We took the elevator. Miss Havisham told me that it was considered the height of poor breeding and vulgarity to jump all the way to the lobby at the Council of Genres – and it was impossible to jump straight into the council chambers for security purposes. The chambers were situated on the twenty-sixth floor of the Great Library. Like the seventeenth floor, it was almost deserted; authors whose names begin with Q and Z are not that abundant. The doors opened and we stepped out. But it wasn't like the previous Library floors I had visited, all sombre dark wood, moulded plaster ceilings and busts of long-dead writers – the twenty-sixth floor had a glazed roof. Curved spans of wrought iron arched high above our heads, supporting the glass through which we could see clouds and a blue sky beyond. I had always thought that the Library was created conceptually to contain the books and had no use or existence outside that. Miss Havisham noticed me staring up at the sky and drew me towards a large window. Although it was the twenty-sixth floor it seemed a lot higher – and the Library, inwardly shaped like a fine cross many miles in length, was far squatter when seen from the outside. I looked down the rain-streaked exterior and beyond the stone gargoyles to a tropical forest far below us, where wispy clouds flecked the tops of the lush foliage.

'Anything is possible in the BookWorld,' murmured Miss Havisham. 'The only barriers are those of the human imagination. See the other libraries?'

Not more than five miles distant, just visible in the aerial haze, was another tower like ours, and beyond that, another – and over to my right, six more. We were just one towering library among hundreds – or perhaps thousands.

'The nearest one to us is German,' said Miss Havisham, 'beyond that French and Spanish. Arabic is just beyond them – and that one over there is Welsh.'

'What are they standing on?' I asked, looking at the jungle far below. 'Where exactly are we?'

'Getting all philosophical, are we?' murmured Miss Havisham. 'The long and short answer is we really don't know. Some people claim we are just part of a bigger story that we can't see. Others maintain that we were created by the Great Panjandrum, and still others that we are merely in the mind of the Great Panjandrum.'

'Who,' I asked, my curiosity finally getting the better of me, 'is the Great Panjandrum?'

'Come and see the statue,' she said.

We turned from the window and walked along the corridor to where a large lump of marble rested on a plinth in the middle of the lobby. The marble was roped off and below it was a large and highly polished plaque proclaiming: 'Our Glorious Leader'.

'That's the Great Panjandrum?' I asked, looking at the crude block of stone.