at the far end of the string · the other side of the shelf · in the Librarian’s colours
The Librarian of Unseen University
Oook.
A Discworld homage, from a library that finds him relatable
Our library has a guide. He lives in the stacks of Unseen University, climbs the shelves with prehensile hands and feet, and communicates mainly in Oook.
He was transformed by a magical accident and refused to be changed back. He kept his job because he was the only one who knew where all the books were. We find him relatable. He is Terry Pratchett’s, from the Discworld books, and this room is a thank-you note.
Not many people these days remarked upon the fact that he was an ape.
Read off our Library page, which quotes the whole passage and gives it as pages 3 and 4. Not checked against the book.
Why we find him relatable
Not the ape. The rest of it. His body changed, suddenly and not by his choice, and he found the new one suited the work better than the old one had: shelves are easier to climb with four hands, and a librarian who can sort books with his feet is ahead of one who cannot. So he declined to be put back. Every offer to fix him was an offer to take away something that worked, made by people who assumed they knew what he ought to want. Nobody else got to decide that. And he kept his job because he was the expert: the only one who knew where everything was, which is a better reason to keep a job than most, and a reason an institution cannot argue with however much it might like to. On a Disabled people’s site that is not a joke about an animal. It is a librarian who was told what he should want to be, and said Oook.
The rules
He belongs to a small group of senior librarians who can travel L-space on purpose, and who are pledged to keep its rules, which are very strict and very short.
- Silence.
- Books must be returned no later than the date shown.
- Do not meddle with the nature of causality.
Read off our Library page, which quotes the Discworld Wiki's article on the Librarian. The rules are from the novels; the wiki is fan-written and published under CC BY-SA, and it is credited as the place these words were read rather than as their author.
The second is the one on every date-due slip in every library there has ever been, which is how you know they are all the same library.
there is no higher life form than a librarian
Read off our Library page, which gives it as page 13. The end of a longer sentence, which is why it starts in lower case. Not checked against the book.
The Disc
The world he looks after the books of is flat. It rides through space on the backs of four elephants, and the elephants stand on the shell of a turtle swimming slowly through the dark, and at the Rim, where the world stops, the sea runs off the edge and falls away. A world with an edge you can walk to is a world after this library’s own heart, because we call our reading lists Books of the Edges. The Librarian first appears in The Colour of Magic, the first of the books, in 1983, and is an orangutan from The Light Fantastic in 1986 onwards; the passages in this room and the one before it are from Guards! Guards!, from 1989.
What is not in here
- The Librarian is not drawn anywhere in this room. He is up in the shelves somewhere, and he would rather you did not stare. The pictures of him people love best were painted for the books by the artists who drew the Disc, and they are theirs; the photographs of him on our Library page are there under licences this site cannot carry, so they stay there.
- The drawing at the top is ours: a disc, four elephants and a turtle, in the Librarian’s colours. A world on the back of a turtle is much older than the Discworld, and the Discworld is Pratchett’s.
- No long passages. Every quotation here is a line or two, with its author, its book and its year on it, and says how it was checked. The long ones stay on our Library page, where they are already cited.
And one thing that is in here, and in every other room on the street, where you cannot see it. In Going Postal the clacks towers keep a dead operator’s name moving up and down the line, marked to be sent on, never logged, and turned round at the end. After Pratchett died, people started doing the same in their websites’ headers. Every page on this street now sends X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett, so his name is going up and down the line with it.
Please return this room no later than the date shown. Or keep it as long as you like: the string goes back the way you came, and the library is open.
Job marker — a banana skin on the floor, left where somebody finished the banana
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: Why did the Librarian keep his job?
Before the code: The Librarian kept his job because he was the only one who knew where all the what were?
Hint 1
It is in the first paragraph under the drawing.
Hint 2
A library is full of them.
Last hint
He climbs the shelves to reach them.
Give me the answer
The answer is the books. He was the only one who knew where all the books were, so however the University felt about an orangutan in the stacks, the matter was never really raised.
Taking the answer is a real way through this, not a lesser one. Nothing is watching and nothing is written down.
Quest code: BANANA
That is the one.
He was the only one who knew where all the books were, so however the University felt about an orangutan in the stacks, the matter was never really raised.
Quest code: BANANA
HOW LOUD DO YOU WANT IT?
Starts wherever your device says. Nothing moves, flashes, or plays until you say so.