The Infinite Library

by Kane X Faucher

  Snoop,

  Cease and desist all further inquiries. The matter is now at an end for you. Meddle no further, and respect the privacy of the senders and recipients or face disciplinary action.

  The letter was not signed, but the threatening tone was not lost on me. Having been uncovered, I am quite sure that the group reassigned new books and operated under stricter codes of secrecy since. Had I been more cautious, I may have penetrated deeper into their mysteries, and so it is my hope that by my documenting this that some enterprising researcher in the future may extend our knowledge beyond where my attempt was so prematurely ended.

  B. Serial Clue-Planting

  This next event is a slight variation on the first, and was also discovered chiefly by the governance of chance. I am unsure if this was being perpetrated by a group or by someone acting individually, for all the fragments I had collected were typewritten, and the tone consistent in its inconsistency.

  While I was thumbing through a book on the cosmogonies of Francis Ponge, a folded page jutted out from the section devoted to Ponge's “hymn to electricity”. This would prove the start of a long and inconclusive research that took no less than two years of collection and frustration.

  The note I found there, and every other like it, sported a stylized watermark identifying that it was part of the same series. Try as I have to discern any meaning or purpose to these fragments, I am simply not up to the task of deciphering what is written in them, nor if they are parts of a larger work that - had I the patience to find them all - would reveal their meaning by appeal to their totality.

  The regression precipitates the beginning of how the circle is closed, not the reverse.

  DR7009.C349 1996

  Mulling the possible meanings, I came only to conjecture. The call number at the bottom of the note urged me on to locate it and find therein another note, as equally cryptic as the last. There seemed to be a sequentiality to the fragments, and each of them furnished the call number of the book where I would find another one. I followed this call number trail for about 184 books, thereby collecting 184 fragments that I still could not understand. The question of where the fragmented text began, in which book, haunted me as well.

  There were plenty of frustrations along the way. At least eight times the book I needed to acquire next in the fragment series had been checked out and, presumably, the fragment would have been discovered by the borrower and most likely tossed away. On other occasions, the call number cited would lead me to a book with no fragment at all. Fortunately, when I came to an impasse, I discovered that there was a pattern to these fragment deposits roughly corresponding to a mathematical sequence involving the call numbers. So, for example, I could expect that the next fragment would appear 1001 books later in the call number sequence, but this was not always the case. If there was a mathematical pattern, it was far beyond my ken to pinpoint, but I knew there to be one since it would lead me to the approximate location where I could be seen investigating an entire shelf of books and coming away with the next missing fragment.

  The fragments themselves I would provide in an appendix if I still possessed them. Only one of the fragments exist since I had taken to writing it in one of my notebooks, and that fragment (which was the first I found and is by far the one that haunts me most, is written above). In retrospect, I should have copied each of them instead of merely collecting them in a file folder that has been misplaced under mysterious circumstances. The fragments themselves, I can say, have a strong metaphysical bent to them and seem to concern the nature of the library as its operative metaphor.

  The thrill of the chase is what marks the excitement of this particular phenomena. The serialized aspect of these fragments seems to promise some stable meaning to emerge if one is persistent enough to locate them all, appealing to a collection fetishism. I freely admit that I was immediately hooked by this mystery, but try as I did, I had as much luck as the previous research bout with the secretive group's method of correspondence. The method of dissemination is slightly novel in its aspect, and one could wager that it involves considerable risk given that any of the volumes in which the fragments are inserted could be borrowed and the fragment merely tossed away. As authors generally aim to be understood, I would speculate that the meaning would remain intact even if fragments were lost or destroyed, thereby suggesting that one should not build too much into the interpretation of any individual fragment.

  However, I can quite easily contradict this claim if I suppose that the author's intention is not to be understood, and is merely “having us on.” There may be an authorial intention to obscure, planting vague and esoteric fragments to offer us who discover them the illusion of a larger meaning. I do not like to dwell on this possibility given how much time I had already invested in my investigation, but it is a possibility I cannot dismiss out of hand. I've read about those who construct elaborate, serpentine ciphers and codes that are false, a method of “Greeking” that is mischievously concocted to trick scholars into wasting their time trying to crack it, trying to find some kind of meaning when there never was one to begin with.

  C. Posterity Management

  This is simply where the author inserts unpublished manuscript pages at random throughout the library. I hazard to include this in a roundup of paralibrary activities, but it does definitionally find itself within its domain. The author's name (if it is in fact real and not a pseudonym) is Jonkil Calembour, and I have only by chance uncovered five examples of his writing scattered throughout the library. Save for the inconceivably time consuming task of going through the university library's entire holdings, I dare say that the collection of all these intentionally orphaned leaves of his “great unpublished” will never see reunion. I did do considerable research on the author, and from a comparison I made between the unpublished texts purporting to be under the authorship of Calembour and his published works, there seems to be a consistency of style and theme. I am not particularly interested in the content of his ravings, to be frank, but it would be of some utility to Calembour scholars should the text be authenticated. However, I cannot rule out that it may have been an emulator trying to make mischief.

  Something of note, however, came to me via a Calembour scholar I had contacted. He told me that there is indeed mention in one of Calembour's books about his desire to cause some mischief for his biographers. Calembour spent considerable time considering and openly remarking upon his posthumous reception, and so stated his goal of inserting unnumbered pages of his writings throughout various books that he had read, each of the pages in the books themselves underlined and with notes to provide a “clue” to the inserted page. Of course, given the maverick and harlequin playfulness of Calembour, one could fully expect that some of these would be “dummy connections” that would exasperate scholars for long hours trying to suss out a relevance that was never there in the first place.

  I also came across a book entitled, The Authorship of Jonkil Calembour that muddied rather than clarified the issue of who was the author or authors responsible for the over 100 volumes in the Calembour canon. Although he was prolific to the point of graphomania, it is difficult to explain how he was able to complete such a body of work in his lifetime. A further problem emerges when we learn that there were a few other authors who claimed to be writing under his name, and that Calembour himself constantly alludes to various collaborators and saboteurs that were working to enlarge his corpus for laudatory or defamatory purposes. As well, Calembour himself had also written under the name of his own collaborators such as Dr Fuse Less et al. In the end, I decided to abandon any pursuit that was properly the domain of Calembour scholarship and stuck to the task of studying this particular paralibrary phenomenon.

  The orphaned leaves themselves were not difficult to acquire given that my research into Calembour had supplied me with a suitable source of his own research interests, thereby guiding me to the books he would have most likely consulted and subsequently dumped within them his unpubli
shed pages (Note: I leave aside the authorship debate and will refer to Calembour as the originating author for brevity's sake). Even his vast, polymathic interests were not unlimited, and so a careful cull of his bibliographical entries was enough to populate a list of possible leads of about 2,000 books. About 500 of these contained an inserted page. Although I cannot lay claim to the manuscript being complete, it is a sizable enough collection to be of interest to Calembour scholarship, and I have since provided the Tarakotta Academy of Letters what I have collected. Since my goal was primarily to reunite the pages and muse on the event as a suitable entry to paralibrary sciences, I left off any attempt to put the pages in their proper sequence - a task better delegated to those more familiar with Calembour's work and with the patience required to order unnumbered pages. Moreover, the content I had read did not furnish me with any clues as to where I would find more of their kind, this already supplied by the bibliographical entries.

  While on vacation down south, I ran into an old school chum of mine and we began talking about our current research. At some point, I had mentioned this phenomenon and he told me of something similar where an author whose fortunes in becoming recognized were rather bleak had undertaken to do his own version of posterity management. The author, inferred my friend, might have been inspired by reading Will Self's The Book of Dave, for the unpublished manuscripts were copied several times, wrapped in plastic, and buried deep in the ground where they would presumably be found perhaps years, decades, or even centuries later. This time capsule technique may have afforded posthumous recognition of the author that had been missing in life. Perhaps the found texts would become interpreted as some sort of gospel for a new world unrecognizable by us.

  Conclusion

  As stated supra, if paralibrary sciences did not already exist as a viable academic sub-discipline or exercise, it would by necessity have to be invented. I have herein described three of what I would presume to be several possible events and uses a library can be put to that go beyond its intended scope. Whether it was a jape, an accident, or a fully intended delivery, I received an anonymous package while still writing this casual article. The book I received by this anonymous donor was entitled Codex Infinitum and its premise was in developing Jorge Luis Borges' infinite library of Babel to such an extreme whilst considering its philosophical implications. In it is a wealth of paralibrary phenomena I found somewhat entertaining, but sadly it is just fiction. I believe that a book of this sort may generate a sudden surge in interest in paralibrary sciences, but it may attract the wrong sort of researchers who will suspect every event to be connected to the monotonous genre of secret societies and vast enigmatic conspiracies. And, like all thing popular, it will have its day and then peter out, perhaps taking my proposed sub-discipline's viability with it. Or, I can dare to venture that this popularity will urge universities to take this study seriously enough to add it to the existing curriculum of library sciences and then go about its vigorous promotion for more seasoned and serious scholars interested in documenting the phenomena in ways much better skilled than I have briefly and unsatisfactorily done here. Since this sub-discipline is in its infancy, I can only hope that these reflections of mine will function as the opening of a dialogue that will gain in methodological rigour as more interested researchers add their own skills to the task.

  Pickman's conjectures were spotted with some hasty thinking, and I failed to see what use my own work in cryptographic research would be to his enterprise. It was obvious by his report that whoever was planting these clues had already come to know that there was an “eavesdropper” in this elaborate correspondence. Some of what puzzled him about the nature of these books would have taken on new colour had he known about the Library, but my eyes burned on the mention of the Codex Infinitum. It gave me pause to consider that Pickman might have been another of Castellemare's agents who contrived this excuse to frustrate me further with mystery and coincidence. It was paranoid reasoning, and I had to consider the possibility that Pickman was in earnest and not of Castellemare's dummies.

  I wrote to Pickman:

  Dear Dr Pickman,

  I have read your interesting preliminary work on Paralibrary Phenomena. As you know, my skills are centered in decoding, deciphering, and in being able to assess the value of rare books (a hobby of mine). That being said, I am unsure of how my involvement would be of any benefit to your research.

  To which he replied, an hour later:

  Dear Dr Gimaldi,

  I should perhaps be more up front, but perhaps assumed you already were aware, but I was given your name by a one Heinrich Hermann – an elderly and scholarly friend of my family – who was approached about a similar issue by a bookseller named Anton Setzer. Mr. Hermann learned of your recent interest in library mysteries by this Mr. Setzer, so Mr. Hermann thought nothing of giving me your name after I had discussed a few of the issues I have been pursuing. If your name and current interest in library mysteries was given in error, I do sincerely apologize.

  Best,

  G.D.P.

  Setzer was throwing my name around for some reason. Before deciding whether I was going to respond to Pickman, I sent a blast to Setzer:

  Anton,

  First you claim to make a “clean breast” of things, send me a cryptic fiction where you are named, and then I get word that you have been speaking of me to others (who is Heinrich Hermann?). I've now been contacted by a library studies scholar interested in sharing his work with me. I fail to understand the motives. If you are still in the candid mood, please do “enlighten” and “apprise” me of why you feel at such liberty to throw my name around as casual dinner conversation.

  G

  And then, his response:

  Gimaldi,

  It isn't good for one's critical mindset to be so arrant in your suspicions of everything and everyone. I have no evil designs. You approached me – nay, stalked me! - to put your questions of the Library to me. Would I be wrong to assume that the Library still holds interest for you? You very well know that I cannot give you all the answers, but when Heinrich told me of a younger scholarly friend's current fascination with a library-related mystery, and I heard some of the details, well, I thought this would aid you in the answers you seek. I may have been wrong, and you may have left the agonizing mystery of the Library well behind you now, which is not so foolish a decision to make. My mentioning your name was little more than a professional courtesy, and I genuinely hoped that this would be of interest to you. As for Heinrich, he is not one of Castellemare's allies; he is an astonishing individual, really, and perhaps one day you may come to hear his story about a different way of reading, one that nearly claimed his sanity.

  I will not take offense at your tone, but try to be a bit more charitable before you start barking.

  With best of intentions,

  Anton

  I wrote back to Pickman and said that I would be interested in meeting with him if he could see his way up to Toronto some time in the next while. He responded in the way a child would in being told he could stay up past his bedtime. He urged for a sooner rather than later meeting, and was – as he said – free for the next month until classes resumed again. He would make the trip. Like most scholars who concerned themselves with issues so few cared about, he would cleave to anyone who would even wink in his direction. I knew that feeling, once, when I still cared, when I still considered my interests in a disproportionately amplified importance. Once upon time, I cared to make my name in my field, and that somehow this would radiate beyond the small cadre of researchers, eliciting a widespread interest on the subject in the popular mind. It just needed the right idea, the right researcher, the right promoter. I had once thought I could throw that bridge from the island obscure of academic concern to the continent of the public. But it turned out that the magnitude of distance was too large.

  Four days later, I met Pickman at the airport. Neither of us being gifted in the practical, we had not arranged to identify ours
elves to one another, did not say “I'll be the one with the red hat” or some other way of distinguishing us from the others. But there was no mistaking that the mussed up man in the baggy suit and the thick lenses, the beginnings of a neck wattle, and a look of confusion only lifelong dedicated academics could cultivate, was Pickman.