← back to the street

on the street · a public reading room at eleven in the morning · the windows up high, and the sky in all of them

Free to all

Community Library

Knowledge is infrastructure. Access to it is mutual aid.

This is our library, with the doors open and the sky in the windows. Books of the edges, zine walls, music, bookmarks, and things you can borrow and have, made by and for neurodivergent and disabled people. Nothing requires a card. You do not have to buy anything to be here, or explain yourself, or be social correctly. Libraries are already the most radical institution most people use without thinking about it: you borrow something, you give it back, and somebody else borrows it. No one owns it. Everyone benefits. At the library you are a patron, not a customer.

In praise of the public library

The library economy

Borrowing is not only a way of running a building full of books. It is an ethic: a way of sharing what sustains a life that needs neither wealth, nor competition, nor owning anything for ever. Murray Bookchin named the principles under it usufruct, the freedom to use what is held in common without using it up; the irreducible minimum, the level of living nobody falls below whatever they put in; and complementarity, differences without a ladder in them, each of us a small part of something bigger than the sum. We call it the library economy, and tool libraries, clothing libraries and seed libraries are already running on it. What if we ran more of the world this way? Ours is the Things Library.

On the front desk: our collections

Books, reading lists, zine walls, music, infographics, eBooks, bookmarks, highlights and things to borrow, every one of them on stimpunks.org and every one of them open. Browse what calls to you. Nothing requires a card.

New here? Start with NeuroTribes for the history, our Neurodiversity Affirming Reading Recommendations for what to read next, and the Glossary for the words. That’s the thread.

At the back, past the 800s

Between two cases at the far end of the room the aisle is a little longer on the inside than it is from the outside. Anybody who has lost an afternoon in a library has walked partway down it.

There is a gap in the stacks → Somebody has tied the end of a ball of string to the shelf beside it. The Librarian of Unseen University would call where it goes L-space, and he would know: it is Terry Pratchett’s idea, from the Discworld books, and it is the place where every library is the same library.
Job marker — a returned book lying on the floor, its date-due slip sticking out of the top

You have found a job marker. The Adventurer’s Guild is a shopfront on the street, and it posts jobs that send you round these rooms. Take the code below to its board and that job is done. Nothing here is scored, nothing expires, and one is a perfectly good number of jobs to do.

The job: What are you, at the library?

Before the code: At the library, you are a patron and not a what?

Hint 1

It is in bold at the end of the paragraph under the drawing.

Hint 2

It is the word for somebody a shop wants money from.

Last hint

Cory Doctorow's line uses it too.

Give me the answer

The answer is a customer. The library says it twice: at the library you are a patron, not a customer. Nothing there requires a card, and nobody asks you to buy anything to justify being in the room.

Taking the answer is a real way through this, not a lesser one. Nothing is watching and nothing is written down.

Quest code: PATRON

Hand it in at the Adventurer’s Guild →

HOW LOUD DO YOU WANT IT?

Starts wherever your device says. Nothing moves, flashes, or plays until you say so.