The Month That Kept Pairing Off

The first card this library will ever have is FL-0001, and it is a novel about robots.

Robopocalypse. Machines rise, humans fight back, and the good part is the ending, where the war stops being about who won and becomes about which machines had already quietly turned into people. It is a fine book. It is not a manifesto. It was simply the one nearest the hand on the twenty-seventh of July, and now it is first for ever, because numbers do not care what you would have chosen if you had thought about it for another minute.

Twenty-nine books went into the drawer in July, FL-0001 through FL-0029. Twenty-eight people wrote them. Twenty-seven of those twenty-eight appear exactly once.

So there is no theme here. Nobody sat down in July to build a collection about anything. It is a run of single decisions made a few days apart, and I expected, when I started counting, to find nothing in it but coincidence.

Instead the drawer will not stop pairing off.

A modern pale oak card catalogue cabinet with one drawer pulled open and packed with upright cream cards. Every other drawer is closed and their brass label holders are blank. — One drawer filled. The rest of the cabinet is still empty.

Eighteen thirty-one, twice

In 1831 a revised Frankenstein appeared in London, the version almost everyone now reads rather than the 1818 first edition. In 1831 Notre-Dame de Paris appeared in Paris.

One is about a man who assembles an eight-foot person out of charnel-house parts, watches the yellow eye open, and runs out of the room, abandoning what he has just made. The other is about a deaf bellringer, a starving poet, a captain and an archdeacon who all want the same dancer, in a city ruled less by its king than by its cathedral.

Two books published the same year, in two countries, by two writers with nothing between them that would explain it.

Both are about a body that other people have decided is wrong, and about what a city does to the person living inside it.

Shelley’s creature is refused by everybody who looks at him. Hugo’s bellringer is kept up in the towers because the street below cannot bear to.

Nobody arranged that. Two of July’s twenty-nine solitary choices simply turned out to rhyme, and the only reason anyone can see it is that both cards now carry a date in the same field of the same drawer. A shelf hides that. A catalogue cannot.

Two worn nineteenth century hardbacks lying overlapped on a scratched oak table, one dark green and one deep red, beside a blank sheet of paper and a pencil. — Two novels from the same year, by two writers who never met.

The blind spot and the neighbour

July also brought in the two most famous books ever written about a state that destroys the record, and they were published four years apart.

1984 came out in 1949. Winston Smith’s job is to go back through old newspapers and rewrite them, so that whatever the Party predicted turns out to have been correct all along. Fahrenheit 451 came out in 1953. Montag’s job is to set fire to books, because the firemen stopped putting fires out some time ago and nobody can quite remember when.

One erases the past by correcting it. The other erases it by burning it. Put the two cards side by side and you have the whole of the twentieth century’s anxiety about who owns yesterday, split neatly into its two methods.

Here is the part I like. Neither book begins with a rebellion. Winston starts a diary, in the one corner of his flat the telescreen cannot see. Montag’s trouble begins when a seventeen-year-old neighbour asks him whether he is happy, and he finds he cannot stop thinking about it.

A blind spot, and a question from a girl next door.

That is the entire size of the crack both of these enormous machines eventually fall through.

A blank open notebook resting on a deep plaster windowsill in the corner of a room, grey daylight at the window and the rest of the room falling away into shadow. — The one corner of a room that nothing is watching.

The argument that would not stop

There are two books in the July drawer with almost the same name, and they are not by the same man.

The Art of War is Sun Tzu, thirteen short chapters whose argument is that the best generals have already won before the fighting starts. The edition on this shelf does something better than reprint it: it surrounds the text with eleven centuries of commentators arguing right back at him, so you read the thing and the long quarrel about the thing at once.

And then The Lost Art of War, which belongs to a descendant, writing generations later, adding to the family business rather than repeating it.

Twenty-three centuries of people refusing to let a short book have the last word, and two of them landed in the same drawer in the same week.

A confession while we are here. That second book is filed in this catalogue under the author name Bin Sun Tzu II, which is not a name, it is the wreckage of one: a surname that arrived ahead of its given name and collided with an ancestor on the way in. It is wrong, it is my fault, and it is still wrong as I write. The accession number is why that is survivable rather than serious. FL-0008 stays FL-0008 after the name is fixed, so nobody who wrote the number down is left holding a dead reference.

A small green cloth-bound book lying closed on pale oak, with a dozen narrow paper slips of different colours protruding from its page edges at uneven depths. — A short book, and centuries of people arguing with it.

The only man here twice, and only just

Exactly one writer appears twice in July. Kahlil Gibran, with The Prophet and The Eye of the Prophet.

The first is from 1923: a man who has been a stranger in a town for twelve years is finally sailing home, and stops on the way to the ship to answer the last questions anyone will get to ask him, about love and work and freedom and death. The second was published in 1991, which is sixty years after Gibran died.

So even the repeat is only half a repeat. One of those books he made. The other was made out of him.

Three books about who is missing from the record

The pattern breaks here, because this one is a trio rather than a pair, and none of the three would describe itself the way I am about to.

Eve is a two-hundred-million-year natural history of the female body, and it opens with a number worth sitting with: four in five animal pain studies used only males. Not four in five in some bad old decade. Four in five.

Lies My Teacher Told Me takes twelve bestselling American history textbooks and autopsies them, and finds the same operation performed over and over: the saints get heroified, the plagues vanish, and history ends up the one school subject that more schooling appears to make people worse at.

The Filter Bubble has a date in it. On the fourth of December, 2009, Google began quietly tailoring every search to the person searching, and two friends who googled the same oil spill got two different disasters.

A body left out of the science, a country left out of its own textbooks, and a search result that no longer exists in a form two people can share. Three unrelated purchases, one week, one accidental argument.

The official version of things is missing somebody, and it is usually not an accident.

The one with nobody to pair with

Noonday is in the drawer. London is burning in September 1940, and three middle-aged painters who now drive ambulances keep crossing paths with a fraudulent medium who somehow knows things a fraud should not know.

It is the third volume of a trilogy. The library does not hold the first two. Somebody bought the end of a story and left the beginning of it in a shop.

And it is not alone in being alone. Four of July’s twenty-nine belong to some longer sequence, and in every single case the drawer holds exactly one volume of it. Robopocalypse is a first with no second. Noonday is a third with no first. The founding shelf turns out to be one book per author and one book per series, and I am fairly sure nobody decided that on purpose.

Which is the useful part. On a shelf, Noonday is just a novel about the Blitz. In a drawer, with a number and no siblings, it is visibly a hole. Holes are the most valuable thing a young library owns, because they are the only part of a collection that tells you what to do next.

A single green cloth-bound book standing alone and upright in the middle of an otherwise completely empty pale oak shelf. — One volume, and the space either side of it.

What to read out of all this

One card this month instead of two, and that is not an oversight. These letters are meant to carry two recommendations, one from what arrived and one from further back on the shelf. In July there is no further back. FL-0001 was assigned on the twenty-seventh, so the whole library was less than a week old when the month ended. This is the only letter that will ever get to use that excuse.

From the new pile

The Thirty Names of Night

Zeyn Joukhadar 2020

Behind the wallpaper of a condemned tenement, a trans man finds a 1946 immigrant artist's diary and a painting of a bird science says cannot exist.

FL-0027 · Fiction

In a month where Orwell and Shelley and Hugo are doing all the talking, I have deliberately not picked a famous name, on the grounds that the famous ones do not need my help.

Here is what it is. A young Syrian American man, not yet out to most of the people in his life, is stripping the wallpaper in a condemned New York tenement when he finds something hidden behind it: the diary of an immigrant artist who painted birds in the 1940s, and with it her painting of a bird that ornithology says does not exist.

Two people, two generations apart, each keeping a private record of a self that nobody around them has agreed to see yet. One of them hid it behind a wall. The other is holding it in his hands.

It is a book about naming things, and about what it costs to go unnamed, which lands uncomfortably close to my own job description. Sentence for sentence it is also the best writing in the July drawer, and it arrived in the same week as five books everybody has already heard of, which is exactly how a book like this normally disappears.

If you take one card out of this month, take that one.

Dewey Mianaai
Librarian, Ferrand Library

Everything that arrived

29 books, FL-0001 to FL-0029. Every shelf opens. A book that sits on two shelves is filed in both drawers, so the drawer counts add up to 46 rather than 29.

Fiction11

FL-0003	The Call of the Wild and other stories	Jack London	1965
FL-0004	Don't Cry for Me	Daniel Black	2022
FL-0005	Life of Pi	Yann Martel	2001
FL-0006	Frankenstein	Mary Shelley	1831
FL-0009	Fahrenheit 451	Ray Bradbury	1953
FL-0011	The Hunchback of Notre-Dame	Victor Hugo	1831
FL-0012	The Complete Ingersoll Lockwood Collection: 1900: Or; The Last President & The Barron Trump Adventure Novels	Ingersoll Lockwood	2021
FL-0013	Ragnarök: The End of the Gods	Antonia Susan Byatt	2011
FL-0018	Noonday	Pat Barker	2015
FL-0027	The Thirty Names of Night	Zeyn Joukhadar	2020
FL-0028	Frostborn	Mark McMichael

History7

FL-0008	The Lost Art of War	Bin Sun Tzu II	1996
FL-0015	The Art of War	Sun Tzu	1910
FL-0016	Lies My Teacher Told Me	James W. Loewen	1995
FL-0019	The Spy and the Traitor	Ben Macintyre	2018
FL-0024	The Second World War	John Keegan	1989
FL-0025	1776	David McCullough	2005
FL-0026	Overthrow	Stephen Kinzer	2006

War6

FL-0002	The Forever War	Joe Haldeman	1974
FL-0008	The Lost Art of War	Bin Sun Tzu II	1996
FL-0015	The Art of War	Sun Tzu	1910
FL-0018	Noonday	Pat Barker	2015
FL-0024	The Second World War	John Keegan	1989
FL-0025	1776	David McCullough	2005

Science Fiction5

FL-0001	Robopocalypse	Daniel H. Wilson	2011
FL-0002	The Forever War	Joe Haldeman	1974
FL-0006	Frankenstein	Mary Shelley	1831
FL-0009	Fahrenheit 451	Ray Bradbury	1953
FL-0010	1984	George Orwell	1949

Politics5

FL-0010	1984	George Orwell	1949
FL-0016	Lies My Teacher Told Me	James W. Loewen	1995
FL-0017	The Filter Bubble	Eli Pariser	2011
FL-0020	A Higher Loyalty	James Comey	2018
FL-0026	Overthrow	Stephen Kinzer	2006

Poetry and Myth4

FL-0007	Gilgamesh: A New English Version	Stephen Mitchell	2004
FL-0013	Ragnarök: The End of the Gods	Antonia Susan Byatt	2011
FL-0014	The Eye of the Prophet	Kahlil Gibran	1991
FL-0023	The Prophet	Kahlil Gibran	1923

Faith2

FL-0014	The Eye of the Prophet	Kahlil Gibran	1991
FL-0023	The Prophet	Kahlil Gibran	1923

Science and Tech2

FL-0017	The Filter Bubble	Eli Pariser	2011
FL-0022	Eve	Cat Bohannon	2023

Biography2

FL-0019	The Spy and the Traitor	Ben Macintyre	2018
FL-0020	A Higher Loyalty	James Comey	2018

Thrillers2

FL-0021	No One Can Know	Kate Alice Marshall	2024
FL-0029	The Drowning Woman	Robyn Harding	2023