The Pilgrims’ Progress: A Tale of the Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository
Miss Haining, the latest custodian of the Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository, had resigned herself to never understanding entirely the institution’s intricacies. It was some consolation to her that she was, in this matter, as in many others, following in a proud tradition of Caxton librarianship. At some critical juncture in their involvement with the institution, each of her predecessors had thrown up their hands in defeat when it came to comprehending its workings, dating back to William Caxton himself, the library’s somewhat unwilling founder, and therefore the first in a long line of baffled Caxton conservators.
On a basic level, the operation of the Caxton was easily explained. When a novel achieved a singular status with the reading public (generally after the death of its author), a first edition of the book in question, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, would appear on the Caxton’s doorstep, soon to be followed by the fictional character or characters responsible for its popularity. Now and again, due to some fault in the system, a character might arrive before the book, causing confusion, or even mild shock for the librarian. Whatever the order of delivery, the physical environs of the Caxton—which, like a novel, were capable of containing multitudes—would already have conjured living quarters to accommodate them, always with a window through which could be glimpsed the world of their respective book, just in case a character should feel the urge to wander among the familiar. Funding for the library, involving the rounding up or down of fractions of pennies, was so ingrained in the systems of publishing that even the most scrupulous of accountants often failed to notice it. If they did, they never succeeded in establishing the reason, or the ultimate destination of the nubbins, and subsequently gave up—or, on occasion, went mad, and then gave up.
How Caxton came to establish the library that bore his name was one of the first stories passed down to their successors by departing librarians. Mr. Berger had shared it with Miss Haining over tea and scones, just as Mr. Gedeon had shared it with Mr. Berger some two decades earlier. It was a valuable introduction to what was to follow, since it was so improbable that everything else seemed marginally more acceptable by comparison.
As Miss Haining approached retirement, it had fallen to her to pass on the founding narrative of the Caxton to one Marjorie Dobbs, who had found her way to the library after having her purse pinched by the Artful Dodger. (The library had a way of choosing—or luring—replacement librarians. Some of Marjorie’s predecessors had variously arrived there on the trail of Anna Karenina, Robinson Crusoe, Hamlet, and on one particularly memorable and confusing occasion, an enormous white rabbit cursing a pocket watch.)
Here, then, as told by Miss Haining to Miss Dobbs, is the origin story of the Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository.
