the loveliest librarian

Remorse: you were a pale woman with thin arms, absorbing the colors of moss, lichen, and limestone into your skin. The heavy library doors were open, and within there were green reading lamps and polished heavy tables, and books massed up to the gallery and above. A few of these books were exalted, some were usefully informative, the majority of them would only congest the mind. My Swedenborgian old lady says that angels do not read books. Why should they? Nor, I imagine, can librarians be great readers. They have too many books, most of them burdensome. The crowded shelves give off an inviting, consoling, seductive odor that is also tinctured faintly with something pernicious, with poison and doom. Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned. And you, an underpriestess of this temple stepping out to look at the sky, and Mr. Lubeck, your chief, a gentle refugee always stumbling over his big senile dog and apologizing to the animal, “Ach, excuse me!” (heavy on the sibilant). [p. 10-11]

Title: Him With His Foot in His Mouth
Creator: Bellow, Saul
Relation: Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Date Issued: 1998
Date Copyrighted: 1984
Type: Text

“I was there when the kids came in for Story Hour and saw that poster for the first time. They were scared. Their eyes got big, and one little girl started to cry. And I liked it that they were scared. I thought, ‘That’ll pound the do-right into em, all right. That’ll teach em what’ll happen if they cross her, if they don’t do what she says.’ And part of me thought, you’re getting to think like her, Dave. Pretty soon you’ll get to be like her, and then you’ll be lost. You’ll be lost forever.

“But I went on, just the same. I felt like I had a one-way ticket and I wasn’t goin to get off until I rode all the way to the end of the line. Ardelia hired some college kids, but she always put em in the circulation room and the reference room and on the main desk. She kept complete charge of the kids… they were the easiest to scare, you see. And I think they were the best scares, the ones that fed her the best. Because that’s what she lived on, you know – she fed on their fright. And I made more posters. I can’t remember them all, but I remember the Library Policeman. He was in a lot of them. In one – it was called LIBRARY POLICEMEN GO ON VACATION, TOO – he was standin on the edge of a stream and fishin. Only what he’d baited his hook with was that little boy the kids called Simple Simon. In another one, he had Simple Simon strapped to the nose of a rocket and was pullin the switch that would send him into outer space. That one said LEARN MORE ABOUT SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY AT THE LIBRARY – BUT BE SURE TO DO RIGHT AND GET YOUR BOOKS BACK ON TIME.

“We turned the Children’s Room into a house of horrors for the kids who came there,” Dave said. He spoke slowly, and his voice was full of tears. “She and I. We did that to the children. But do you know what? They always came back. They always came back for more. And they never, never told. She saw to that.” [p. 501-502]

Title: The Library Policeman
Creator: King, Stephen, 1947-
Relation: Four Past Midnight
Publisher: Signet
Date: 1990
Type: Text

He kicked Fox in the head, knocked her down, and tied her to a card catalog. He stuffed a handful of moss and dirt into her mouth so she couldn’t say anything, and then he accused her of plotting to murder Faithful Margaret by magic. He said Fox was more deceitful than a Forbidden Book. He cut off Fox’s tail and her ears and he ran her through with the poison-edged, dog-headed knife that he and Fox had stolen from his mother’s secret house. Then he left Fox there, tied to the card catalog, limp and bloody, her beautiful head hanging down. He sneezed (Prince Wing is allergic to swordplay) and walked off into the stacks. The librarians crept out of their hiding places. They untied Fox and cleaned off her face. They held a mirror to her mouth, but the mirror stayed clear and unclouded.

When the librarians pulled Prince Wing’s leviathan sword out of the tree, the statue of George Washington staggered over and picked up Fox in his arms. He trucked her ears and tail into the capacious pockets of his birdshit-stained, verdigris riding coat. He carried Fox down seventeen flights of stairs, past the enchanted-and-disagreeable Sphinx on the eighth floor, past the enchanted-and-stormy underground sea on the third floor, past the even-more-enchanted checkout desk on the first floor, and through the hammered brass doors of the Free People’s World Tree Library. Nobody in The Library, not in one single episode, has ever gone outside. The Library is full of all the sorts of things that one usually has to go outside to enjoy: trees and lakes and grottoes and fields and mountains and precipices (and full of indoor thing as well, like books, of course). Outside The Library, everything is dusty and red and alien, as if George Washington has carried Fox out of The Library and onto the surface of Mars. [p. 201]

Title: Magic for Beginners
Creator: Link, Kelly
Relation: Magic for Beginners
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Date: 2005
Type: Text

The Librarian often wore a dark-red blouse. Her lips were reddened to match, and her hair was bobbed. She was not a young woman anymore, but she maintained an eye-catching style. He remembered that years ago when they had hired her, he had thought that she got herself up very soberly. Her hair was not bobbed in those days — it was wound around her head, in the old style. It was still the same color — a warm and pleasant color, like leaves — oak leaves, say, in the fall. He tried to think how much she was paid. Not much, certainly. She kept herself looking well on it. And where did she live? In one of the boarding houses — the one with the schoolteachers? No, not there. She lived in the Commercial Hotel.

And now something else was coming to mind. No definite story that he could remember. You could not say with any assurance that she had a bad reputation. But it was not quite a spotless reputation, either. She was said to take a drink with the travellers. Perhaps she had a boyfriend among them. A boyfriend or two.

Well, she was old enough to do as she liked. It wasn’t quite the same as the way it was with a teacher — hired partly to set an example. As long as she did her job well, and anybody could see that she did. She had her life to live, like everyone else. Wouldn’t you rather have a nice-looking woman in here than a crabby old affair like Mary Tamblyn? Strangers might drop in, they judge a town by what they see, you want a nice looking woman with a nice manner. [p. 35-36]

Title: Carried Away
Creator: Munro, Alice
Relation: Open Secrets: Stories
Publisher: Random House
Date: 1994
Type: Text

Myrtle is the possessor of a graduate degree, an immovable iron helmet of hair, an air that brooks no nonsense. But she isn’t a caricature, isn’t a prim crone in sensible shoes or a petty hardass or a lean, sexless bureaucrat with an iron-gray bun. Cartoonishness and dignity do not mix. She doesn’t wear half-glasses on a leash; her ankles have never swollen a single time; she’s never once lifted an index finger to her mouth and narrowed her eyes to shush someone. She doesn’t spend her weekends lamenting the demise of the card catalog (though, okay, a little, maybe she pines just a jot for that musty, tactile, blond-wood glory, that row of massive rectangles atop spindly legs, like a showroom full of Cadillacs parked on nightstands). Truth be told, she doesn’t read much, off the job: maybe Smithsonian, the newspaper engagements and obituaries, home-gadget catalogs. And having no spectacles means—obviously—that she couldn’t very well fling them off, shake loose her glowing hair, and, an insta-vixen, jump some lucky jasper’s bones in the bookmobile. [p. 10]

Title: Bibliophilia
Creator: Griffith, Michael, 1965-
Relation: Bibliophilia: A Novella and Short Stories
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Date: 2003
Type: Text

When Olena was a little girl she had called them lie-berries—a fibbing fruit, a story store—and now she had a job in one. She had originally wanted to teach English literature, but when she failed to warm to the graduate study of it, its french-fried theories—a vocabulary of arson!—she’d transferred to library school, where everyone was taught to take care of books, tenderly, as if they were dishes or dolls.She had learned to read at an early age. Her parents, newly settled in Vermont from Tirgu Mures in Transylvania, were anxious that their daughter learn to speak English, to blend in with the community in a way they felt they probably never would, and so every Saturday they took her to the children’s section of the Rutland library and let her spend time with the librarian, who chose books for her and sometimes even read a page or two out loud, though there was a sign that said PLEASE BE QUIET BOYS AND GIRLS. No comma.

Which made it seem to Olena that only the boys had to be quiet. She and the librarian could do whatever they wanted.

She had loved the librarian. [p. 20]

Title: Community Life
Creator: Moore, Lorrie
Relation: Birds of America: Stories
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Date: 1998
Type: Text