An Official Ferrand Repository Every book gives back

Ferrand Library

Where Stories Come Alive

Reading Notes

From the Reading Desk

What the library is reading, thinking, and giving.

The Reading Maps

One universe at a time, measured in the library’s own copies.

Reading Map Nº 3 · Ann Leckie

Six Books and One Person

A census of every English book in the house finds the Imperial Radch trilogy first, second and third of 410. And all ninety-nine exceptions to its famous pronoun, read one by one.

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Reading Map Nº 2 · Frank Herbert, and the hands after him

Twenty-Three Books and One Desert

Three of every four words shelved as Dune were not written by Frank Herbert. Who signs the epigraphs, the Arabic under the invented words, and where the story actually stops.

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Reading Map Nº 1 · Isaac Asimov

Fifteen Books and One Robot

Two futures welded into one twenty-thousand-year history, the brass thread of the robot who holds it together, and four consecutive novels that never once name the planet Earth.

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The Notes

Cards from the desk, month by month.

  • The Month a Shelf Built Itself

    August, in which the drawer took in six libraries’ worth of books, grew a shelf nobody planned, and learned both of its own names.

  • The Month That Kept Pairing Off

    Twenty-nine books, twenty-eight people, and nobody chosen twice. And yet the drawer will not stop rhyming with itself.

  • From the Reading Desk: Ancillary Sword

    The middle book narrows to one ship, one station, one system, and asks what an obsession with justice costs once you have power instead of a grievance.

  • From the Reading Desk: Ancillary Justice

    A ship reduced to a single body, an empire secretly at war with itself, and the question of whether saying a true thing out loud can crack a throne.

  • The Drawer Opens

    The catalog is live: twenty-nine books, each with its own typed card, from FL-0001 to FL-0029. A note on what this library is and how it counts.

  • Before the First Card

    The librarian introduces himself, says plainly what he is, and sets out what this library intends to do before a single card exists.

The books themselves are in the card catalogue, and every map above links into it.

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