But to her surprise, although she shouldn’t have been surprised, she discovered that most of the works in the library—all, of course, were out of print—were the literary equivalent of trash. Romance novels, yesterday’s political thrillers, Cold War espionage tales, pop biographies of people she had never heard of. The how-to section was immense, as was the self-help section. Decades’ worth of diet books suggesting that people starve themselves to death, cookbooks whose recipes often called for lard, child-raising books recommending that children not be spared the rod, and books promising people new ways to get rich quick, predicting market peaks and crashes that never materialized. And, of course, thousands of books and pamphlets filled with nothing but outmoded pornography, disappointing drawings of things no longer even considered burlesque. And then there was trash that didn’t look familiar: “dime novels,” serialized Westerns, almanacs, astrological guides, crop counts carved into pieces of bark.

But that was only the shelved material. Most of the library, Leora discovered, was taken up by archives. Not records of famous people, but of ordinary people, the sort of people whose loose letters and photographs would never have been immortalized in the city above, even by their grandchildren. There were endless piles of love letters, packed by the bundle, letters whose ardor waxed hotter and hotter in each series of correspondence and then inevitably cooled and froze into a bitter final exchange—the sort of letters, Leora thought to herself, that people throw away or burn after receiving the last one. There were application letters for jobs by the thousands, stacked by sender. There were letters from parents to children in summer camps, filled with unheeded advice about poison ivy, and letters from parents to children in military camps, returned to sender, unopened. And then there were the photographs—color, black and white, sepia, all the way back to lithographs, in piles miles high—unlabeled, loose photographs of who knew who, taken who knew where, who knew when, fallen from photo albums, out of context and out of time.

It occurred to Leora, as she flipped through these photographs of people who were beginning to look increasingly familiar, that all her wandering in the lost city thus far had been somewhat beside the point. Dropping the photographs she was holding onto a moldy chrome-lined table and abandoning the stacks of literary trash behind her, she exited the barnacled doors and headed for the lost city hall, to consult the local registers and find out whether she might actually know any of the residents of the lost city.