Alternate title – ‘Then the librarians come – like vampires, some say.’ From Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer, Severian’s meeting with the master Curator – a blind librarian presumably based on Borges.

You are familiar, I suppose, with the method by which we recruit our numbers?”

I admitted I was not.

“In every library, by ancient precept, is a room reserved for children. In it are kept bright picture books such as children delight in, and a few simple tales of wonder and adventure. Many children come to these rooms, and so long as they remain within their confines, no interest is taken in them.” He hesitated, and though I could discern no expression on his face, I received the impression that he feared what he was about to say might cause Cyby pain.

“From time to time, however, a librarian remarks a solitary child, still of tender years, who wanders from the children’s room and at last deserts it entirely. Such a child eventually discovers, on some low but obscure shelf, The Book of Gold. You have never seen this book, and you will never see it, being past the age at which it is met.”

“It must be very beautiful,” I said.

“It is indeed. Unless my memory betrays me, the cover is of black buckram, considerably faded at the spine. Several of the signatures are coming out, and certain of the plates have been taken. But it is a remarkably lovely book. I wish that I might find it again, though all books are shut to me now.

“The child, as I said, in time discovers The Book of Gold. Then the librarians come -like vampires, some say, but others say like the fairy godparents at a christening. They speak to the child, and the child joins them. Henceforth he is in the library wherever he may be, and soon his parents know him no more.

I read this volume – and only this volume – of The Book of the New Sun about 15 years ago and probably didn’t do Wolfe justice so I’ve gone back attempting to balance that judgment. It’s certainly better than I remembered (the above story especially is some delightful mythmaking) but I can’t shake the feeling – and the terms in which people always praise him remain responsible for this sense – that his prime draw is as a sort of detective game consisting half of piecing together doled out clues about the world and half of parsing through his narrator’s conflicting statements. I’ll play the game happily enough but it’s a different game than what I natively want.