How They Speak

The more I've worked with the books, the more I've come to feel as if each one has it's own distinctive personality. Some speak out in a southern accent, with their yellow and brown tags boasting a picture of cowboy boots and the label "western", while their covers depict dry sagebrush scenery behind daring gun-slingers and their horses. Other books- clearly romances- seem to demand to be placed where the cute, starry-eyed couple on the front may have a little time to themselves. There are also the sci-fi stories, often giving the idea that if you were to so much as open one, you would be engulfed in a green glow from the alien space ships or obliterated by a ferocious blaster gun ray; unless of course, it happens to be the Steam Punk brand of sci-fi, in which case, people in Victorian-style clothes pose with their unusual technology, framed by silver or bronze with gears & cogs scattered about.

While they all have such varying voices and styles, the majority of the books are all very friendly. Even the shy little Amish romance novels would be more than willing to follow you home, were you to pick them up. But there was one book to which an exception applied: a large, menacing,  old-fashioned looking, black book. It stood two feet tall and was 10 inches thick, with a muscular, unmarked spine. Nobody checked it out, and it was no wonder; even if there happened to be a person around who was strong enough to lift it, they likely would not have been in a place to notice it. The book kept it's home underneath a shelf full of old copies of a newspaper that no longer existed, tucked away in the farthest, darkest corner of the library.

I often wondered about it, because having a book with no title, no author, and no dewy decimal number was quite an oddity. In normal circumstances, it would mean the book did not belong to us and was thrown into the book-drop by mistake. Obviously, such a monster as that would never have fit in the book drop, so that option was out. I once tried to ask the librarians, but all they would give me was that "it is an antique, and should you see anyone attempting to move it, please ask them to put it down."

The fact that they seemed so uptight about the mere mention of it seemed a tad odd, but perhaps it had just been a hard day for them. Even librarians can get bombarded with tough to please people every now and then. Whatever the reason, I knew there was something different about that book, and I was determined that some day I would find out what secrets it held.


-"Between The Pages" exerpt (C) by Sarah Iddings, June 2013.