Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Stanhope Road ·
My Books Bound in Advance
A librarian's quarterly binding slips come back in cloth that matches the coats of readers who have not yet joined the branch, and the order of the dates cannot be turned about.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: "Hilda Fenwick, branch librarian"
I have kept the issue desk at the Stanhope Road branch since 1964, and four times a year I fill the binding slips: volume, accession number, condition, and the cloth. The cloth is my part. I choose it to suit the book, sober textures for the county surveys, dark grounds for the sermons, and I write the shade in the slip with my own shorthand: periwinkle, corn, slate. The slips go by the evening van to the Mayhew bindery and the books come home bound inside the quarter.
In the Michaelmas before last I sent out eleven volumes. Eleven came home, every one bound, none of them in the cloth I wrote. I noticed at the trolley, which is where a librarian notices anything. A county history stood in leaf-green where I had written slate for it. The furniture register came in fawn cloth. A volume of sermons arrived in bottle-green, which I never write for sermons, and the bindery's packing note carried no remarks.
I keep carbons of every slip, filed by quarter, so the first thing I did was lay the carbons flat. My shades were on my copies as I wrote them. Then I asked the bindery to lend their counterfoil for the quarter, and their counterfoil carries the shade instructions filled in against each accession number — in a hand like mine, smaller, dated some weeks before the quarter opened. I did not write those instructions. I have set my own carbons beside their counterfoils, line to line, and the counterfoils stand entirely filled, earlier than my slips and agreeing with the books, and there is no gap in either file where a correction could have gone through.
Here is the order of events, which is what I am on firm ground with, dates being my trade. The bindings bear their invoice dates. The counterfoils bear shade instructions before them. The first borrower of each rebound volume bears an enrolment date after all of it. I took the four green volumes down the shelf and ran their cards: each was first taken out by a reader enrolled that same January, days behind the binding invoices. Mrs Nora Quaye, fawn herringbone coat, joined in January and carried out the furniture register the week after her card was signed. Mr Albert Sandwell, bottle-green, joined the February and took the sermons first thing, remarking at the desk that they had "come in to suit him." I have his remark in the desk diary, whatever he thought he meant by it.
My junior, Mr Edgar Loxley, has countersigned the slip file and the enrolment cards both, and the Cantor's office holds copies of the counterfoils with our statements, so this one is corroborated all down the line: cloth in advance, reader behind, dates dutifully in order. That is what I find hardest to sit under. There is nothing to deny. The paper is clean, the records agree, and nobody has had to explain anything, because the paperwork carries the whole of it without confessing it is odd.
With the returns this quarter the bindery enclosed a card, printed plain, asking for the list of readers the branch expects. I sent no list; we do not keep one; I filed the card. Then I sat with the Michaelmas counterfoils one more evening, and minded that somebody wrote my shades earlier than I did, in a hand like mine but smaller, and knew the cloth to the coats before the coats ever came through my door. Whoever sent them last quarter's, where is the ledger that sent it, and who is keeping our next year's readers on their shelf in advance?