The Library of Unrequited Love

by Sophie Divry, Siân Reynolds

Genres: Literary Fiction; Workplace Romance

Synopsis

One morning a librarian finds a reader who has been locked in overnight. She begins to talk to him, a one-way conversation full of sharp insight and quiet outrage. As she rails against snobbish senior colleagues, an ungrateful and ignorant public, the strictures of the Dewey Decimal System and the sinister expansionist conspiracies of the books themselves, two things shine through: her unrequited passion for a researcher named Martin, and an ardent and absolute love for the arts. A delightful divertissement for the discerning bookworm...

Release date: January 13, 2013

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 46

Sample

WAKE UP! WHAT ARE YOU DOING LYING THERE? The library doesn’t open for another two hours, you shouldn’t be here at all. If it isn’t the limit! Now they’ve started locking readers into my basement. Honestly, there’s no end to what I have to put up with. No, no point shouting, it’s not my fault … But I know who you are, you know your way round the library. You mooch about this place all day, so sooner or later you were bound to end up spending the night here. No, don’t go away, now you’re here, you can give me a hand. I’m looking for a book they want upstairs. Existentialism Is a Humanism, you know, book by Sartre, they’ve somehow lost it down here, so take a look on the shelves, please. What? You don’t recognize me? But I work in this room every day. So I must be completely unnoticeable. Nobody sees me, that’s my problem. Even in the street, people bump into me and say, “Oh, sorry, didn’t see you.” The invisible woman, that’s who I am, the invisible woman, the one in charge of the Geography section. Ah, yes, now you’ve remembered who I am, of course. Oh there it is, thanks very much, that was quick of you. Existentialism Is a Humanism has no business down here in my basement, we don’t have philosophy on this level. It suits the eggheads on the ground floor. I’ll give it back to them, they’ll be pleased, they’ve been looking for it for ages up there. See, you really are a big help. Anyway, I’m not allowed to open the doors for you, it would mean calling the security people, it’s too dangerous. Yes, it is, it’s dangerous, because it would be unprecedented, first time ever. And in a library, one should never draw attention to oneself. If you attract attention, you’ll disturb people. You can just stay here with me, while I get my reading room ready. I’ve more books to shelve. And since you’re so efficient, can you take out of the History section all the geography books that readers have shoved in there? Go on, don’t complain: sorting, rearranging, not disturbing people, that’s what I do all day long. Taking books off shelves and putting them back on, over and over, ad infinitum. No, it’s not that fascinating, sorry about that. Because to put a book back in the right place, I don’t even have to look at the author’s name. I just have to read the numbers here, on this little label stuck on the spine, and slip it in with the others that have the same shelfmark. There, you see, that’s all. And I’ve been doing this job for twenty-five years now, twenty-five years, with the same rules, it never changes. Even if they call me upstairs to the Loans desk, it’s no better. Checking books in and out, making the bar codes go beep-beep, think that’s fulfilling? Beep-beep, “Back on twenty-sixth September, goodbye”; beep-beep, “Back on fourteenth May, thank you”. Being a librarian isn’t an especially high-level job, I can tell you. Pretty close to being in a factory. I’m a cultural assembly line worker. So what you need to know is, to be a librarian, you have to like the idea of classification, and to be of a docile nature. No initiative, no room for the unexpected; here, everything is in its place, invariably in its place. Did you sleep well, at least, down here? No? You were scared? Oh, but it’s very quiet. I like the peace and quiet, I find it reassuring. But that’s how I am, I need precision and routine. I could never work in a railway station: too much going on and the very idea that a train was going to be late would give me a panic attack. Anyway, I never take the train nowadays, I’m too old for that. I don’t drive either, it’s too dangerous and I hate car parks, I like old-fashioned beauty. Just the very idea of getting on the slip road to a motorway gives me palpitations. Don’t stay standing up like that, I’ll get you a coffee. I always bring a Thermos of coffee when I come in early. Drink up, it’ll make you feel better. Believe me. Now just sit down there and don’t bother me again, or I’ll get stressed. Even in small-town libraries like this, people make terrible mistakes in their shelving. It drives me up the wall, it’s a sign of how pathetic they are. Not only do they shut absent-minded readers into my basement at night, but they shelve the books all wrong as well. Because, theoretically, whether you’re in Paris, Marseille, Cahors, Mazamet or Dompierre-sur-Besbre, you ought to be able to find the same book in the same place. See, take a classic work of sociology, Émile Durkheim’s The Division of Labour in Society. Well, there it is, shelfmark 301. Next to Suicide. That’s another great classic by Durkheim: Suicide. Same author, same shelfmark: 301 DUR. Works every time. Can’t go wrong. The man who invented this system, his name was Melvil Dewey. He’s our founding father, for all us librarians. Just a little guy, from a poor family somewhere in America, and he was. . .