impress on him that under no circumstances should he go outside the grounds, as beyond the library's garden walls lay Illiteracy, a waste land where the runes were all ruined. Tom planned to go there as soon as he grew tall enough to build a staircase of tomestones high enough to see beyond. He remembered dimly that he had once been told of other Libraries, and if only he could carry enough rats and, of course, one cat, he should be able to travel there and meet like minded kids.

This had been one of the great libraries apparently called the Bowdler or Buddleia, Tom wasn't sure which , so there were, quite literarily, millions of books - they would never run out...or so Tom believed. Nevertheless, he held no illusions.

Late Returns will be dealt a bad hand