behind the Community Library · down the gap past the 800s · nothing is straight, and nothing is lit
Where every library is the same library
L-Space
Mass distorts space. Enough books distort it into something you can walk along.
A library is not just a building full of books. It is a place in L-space: every library, everywhere, joined to every other through the sheer weight of what is in them. Knowledge is power, power is energy, energy is matter, and matter is mass, which is Terry Pratchett’s arithmetic, from the Discworld books, and mass bends the space around it. Enough books bend it into something you can walk through. What you need to find your way is not a map. It is a ball of string.
And mass distorts space. It distorts it into polyfractal L-space.
Read off our Library page, which quotes the passage it comes out of at length. Not checked against the book.
A ball of string
So, while the Dewey system has its fine points, when you’re setting out to look something up in the multidimensional folds of L-space what you really need is a ball of string.
Read off our Library page, which quotes the passage it comes out of at length. Not checked against the book.
That is how we think about a library. Not a catalogue. Not a curriculum. A space you move through by following a thread, finding what you need on the way to something else, and getting home again because you tied one end to the door. A monotropic mind walks L-space whether or not there is a library in it: one thread, followed all the way in, and the rest of the building bends round it. The name for that from the inside is a rabbit hole, and there is one of those on the street too.
Books bend space and time.
Read off our Library page, which credits it to Guards! Guards! on WorldCat. Not checked against the book.
Have you really read all these?
People ask it about a big shelf of books as if it were an accusation. They have misunderstood what a library is for. An unread book is not a failure. It is a resource, a future you got ready for, and the books you have not read yet are the most honest part of any collection: the part that says there is more to know. That is the anti-library. Neurodivergent people often build our libraries this way. We follow threads, we collect ahead of a hyperfocus that has not arrived yet, and we buy the book because something in us knew it before the moment to read it came. That is not disorganisation. It is monotropism working across time, and in L-space it is how the shelves get so heavy.
Nothing is more important than an unread library.
Read off our Library page, WHICH GIVES IT NO SOURCE, and we could not trace it from here. It is here on that page's word, and it says so under the quotation.
Books of the Edges
We call our reading lists Books of the Edges because of where we live. Disabled and neurodivergent people are always the edge cases. The middle of the world is built for some people, with its neat categories and its smooth timelines, and real life happens at the edges: in the breaks, the mismatches and the overlaps, where systems fail to account for how complicated people are and where new worlds come from. The name is from Octavia E. Butler, whose disabled narrator in Parable of the Sower calls her philosophy Earthseed: The Book of the Living, after the Books of the Dead. L-space is the one place where every edge of every library meets every other.
Threads worth pulling
From our glossary, and the end of every one of them is tied to somewhere else.
- Anti-library, the books you have not read yet, which are the part of a library that knows there is more to know
- Library Economy, borrowing as a way of running more of the world than books
- Rabbit Hole, what following one thread all the way in feels like, from the inside
- Reading, the thing all of this is for, and all the ways of doing it
- Monotropism, a mind that goes one thread at a time, and deep, which is how L-space is walked
Job marker — the loose end of a ball of string, coiled on the floor where it was tied off
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 do you need to find your way through L-space?
Before the code: When you set out to look something up in the folds of L-space, what do you really need?
Hint 1
It is not a map.
Hint 2
It is drawn right across the top of the room.
Last hint
You tie one end to the door.
Give me the answer
The answer is a ball of string. Nothing in L-space is straight, so a map would be no use. Pratchett's answer, in Guards! Guards!, is a ball of string: tie it to the door and follow it back.
Taking the answer is a real way through this, not a lesser one. Nothing is watching and nothing is written down.
Quest code: STRING
That is the one.
Nothing in L-space is straight, so a map would be no use. Pratchett's answer, in Guards! Guards!, is a ball of string: tie it to the door and follow it back.
Quest code: STRING
HOW LOUD DO YOU WANT IT?
Starts wherever your device says. Nothing moves, flashes, or plays until you say so.