Ex Libris Read online

  EX LIBRIS:

  Stories of Librarians, Libraries & Lore

  Edited by Paula Guran

  Copyright © 2017 Paula Guran.

  Cover art by Julie Dillon.

  Cover design by Sherin Nicole.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-60701-490-4

  Print ISBN: 978-1-60701-489-8

  PRIME BOOKS

  Germantown, MD

  www.prime-books.com

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  For more information, contact Prime Books at [email protected].

  All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors, and used here with their permission.

  Special thanks to John O’Neill of Black Gate (blackgate.com).

  Stories are copyrighted to their respective authors and used here by permission.

  “The Last Librarian: Or a Short Account of the End of the World” © 2011 Edoardo Albert; 1st Publication: Daily Science Fiction, 5 August 2011. | “The Books” © 2010 Kage Baker; 1st Publication: The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF, ed. Mike Ashley (Robinson). Reprinted by permission of Kathleen Bartholomew and the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc. | “In Libres” © 2015 Elizabeth Bear; 1st Publication: Uncanny #4. | “The Sigma Structure Symphony” © 2012 Gregory Benford; 1st Publication: The Palencar Project, ed. Davd Hartwell (Tor). | “Paper Cuts Scissors” © 2007 Holly Black; 1st Publication: Realms of Fantasy, October 2007. | “King of the Big Night Hours” © 2007 Richard Bowes; 1st Publication: Subterranean, Issue #7. | “Exchange” © 1996 Ray Bradbury; 1st Publication: Quicker Than the Eye (Avon Books). | “The Green Book” © 2010 Amal El-Mohtar; 1st Publication: Apex Magazine, 8 November 2010. | “Those Who Watch” © 2016 Ruthanna Emrys; 1st Publication: The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu, ed. Paula Guran. (Robinson UK/ Running Press US) | “Death and the Librarian” © 1994 Esther M. Friesner; 1st Publication: Asimov’s, December 1994. | “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler” © 2015 Xia Jia; originally published in Chinese: Guangming Daily, 5 June 2015, Version 14; 1st English publication (translation in cooperation with Storycom by Ken Liu): © 2015: Clarkesworld #110. | “In the House of the Seven Librarians” © 2006 Ellen Kages; 1st Publication: Firebirds Rising: An Anthology of Original Science Fiction & Fantasy, ed. Sharyn November. (Firebird/Penguin). | “Magic for Beginners” © 2005 Kelly Link; 1st Publication: Magic for Beginners (Small Beer Press). | “Summer Reading” © 2012 Ken Liu; 1st Publication: Daily Science Fiction, 4 September 2012. | “In the Stacks” © 2010 Scott Lynch; 1st Publication: Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword & Sorcery, eds. Jonathan Strahan & Lou Anders (HarperVoyager). | “The Fort Moxie Branch ” © 1988 Cryptic, Inc; 1st Publication: Full Spectrum, eds. Lou Aronica & Shawna McCarthy (Bantam Spectra). | “The Inheritance of Barnabas Wilcox” © 2004 Sarah Monette; 1st Publication: Lovecraft’s Weird Mysteries #7. | “Special Collections” © 2015 Norman Partridge; 1st Publication: The Library of the Dead, ed. Michael Bailey (Written Backwards/Dark Regions Press). | “A Woman’s Best Friend” © 2008 Robert Reed; 1st Publication: Clarkesworld # 17. | “What Books Survive” © 2012 Tansy Rayner Roberts; 1st Publication: Epilogue, ed. Tehani Wessely (Fablecroft Publishing). | “The Midbury Lake Incident” © 2015 Kristine Kathryn Rusch; 1st Publication: Magical Libraries, an Uncollected Anthology, Issue 5 (WMG Publishing). | “The Librarian’s Dilemma” © 2015 E. Saxey; 1st Publication: The Journal of Unlikely Academia, October 2015. | “With Tales in Their Teeth, From the Mountain They Came” © 2013 A.C. Wise; 1st Publication: Lightspeed #32.

  Contents

  Ad Librum by Paula Guran

  In the House of the Seven Librarians by Ellen Klages

  The Books by Kage Baker

  Death and the Librarian by Esther M. Friesner

  In Libres by Elizabeth Bear

  The King of the Big Night Hours by Richard Bowes

  Those Who Watch by Ruthanna Emrys

  Special Collections by Norman Partridge

  Exchange by Ray Bradbury

  Paper Cuts Scissors by Holly Black

  Summer Reading by Ken Liu

  Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

  The Inheritance of Barnabas Wilcox by Sarah Monette

  The Midbury Lake Incident by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  With Tales in Their Teeth, from the Mountain They Came by A.C. Wise

  What Books Survive by Tansy Rayner Roberts

  The Librarian’s Dilemma by E. Saxey

  The Green Book by Amal El-Mohtar

  In the Stacks by Scott Lynch

  A Woman’s Best Friend by Robert Reed

  If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Xia Jia

  The Sigma Structure Symphony by Gregory Benford

  The Fort Moxie Branch by Jack McDevitt

  The Last Librarian by Edoardo Albert

  About the Authors

  About the Editor

  Ad Librum

  Paula Guran

  That libraries and librarians are often found in fiction should come as no surprise. Cultural reflection aside, writers usually know both well and are fond of them. And, since authors need reading and readers and libraries and librarians nurture such, authors have a vested interest in their ongoing success.

  Grant Burns points out in Librarians in Fiction: A Critical Bibliography (1997): “Librarians in fiction tend to be unhappy and beset with problems. That fact probably says far less about librarians and their image than it does about serious fiction.”

  Science fiction and fantasy is, thank goodness, not “serious fiction” (whatever that is). The troubled, gloomy librarian does, of course, occur in speculative fiction, but librarians are also characterized in a variety of other ways.

  Descriptions of libraries themselves, in general fiction, are similarly confining. Back in 1904—a time when fiction in libraries and the establishment of public libraries (at least in England) were controversial topics—librarian J.D. Stewart wrote, more than somewhat tongue in cheek:

  Now, it may seem novelists, with few exceptions, are the last persons capable of describing a library . . . The libraries they have described fall naturally into two classes—the gloomy-mysterious and the impossibly-magnificent . . . Sometimes they are places of mystery, with secret passages concealed by sliding bookcases and leading to noisome vaults—vaults where ghastly deeds have been done, and in which heaps of human bones lie mouldering. Some writers have even misinterpreted the phrase, “ghosts in the library,’’ and have turned the place into a haunted chamber, the supernatural inmates having a close connection with the human bones aforesaid . . .

  Like those troubled, gloomy librarians, “gloomy-mysterious” and “impossibly-magnificent” libraries certainly exist in speculative fiction—especially the darker sorts!—but again, there’s far more diversity in both architecture and atmosphere.

  In fantasy, libraries can exist outside time and space and be infinite. Librarians are usually vastly knowledgeable and often greatly heroic . . . and sometimes scary or even evil.

  The most-often cited example of the fantastic library is Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel in his 1941 story of the same name.

  “The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries . . . ” he explains. Each shelf in these rooms “contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color.” Each book consists of different combination of letters, and in total they contain all possible arrangement of letters. So, the Library as a whole contains:

  Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels
’ autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.

  Borges (who worked as one) doesn’t say much about librarians, although he mentions the possibility that “there must exist a book which is the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has gone through it and he is analogous to a god.”

  The Library of Dream in Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel series The Sandman is another fictional library existing outside time and space. Librarian Lucien oversees “the largest library that ever was” (Vertigo Jam, August 1993) and even contains books “their authors never wrote or never finished, except in dreams.” (Sandman 22, January 1991). Lucien says he “can remember the title, author, and location of every book in this library . . . Every book that’s ever been dreamed. Every book that’s ever been imagined. Every book that’s ever been lost. Millions upon millions of them. That’s what I remember. It’s my job. Other things . . . I forget sometimes.” (Sandman 57, February 1994).

  Earlier, in Beyond Life (1919), John Branch Cabell invented a library with similar books, but it was quite firmly (if fictionally) bound in time and space. Located in protagonist John Charteris’ Cambridge home, Willoughby Hall, its shelves “contain the cream of the unwritten books—the masterpieces that were planned and never carried through.”

  The section includes, he notes, “a number of persons who never published a line.” But there are well-known authors as well: “Thackeray’s mediaeval romance of Agincourt. Dickens, as you see, has several novels there: perhaps The Young Person and The Children of the Fathers are the best, but they all belong to his later and failing period.” The main treasure of this library is an “unbound collection of the unwritten plays of Christopher Marlowe.”

  Charteris also possesses “books with which you are familiar, as the authors meant them to be.” Books read in these “intended” editions are quite different than the works as published.

  The Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat (formerly known as the Cheshire Cat—yes, the one with whom Alice acquainted) is in charge of the Great Library in Jasper Fforde’s humorous cross-genre Thursday Next series. (Seven books beginning with The Eyre Affair, 2001). The Library is a “cavernous and almost infinite depository of every book ever written. But to call the Cat a librarian would be an injustice. He was an uberlibrarian—he knew about all the books in his charge. When they were being read, by whom—everything.”

  Fforde’s Great Library is located on an alternate Earth where literature is quite important and reality is stretched so thin fictional characters can jump from one book to another. The Library’s upper twenty-six stories house all published fiction. Beneath it are another twenty-six floors of “dingy yet industrious subbasements known as the Well of Lost Plots. This is where books are constructed, honed and polished in readiness for a place in the library above—if they make it . . . The failure rate is high.”

  Another library outside the normal limits of space and time is found in Genevieve Cogman’s Invisible Library novels. The mission of the Invisible Library—which exists between many alternate Earths—is to save books unique to a particular Earth. Librarians—who can alter reality using the Language—are spies/agents sent to retrieve these books. Librarian Irene is sent on a mission in the first book (The Invisible Library, 2015) that proves quite dangerous. The following books expand on the role of librarian as hero.

  A truly heroic librarian from outside space/time is found in Liz Williams’ little-known Worldsoul (2012), which posits the question: “What if being a librarian was the most dangerous job in the world?” Worldsoul is a great city that forms a nexus point between Earth and many dimensions. Its library is a place where old stories gather and forgotten legends come to fade and die—or to flourish and rise again. Librarians are doing their best to maintain the Library, but . . . things . . . keep breaking out of ancient texts and legends and escaping. Librarian Mercy Fane must pursue one such dangerous creature. (Full disclosure: Projected as a trilogy, only this first book was published and I was its editor. I hope Liz Williams will eventually get the sequels published.)

  The Extreme Librarians, or Bookaneers, are the heroic keepers of the Wordhoard Pit of UnLondon, an alternate London in China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun (2007). Young Deeba climbs perilous booksteps and storyladders to the rim of the Pit’s brick tower. At least one hundred feet in diameter, it is hollow and lined with books. Retrieving anything from this high-rise universe of bookshelves is challenging; at the very least it requires harnesses, tethering, ropes, and the occasional pickaxe. One Extreme Librarian, Margarita Staples, relates how bookaneers might be “gone for weeks, fetching volumes. . . . There are risks. Hunters, animals, and accidents. Ropes that snap. Sometimes someone gets separated.” Sometimes librarians never return.

  Miéville also invented Gedrecsechet, the librarian of the Palgolak church in his novel Perdido Street Station (2000). “Palgolak was a god of knowledge. He was depicted either as a fat, squat human reading in a bath, or a svelte vodyanoi doing the same, or, mystically, both at once. . . . He was an amiable, pleasant deity, a sage whose existence was entirely devoted to the collection, categorization, and dissemination of information.”

  Palgolak’s library does not lend books, but readers can visit any time of the day or the night, and there were very. The Palgolaki believe “everything known by a worshiper was immediately known by Palgolak, which was why they were religiously charged to read voraciously.”

  In the second of Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom series, Lirael (2001), the clairvoyant Clayr have a vast library . . .

  “. . . shaped like a nautilus shell, a continuous tunnel that wound down into the mountain in an ever-tightening spiral. This main spiral was an enormously long, twisting ramp that took you from the high reaches of the mountain down past the level of the valley floor, several thousand feet below.

  Off the main spiral, there were countless other corridors, rooms, halls, and strange chambers. Many were full of the Clayr’s written records, mainly documenting the prophesies and visions of many generations of seers. But they also contained books and papers from all over the Kingdom. Books of magic and mystery, knowledge both ancient and new. Scrolls, maps, spells, recipes, inventories, stories, true tales, and Charter knew what else.

  In addition to all these written works, the Great Library also housed other things. There were old armories within it, containing weapons and armor that had not been used for centuries but still stayed bright and new. There were rooms full of odd paraphernalia that no one now knew how to use. There were chambers where dressmakers’ dummies stood fully clothed, displaying the fashions of bygone Clayr or the wildly different costumes of the barbaric North. There were greenhouses tended by sendings, with Charter marks for light as bright as the sun. There were rooms of total darkness, swallowing up the light and anyone foolish enough to enter unprepared.

  The eponymous fourteen-year-old protagonist of the novel becomes a Third Assistant Librarian, explores the library and grows into the young woman she’ll need to be as a Second Librarian who saves the world.

  The Librarian (his name has been long forgotten) of the Unseen University in the Terry Prachett’s Discword series is a wizard. He was once a human. But after being accidentally transformed into an orangutan, he decided to remain a primate. Even though all he ever says is “oook” and occasionally “eeek,” other wizards understand him perfectly. The Librarian has the ability to travel through L-Space, which connects every library that ever existed.

  The Unseen University and its Library are located in the city of Ankh-Morpork. The Library houses “the greatest assemblage of magical texts anywhere in the multiverse” as well as
normal books, books never written, dictionaries of illusionary words, and atlases of imaginary places. Some of its endless shelves are, handily, Mobius shelves. The building does not obey the “normal rules of space and time”: “It was said that it went on FOREVER . . . you could wander for days . . . there were lost tribes of research students somewhere in there [and]strange things lurking in forgotten alcoves . . . preyed on by other things that were even stranger.” (Guards! Guards!, 1989). Luckily it is topped with a dome only a few hundred feet across that helps one get one’s bearings.

  Somewhat like Borges’ library, the Unseen University Library may have book, The Octavo, that might be god. It contains the great eight spells the Creator used to create the Discworld.

  Another (albeit much junior) academic library is located at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in J.K. Rowlings’ Harry Potter books. Its librarian, Madame Irma Pince, is a strict and somewhat scary guardian of the library’s contents and sometimes not very helpful to students. (Even though all the books in the library are already protected by spells, she has been known to place additional hexes on books for enhanced security.) The Hogwarts Library contains “tens of thousands of books; thousands of shelves; hundreds of narrow rows.” (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, 1997). To gain access to the books in its Restricted Section “you needed a specially signed note from one of the teachers . . . These were the books containing powerful Dark Magic never taught at Hogwarts, and only read by older students studying advanced Defence Against the Dark Arts.”

  Occasionally fantasy librarians are wicked. Rachel Caine’s The Great Library series posits a world where the Great Library of Alexandria has survived and evolved into a ruthlessly powerful entity that controls the dissemination of information. Using alchemy, the library can instantly deliver content, but the personally owning books is illegal. Those who govern the Great Library value knowledge and their system far more than human life. “

  Science fiction pioneer Jules Verne’s (1828-1905) heroes, scientists, and engineers, were human libraries (or at least encyclopedias) brimming with information they could provide from memory. He describes one as being “like a book, a book that solved all their problems for them . . . ” (The Mysterious Island, 1894); another, a geographer, when told he speaks like a book agrees: “ ‘That’s exactly what I am. . . . You are all invited to leaf through me as much as you like.” (In Search of the Castaways, 1865).