The Great Library and
Council of Genres

The Textual Sieve was designed and constructed by JurisTech, the technological arm of Jurisfiction. The Textual Sieve is a fantastically useful and mostly unexplained device that allows the user to “sieve” or “strain” text in order to isolate a specified search string. Infinitely variable, a well-tuned Textual Sieve on “full opaque” can rebuff an entire book, but set to “fine” can delicately remove a spiderweb from a half-million-word novel.

I found myself in a long, dark, wood-paneled corridor lined with bookshelves that reached from the richly carpeted floor to the vaulted ceiling. The carpet was elegantly patterned, and the ceiling was decorated with rich moldings that depicted scenes from the classics, each cornice supporting the marble bust of an author. High above me, spaced at regular intervals, were finely decorated circular apertures through which light gained entry and reflected off the polished wood, reinforcing the serious mood of the library. Running down the center of the corridor was a long row of reading tables, each with a green-shaded brass lamp. In both directions the corridor vanished into darkness with no definable end.

I had first entered the Great Library sixteen years ago, and the description of it hadn’t altered by so much as a word. Hundreds of miles of shelves containing not every single book but every single edition of every book. Anything that had been published in the real world had a counterpart logged somewhere within its endless corridors.

Thursday5 was nearby and joined me to walk along the corridor, making our way toward the crossover section right at the heart of the library. But the thing to realize was that it wasn’t in any sense of the word real, any more than the rest of the Book-World was. The library was as nebulous as the books it contained; its form was decided not only by the base description but my interpretation of what a Great Library might look like. Because of this the library was as subtly changeable as my moods. At times dark and somber, at others light and airy. Reading, I had learned, was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so. When we read of the dying rays of the setting sun or the boom and swish of the incoming tide, we should reserve as much praise for ourselves as for the author. After all, the reader is doing all the work—the writer might have died long ago.