New chapters added every day, however

   American author Lincoln Steffens was born on this day in 1866.

   "Power is what men seek," Steffens wrote, "and any group that gets it will abuse it. It is the same old story."


   He and Bookwitch had got off on a wrong foot to begin with. When the new library had opened Sully, as was his custom, had sucked on breath mints for most of the day. Bookwitch, his new boss, had reprimanded him.
   “We’re not to have candy in the library, Mr. Sullendorf,” she’d said.

   “They’re not candy, Miss Boswick,” he’d told her. “They’re breath mints. They’re for the customers’ benefit.”
   “Not customers. Patrons.”

   “Patrons, then.”
   “It’s against library rules to eat while on duty.”
   “It’s not really eating. And I’ve never had any complaints.”
   “I’m sorry. You’ll have to confine your eat—your whatever you call it—to the break room.

   For a couple of weeks after that, Sully, whenever Bookwitch was in his vicinity, had pretended to be rolling a breath mint around in his mouth. When Bookwitch had called him on the carpet he’d given her an innocent look, had opened his mouth to show her there was nothing in there.

   “Then why are you moving your jaws like that?”
   “My jaws?”
   “You’re moving your jaws.”
   “Is there a rule against moving my jaws?”
   After a while she’d let him alone about it, and he’d gone back to sucking on mints. But Bookwitch had been on his ass since then in a thousand ways...
-- The Misforgotten, Chapter 2

A head made of marble

The great sculptor Auguste Rodin (The Thinker) was born on this day in 1840.

"A fellow will hack half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that hardly resembles a man."  --  Samuel Johnson.

   “No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library,” Sully read. Samuel Johnson. Sully had never cared much for Johnson, or for Boswell, that seventeenth-century equivalent of a jock-sniffer, and this observation, like so many of Johnson’s, seemed either slightly or totally off-kilter. A library was the vindication of human hopes, wasn’t it, their realization or elaboration crystallized in books? Indirectly, though, the great lexicographer had hit home with this sally, as almost everyone who worked here at the library, Sully fancied, could present a striking example, to one degree or another, of blasted hopes.   --  Chapter 21, The Misforgotten.

War, what is it good for

World War I began on this day in 1914; it ended on the same day in 1919.

Men were bad, incorrigibly so, Sully knew. The specimens lurking in the library lobby, adoze in chairs and at tables, groping in the stacks and jerking off in the stalls, surfing the Internet for God knew what, plotting their hijacks and heists, were wholly representative of the populace at large. Mischief on their minds, malice in their hearts. Malevolence. Here the accumulated wisdom of the world, the exalted ideas of great men and women, published for posterity and arrayed on row after row of shelves, could not avail against its palpable presence. Or so it seemed to Sully. -- Chapter 16, The Misforgotten.

Not to mention without existentialism

Birth date of Jean-Paul Sartre, French existentialist and author, born in 1905. Sartre wrote:

"The world could get along very well without literature; it could get along even better without man."

As he’d walked to Bookwitch’s office, his head had been reeling to such an extent that he’d had to steady himself against the wall once or twice. In her presence, he’d had small epiphany, had realized that it wasn’t Bookwitch—Bookwitch was benign—but books that were the tyrant. It was books that had pulled him this way and that, that were suffocating him now. He’d wanted to be done with them, with the Great Books and the good books, with all the characters in books clamoring to be heard, to be heeded... -- Chapter 43, The Misforgotten.

It's an OK old flag

Today is Flag Day.

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." -- Samuel Johnson.

“No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library,” Sully read. Samuel Johnson. Sully had never cared much for Johnson, or for Boswell, that seventeenth-century equivalent of a jock-sniffer, and this observation, like so many of Johnson’s, seemed either slightly or totally off-kilter. A library was the vindication of human hopes, wasn’t it, their realization or elaboration crystallized in books? Indirectly, though, the great lexicographer had hit home with this sally, as almost everyone who worked here at the library, Sully fancied, could present a striking example, to one degree or another, of blasted hopes. -- The Misforgotten, Chapter 21.