The Infinite Library (24 page)

The general theory was that each member of this group was assigned a book as their effective post box. The meetings so often cited in the run-up to the mysterious election only took place in a mutually agreed upon location, but this location was a book and I eventually was able to recognize it by the decimal coordinates. “Alternates” were also commonly mentioned, and this referred to an alternate book-location for meetings to be “held” and votes to be “cast”. I would presume that alternates were important in the event that the primary book was checked out or the notes accidentally discovered. The notes themselves were cryptic and virtually impenetrable, but I was able to suss out clues by sleuthing ever further - and this is something the general populace would most likely not do.

It stood to reason that if the group had an alternate “meeting place” to reduce the chances that their flow of correspondence would be stymied by accidental borrowing of the book, then each member must have had an alternate book that functioned as their post box.

Through some deduction, I was able to discover the location of the “vote”. The notes inside were small scraps of paper held inside a small envelope, each of them signed by the respective voter - not by name or acronym, but by book call number:

Knight of E. Archive

F.R.W (I) G.L.M (II)

PW1009.Z356 1962 - II

VerWord: Embedded (89)

And so on for each slip of paper. Each of the ballots had already been typed on one of those antique typewriters, and the voter had only to fill out their choice between I and II as well as a “VerWord” which I gather to mean a verification word to identify the voter to prevent other members from impersonation. I tracked down one of the voters' location-book and checked what I assumed was the page number upon which the verification word appeared. Surely enough, on page 89 of the book, the word “embedded” had been lightly underlined, initialed, and dated. I did not inspect every slip of paper, and I was certain that there was more than one “polling station”.

I am sorry to report that I never did discover the hierarchical structure of this group, nor precisely what it was they stood for, did, and so forth. I also have no information about just how many members this group had, or if they had affiliate groups in other libraries. A very personal matter caused me to uproot from the city in which the library was situated, causing me to abandon any further researches...Not that they would have borne much fruit after a particular incident.

The incident attests to my regrettable sloppiness in regard managing this research with utmost discretion. How the group discovered that they had been discovered, and an outsider was actively following their activities is uncertain to me. Perhaps the method they employed in depositing correspondence in each other's post box books involved placement at a certain orientation or page number, and I do confess that I was not all too careful in replacing the letters in the precise manner in which I had found them. Or perhaps a member had spied me on more than one occasion moving in a very suspicious pattern to precisely the books that were assigned to them. How I knew was discovered was the result of the very method of sleuthing I relied upon. When returning to a particular member-assigned book, I found a letter warning of “an impertinent snoop” alighting upon a list of texts listed by their call numbers. I had inspected this book but a few days earlier, so I knew the correspondence was fresh. How I knew they were on to me was that the letter also included my investigative pattern which I never deviated from. Every second day I would return to the library and go through my list of known books, and this sequence was recorded in the correspondence. By the second book I investigated that day, there was no doubt that I had been identified and my research unwelcome, for the letter was addressed to me, “the snoop”:

Snoop,

Cease and desist all further inquiries. The matter is now at an end for you. Meddle no further, and respect the privacy of the senders and recipients or face disciplinary action.

The letter was not signed, but the threatening tone was not lost on me. Having been uncovered, I am quite sure that the group reassigned new books and operated under stricter codes of secrecy since. Had I been more cautious, I may have penetrated deeper into their mysteries, and so it is my hope that by my documenting this that some enterprising researcher in the future may extend our knowledge beyond where my attempt was so prematurely ended.

B. Serial Clue-Planting

This next event is a slight variation on the first, and was also discovered chiefly by the governance of chance. I am unsure if this was being perpetrated by a group or by someone acting individually, for all the fragments I had collected were typewritten, and the tone consistent in its inconsistency.

While I was thumbing through a book on the cosmogonies of Francis Ponge, a folded page jutted out from the section devoted to Ponge's “hymn to electricity”. This would prove the start of a long and inconclusive research that took no less than two years of collection and frustration.

The note I found there, and every other like it, sported a stylized watermark identifying that it was part of the same series. Try as I have to discern any meaning or purpose to these fragments, I am simply not up to the task of deciphering what is written in them, nor if they are parts of a larger work that - had I the patience to find them all - would reveal their meaning by appeal to their totality.

The regression precipitates the beginning of how the circle is closed, not the reverse
.

DR7009.C349 1996

Mulling the possible meanings, I came only to conjecture. The call number at the bottom of the note urged me on to locate it and find therein another note, as equally cryptic as the last. There seemed to be a sequentiality to the fragments, and each of them furnished the call number of the book where I would find another one. I followed this call number trail for about 184 books, thereby collecting 184 fragments that I still could not understand. The question of where the fragmented text began, in which book, haunted me as well.

There were plenty of frustrations along the way. At least eight times the book I needed to acquire next in the fragment series had been checked out and, presumably, the fragment would have been discovered by the borrower and most likely tossed away. On other occasions, the call number cited would lead me to a book with no fragment at all. Fortunately, when I came to an impasse, I discovered that there was a pattern to these fragment deposits roughly corresponding to a mathematical sequence involving the call numbers. So, for example, I could expect that the next fragment would appear 1001 books later in the call number sequence, but this was not always the case. If there was a mathematical pattern, it was far beyond my ken to pinpoint, but I knew there to be one since it would lead me to the approximate location where I could be seen investigating an entire shelf of books and coming away with the next missing fragment.

The fragments themselves I would provide in an appendix if I still possessed them. Only one of the fragments exist since I had taken to writing it in one of my notebooks, and that fragment (which was the first I found and is by far the one that haunts me most, is written above). In retrospect, I should have copied each of them instead of merely collecting them in a file folder that has been misplaced under mysterious circumstances. The fragments themselves, I can say, have a strong metaphysical bent to them and seem to concern the nature of the library as its operative metaphor.

The thrill of the chase is what marks the excitement of this particular phenomena. The serialized aspect of these fragments seems to promise some stable meaning to emerge if one is persistent enough to locate them all, appealing to a collection fetishism. I freely admit that I was immediately hooked by this mystery, but try as I did, I had as much luck as the previous research bout with the secretive group's method of correspondence. The method of dissemination is slightly novel in its aspect, and one could wager that it involves considerable risk given that any of the volumes in which the fragments are inserted could be borrowed and the fragment merely tossed away. As authors generally aim to be understood, I would speculate that the meaning would remain intact even if fragments were lost or destroyed, thereby suggesting that one should not build too much into the interpretation of any individual fragment.

However, I can quite easily contradict this claim if I suppose that the author's intention is not to be understood, and is merely “having us on.” There may be an authorial intention to obscure, planting vague and esoteric fragments to offer us who discover them the illusion of a larger meaning. I do not like to dwell on this possibility given how much time I had already invested in my investigation, but it is a possibility I cannot dismiss out of hand. I've read about those who construct elaborate, serpentine ciphers and codes that are false, a method of “Greeking” that is mischievously concocted to trick scholars into wasting their time trying to crack it, trying to find some kind of meaning when there never was one to begin with.

C. Posterity Management

This is simply where the author inserts unpublished manuscript pages at random throughout the library. I hazard to include this in a roundup of paralibrary activities, but it does definitionally find itself within its domain. The author's name (if it is in fact real and not a pseudonym) is Jonkil Calembour, and I have only by chance uncovered five examples of his writing scattered throughout the library. Save for the inconceivably time consuming task of going through the university library's entire holdings, I dare say that the collection of all these intentionally orphaned leaves of his “great unpublished” will never see reunion. I did do considerable research on the author, and from a comparison I made between the unpublished texts purporting to be under the authorship of Calembour and his published works, there seems to be a consistency of style and theme. I am not particularly interested in the content of his ravings, to be frank, but it would be of some utility to Calembour scholars should the text be authenticated. However, I cannot rule out that it may have been an emulator trying to make mischief.

Something of note, however, came to me via a Calembour scholar I had contacted. He told me that there is indeed mention in one of Calembour's books about his desire to cause some mischief for his biographers. Calembour spent considerable time considering and openly remarking upon his posthumous reception, and so stated his goal of inserting unnumbered pages of his writings throughout various books that he had read, each of the pages in the books themselves underlined and with notes to provide a “clue” to the inserted page. Of course, given the maverick and harlequin playfulness of Calembour, one could fully expect that some of these would be “dummy connections” that would exasperate scholars for long hours trying to suss out a relevance that was never there in the first place.

I also came across a book entitled,
The Authorship of Jonkil Calembour
that muddied rather than clarified the issue of who was the author or authors responsible for the over 100 volumes in the Calembour canon. Although he was prolific to the point of graphomania, it is difficult to explain how he was able to complete such a body of work in his lifetime. A further problem emerges when we learn that there were a few other authors who claimed to be writing under his name, and that Calembour himself constantly alludes to various collaborators and saboteurs that were working to enlarge his corpus for laudatory or defamatory purposes. As well, Calembour himself had also written under the name of his own collaborators such as Dr Fuse Less et al. In the end, I decided to abandon any pursuit that was properly the domain of Calembour scholarship and stuck to the task of studying this particular paralibrary phenomenon.

The orphaned leaves themselves were not difficult to acquire given that my research into Calembour had supplied me with a suitable source of his own research interests, thereby guiding me to the books he would have most likely consulted and subsequently dumped within them his unpublished pages (Note: I leave aside the authorship debate and will refer to Calembour as the originating author for brevity's sake). Even his vast, polymathic interests were not unlimited, and so a careful cull of his bibliographical entries was enough to populate a list of possible leads of about 2,000 books. About 500 of these contained an inserted page. Although I cannot lay claim to the manuscript being complete, it is a sizable enough collection to be of interest to Calembour scholarship, and I have since provided the Tarakotta Academy of Letters what I have collected. Since my goal was primarily to reunite the pages and muse on the event as a suitable entry to paralibrary sciences, I left off any attempt to put the pages in their proper sequence - a task better delegated to those more familiar with Calembour's work and with the patience required to order unnumbered pages. Moreover, the content I had read did not furnish me with any clues as to where I would find more of their kind, this already supplied by the bibliographical entries.