The Absent Library

Sometimes, between books, my mind wanders to the absent library. A locked room in Bloomsbury without sunlight. The scholar stones and the Sussex chalks like fossilised cannonballs gathering dust. A cyanotype print angled beside an empty macaroon giftbox: a window onto another world, now unobserved in its exposure. The dead lime balanced on the stairwell outdoors, citrus preserved as if it might return to life. And all along the plastic casing that hides the usual office wires, telephone and ethernet cables, are prints and things: David Jones and Mainie Jellett in plastic wrap, posters from strike action and teach-outs that feel as though they were designed for a different world of injustice (so small in comparison to this one), the misericord ceramics balanced like hybrid azulejos, and a 1970s copy of the American comic book Beowulf, Dragonslayer, filled with adverts for cigarettes, guns and martial arts. This strange, pseudo-medieval artefact…