May 2019
Elijah drove slowly along the winding mountain road, having turned off Google Maps a few moments earlier. “Google Maps can’t seem to figure out where my uncle’s house is,” his new employer had said. “You need to keep going after your phone says ‘You have reached your destination’ for another couple of miles. I put a fresh coat of red paint on the mailbox, so it should be easy to spot, though you can’t see the house from the road.”
He did as directed, slowing down and looking carefully after his phone told him he’d arrived, and spotted the red mailbox just after he went around a sharper than usual curve. The driveway twisted and turned up the mountain a few hundred feet until it fed into a wide clearing around a large house, surrounded by a garden that had gone to seed. The bushes were unpruned and weeds were growing among the flowers, but the grass had been cut recently, and the house looked well-maintained. There was an older blue Ford pickup parked in the driveway, alongside a silver Honda Civic.
He parked and got out, and was still walking toward the house when the door opened and a clean-shaven man with longish red hair, about Elijah’s age, stepped out and waved. “Hi! You must be Elijah Hudnall?”
“Yes. Mr. Merrick?”
He made a wry face. “Call me Casey. Come on in.”
Elijah did, and paused for a moment on the threshold. The walls of the room he’d entered were completely lined with bookshelves, with the sofa and chairs sitting out in the middle of the room to allow more wall space for shelves, and the shelves were packed with books; some looked like they were stacked two deep. There were stacks of books on the coffee table, some of them looking rather precarious, and the glimpses of other rooms he saw through the adjoining doors showed bookshelves in them as well. Elijah barely had time to notice the non-shelf furniture before Casey said: “Your office is this way,” and led the way through one of the doors to another room full of furniture and books, and then down a short hallway to a small room, around eight by ten, with an office swivel chair, a desk, a desktop computer that looked pretty old, and, of course, more bookshelves. “The computer belonged to my uncle, and we’ll replace it soon. But I wanted to talk to you first about what you’ll need. I figure I’ll network it with my own machines so I can look at your catalogue from wherever I happen to be. What kind of library catalog software do you recommend for a collection of this size, and how powerful a computer does it need to run?”
Elijah was pleasantly surprised; Casey seemed to be talking as if he already had the internship. He’d thought this was going to be a job interview. He mentioned a couple of library catalog software packages he’d used in his classes, and soon they were looking at software companies’ websites on Casey’s much newer computer in his office across the hall (also lined with lovely, distracting bookshelves). The computer was top-notch, but the Internet speed out here was pitiful; they had plenty of time to talk while waiting for web pages to load. “I should have something faster by the end of the summer,” Casey said. “It’s not trivial to run new fiber out here, but it can be done for the right price. Uncle Eugene had the money, but he didn’t spend enough time online to care about it, I guess.”
After some more research and discussion, Casey said, “I’ll put in an order for the components for your new box, and the software, and you can take a look around the house. You can pick any of the bedrooms on this hall except the master bedroom; you’ll see my dirty clothes strung over the bedstead, if you’re not sure which one that is. Oh, and I’ll be eating lunch around one – heating up vegetable stew leftovers from last night. You’re welcome to join me.”
“You mean I’m hired?”
“If you’re still willing to take the job after seeing the house and the books. You’re the only one that’s applied – the head of your department told me most of the library science students already had summer internships lined up.”
Elijah had also originally had an internship arranged with the public library back home in Greensboro, but it had fallen through due to budget cuts, and he’d been glad to hear about this opportunity to organize a private collection. Casey had written to the head of the library science department at Appalachian State University, saying he’d recently inherited a large collection of books from his great-uncle and wanted to hire a library science grad student to organize them.
Elijah was about to shout “Yes!” when he realized that maybe he’d better look at the bedrooms on offer first. “I think so, but let me finish taking a look around first.”
“Sure.” Casey turned back to the computer and brought up a computer hardware retailer’s site. Just as Elijah started to leave the office, Casey turned and said, “Let’s say… you can go in my bedroom anytime the door is open. If it’s closed, knock, and don’t go in unless I say you can. And when you go in, don’t touch anything except the bookshelves and the boxes labeled ‘Books’.”
“Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks.”
There were books in every room of the house, including the kitchen, which had a shelf containing not just cookbooks but a Penguin Classics Tristram Shandy, a German-English dictionary, and a guide to the wildlife of Peru in Spanish. The bathroom and bedrooms seemed clean and comfortable enough (he sat on the edge of the beds and bounced gently a couple of times, and tested the bathroom faucets to see how quickly he could get hot water), and Elijah picked out the bedroom closest to the hall bathroom, adjacent to his office.
“I’ll take the job,” he said to Casey, returning to his new boss’s office. Casey’s monitor looked like he might be working on some kind of source code? Something too technical for Elijah, anyway. “If you don’t mind, I’ll go back to campus and clean out my dorm, then move my stuff in here, and get to work.”
“Sounds great,” Casey said. “See you later today.”
A couple of hours later, after moving his things out of the dorm and texting his fiancee, Monica, and his parents to let them know he’d gotten the internship, Elijah got to work, starting with an overall survey of the collection. By evening, he had a ballpark estimate for the size of the collection – around eight or nine thousand books, bigger than some small-town public libraries – and an inkling of the size of the task in front of him.
Casey’s late great-uncle, Eugene Taggart, had probably had some organizational scheme in mind at some point, because there were definite trends – mostly fiction in three of the bedrooms, mostly nonfiction in the other rooms, with a preponderance of history in one room and natural sciences in another – but Elijah guessed that in his later years he had grown less careful about reshelving books he’d reread, or shelving newly acquired books, because there were also a lot of exceptions. Based on the languages he more or less knew, he thought that the books in foreign languages tended to be shelved with similar books in English, rather than in a language section by themselves, but there was a shelf in his new office consisting almost entirely of books in languages he didn’t recognize – probably Asian languages, he guessed. (He could distinguish most of the major languages of Europe at sight, though he could only read Spanish and French, and he could tell Korean apart from other east Asian languages. He hadn’t spotted any books in Korean.)
At supper, he told Casey what he’d figured out so far, and his new boss nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I figured. You sort everything out with the Dewey Decimal System, or some other system if you think that works better, and put it all in a catalog where I can see what I’ve got at a glance. And pick out the stuff that looks rarest and most valuable so I can have an appraiser look at it. I don’t exactly need the money, with what I inherited from Uncle Eugene, but if it’s something I don’t care to read that will bring a decent amount of money, I’d be willing to free up a little shelf room for my own books.”
Casey’s personal library, it turned out, was mostly still in boxes stacked in the master bedroom, which he’d brought from his dorm at Duke and his parents’ house in Raleigh after inheriting his great-uncle’s house; he wanted Elijah to catalogue those as well. “My tastes aren’t as eclectic as Uncle Eugene’s, but I read a lot of different things. Uncle Eugene used to take me around to all the bookstores and thrift stores in Raleigh when he’d come visit us when I was a kid, and he told me he’d buy me as many books as I wanted as long as I read at least half of them by the next time he came to visit. I always did. What about you?”
So Elijah told him about his own favorite books and authors, several of which Casey had read, and they continued sitting at the table talking until long after they’d finished supper. At one point, Casey said something strange. They’d been talking about the Oz books, which they’d both read and loved as children, and had re-read at least a couple of times as adults. Casey remarked, “You know, Baum was way ahead of his time in some areas, even though there are unfortunate racist bits here and there in his stories. Like Ozma is such a perfect metaphor for transgender people.”
It was the first time Elijah had heard someone make a connection between the princess of Oz, whose magical transformation he’d read about several times, and transgender people, whom he knew basically nothing about that he hadn’t learned from occasional mentions in sermons or on the news. “Huh? I guess she does change into a girl at the end of the second book, but she was really a girl the whole time, right? Mombi just enchanted her to look like a boy so nobody could find her. That’s not really the same thing.”
“It’s not a perfect analogy,” Casey admitted, “but that aspect you mentioned is actually a really good fit. She was really a girl the whole time, but neither she nor her friends realized it. When she started to realize she was supposed to be a girl, she was nervous at first about the change, and wanted to try it out a bit without committing to it, but afterward, she was super happy about it, and only worried about whether her friends would accept her. All that is a pretty close match to a lot of trans people’s experience. Where the analogy breaks down is that she had to find out she was a girl from Glinda’s interrogation of Mombi, and not by reflecting on her own feelings and experiences. But yeah, surprisingly on point for a book published more than a hundred years ago, when Americans had no concept of trans people.”
“Huh, I didn’t realize that,” Elijah said diplomatically. He wasn’t sure if Casey’s interpretation wasn’t reading too much into the text, but since he didn’t know anything about transgender people, he couldn’t argue against it. He changed the subject and they continued talking about other books and authors, but he made a mental note not to bring up religion or politics around his employer – something his parents had advised him to avoid when he got his first job flipping burgers.
Finally, they reluctantly got up and cleared the table. “One more thing,” Elijah said as they loaded the dishwasher. “Could I have visitors while I’m living here?”
“Sure, within reason.”
“If my fiancee comes to visit for the weekend, could she use one of the other bedrooms I’m not using?”
Casey looked at him strangely, as if wondering why Elijah and his fiancee wouldn’t share a bed, but nodded and said: “Sure. I’m not going to be here all the time; I’ll be going back and forth between here and Raleigh a couple of times over the summer. When I’m not here, you can eat whatever’s in the kitchen, and if you buy groceries, put the receipt on the refrigerator and I’ll reimburse you.”
Elijah decided to take close-up photos of every shelf, so he could look at them from the computer in his office without having to tramp all over the house as much. He had made a decent start on that project when he started getting tired, and got ready for bed.
The next morning, Elijah rose at his usual time, which, it seemed, was earlier than Casey’s. He started a pot of coffee, filled his water bottle at the sink, and went out for a walk, exploring the garden around the house and then walking down the long driveway to the road and down the road about a mile before turning back. When he got back, he looked through the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets to see what he could find for breakfast. He was nearly finished with his bowl of cereal when Casey woke up.
After breakfast, Elijah went back to photographing the shelves – and the stacks of books on tables and chairs and occasionally on the floor. Casey’s bedroom door was open, and he was sleepily eating breakfast, so Elijah went in and photographed the shelves in his bedroom, which mostly seemed to be fiction, and then the boxes of Casey’s books, which had neat handwritten labels like “SF/fantasy, McKillip to Palwick” or “Programming languages.”
Late in the morning, FedEx delivered several boxes of electronics, and Casey started putting together the computer Elijah would be using, which included a label printer for labeling book spines with call numbers. By mid-afternoon, they were waiting on the library catalogue software to finish downloading so they could install it. Meanwhile, having photographed all the shelves, Elijah was scanning the covers and title pages of some of the books in languages he didn’t recognize, and posting the scans on linguaphile forums to try to find out what language they were in, who wrote them, what they were about, and maybe what they were worth.
By the time they went to bed, they had finished installing the library software, and Elijah had made his first few catalog entries, starting with the top shelf to the left of his desk.
Before bed, Elijah decided to call Monica. He got out his cellphone and realized he had no signal.
“Oh, yeah,” Casey said when Elijah mentioned it to him. “I forgot to mention you can’t get a signal here. I just use the landline when I’m here; you’re welcome to use it, too, when I’m not on the phone.”
So Elijah dialed Monica on the landline in the kitchen, something he hadn’t used since he was a kid, and told her all about his first couple of days on the job.
Ohhhh library science.....
Profoundly jealous of Elijah here, this is literally my dream job.
Excited to follow this story! Looking forward to having my heart shattered