The Brakebills Library

This one's for you, Gretchen . . .

I spent several hours during this week's snowstorm reading Lev Grossman's new novel, The Magicians. A large chunk of the action takes place at Brakebills, a sort of college-level Hogwarts. Although I think that all libraries are magical places (cue to loud groaning), the Brakebills Library--which I envisioned as looking rather like the Long Room in the Old Library at Trinity College Dublin (yes, I have been there, so I know whereof I speak)--literally has its own brand of magic:

...some of the books had actually become migratory. In the nineteenth century Brakebills had appointed a librarian with a highly Romantic imagination who had envisioned a mobile library in which the books fluttered from shelf to shelf like birds, reorganizing themselves spontaneously under their own power in response to searches. For the first few months the effect was said to have been quite dramatic. A painting of the scene survived as a mural behind the circulation desk, with enormous atlases soaring around the place like condors.

But the system turned out to be totally impractical. The wear and tear on the spines alone was too costly, and the books were horribly disobedient. The librarian had imagined that he could summon a given book to perch on his hand just by shouting out its call number, but in actuality they just too willful, and some were actively predatory. The librarian was swiftly deposed, and his successor set about domesticating the books again, but even now there were stragglers, notably in Swiss History and Architecture 300-1399, that stubbornly flapped around near the ceiling. Once in a while an entire sub-sub-category that had long been thought safely dormant would take wing with an indescribable papery susurrus.

It's hard not to love the idea of disobedient books. Or the word susurrus.