I am a font geek by design. This is a tag line I feel is about as clever as I can get in describing my intertwining of my interest and occupation. Most of my lovers had found it an odd quirk, and all eventually found it an irritant – and even then for Christmases or birthdays they might buy me a book on pre-Gutenberg scribal fonts or some other book filled with endless lurid plates of various font styles with the same A to Z, 0 to 9, plus special and common characters. I'm a Bembo and Cardo man myself, and I suppose it is these styles that influence my other hobby, which is font design. So serious am I about the importance of fonts that I've turned down purchasing a book everyone tells me is a gripping read simply on what I deem a poor choice of fonts. I simply cannot read a book set with an inferior font any more than I can eat dinner in a restaurant with smokers – it just ruins it for me. Worse, it causes me something near to pain. Alphabets and their component parts, from their history, formation, and aesthetic variations, are my life. As an architect, some people dream of being the next Frank Lloyd Wright in designing some eco-ergonomic-whatzit piece of building art, or to be like the Bauhausians or Le Corbusier in building houses like machines for living in. My drafting table and so many AutoCAD files are simply the meticulous reworking of the alphabet.
With the Arizona project tucked in my CV, I felt confident when the millionaire Egon Denoel had put out a call for someone to act as a consultant on his newest and purposeless scheme of designing a new suburban tract, a subdivision where the roads would resemble a tightly packed alphabet from an aerial perspective. To me, this would be an easier project to plan since the letters would be horizontally hugging the earth in the natural way that letters generally lie flat on a page. Denoel seemed the indifferent and preoccupied person so many wealthy eccentrics are who get bored easily and can't seem to spend their cash fast enough. Sounds a bit like some sort of dare against fate to me. He was the Howard Hughes type, and a bit of a wandering polymath who did all sorts of things with both time and money. His indifference to me dissipated when he learned I shared one of his thousand obsessions: the alphabet. In fact, I had not put together the coincidence of his name: this was the same Denoel of the Denoel font family, the one he designed in his spare time between one prodigious act and another, perhaps between revolutionizing a new dance in New Guinea and inventing a new dish in Mongolian cuisine. I, of course, appreciated the daring of his font, but did find it a bit dated (not to mention his Q and W were a misfit with the overall aesthetic in my opinion). When I asked him what font we'd be using for the subdivision, I was disappointed when he said boring old Times New Roman.
He had purchased 26 miles of land at a width of two miles. It was a considerable chunk, but one he acquired at a discount from the city which thought allowing this to go forward would redeem their pitiful image as a backward, anti-cultural, uninspired box store splotch on the highway. The land was to be parcelled at exactly one by two miles, every section to be the site for a letter done as the road. The project took a year to add the piping and drainage, and the roads. We worked systematically letter by letter, and by the time we had hit Z, all the pre-fab housing had been completed up to N. In lieu of full payment for my services, I was given a house at any point in this subdivision, so I chose the exact middle of the alphabet: at the dipped centre of M (technically, I am listed as living in section M, number 1 M3 avenue – there are four streets in M).
Alphabetopia, as it was at first jokingly called and later officially named, was a gated subdivision. There were only two access points: at the bottom portion of A and the bottom portion of Z. I see now why we could have used a ring road, and why I lived in the worst possible section. There was no shopping or employment in Alphabetopia, which means we all had to commute out of it to do anything. This produced a significant problem when there were only two access points that serviced the area, and during rush hour, it was quite common to see traffic backed up as deep as G and U. The ideal locations to live would be, of course, A and Z, but there are also differences of convenience between the letters worthy of remark. Where I live, most traffic going from M to A or L to Z had to pass by my house, making it a very busy and noisy street. During the winter, snow removal services were not keen on the upper arm of F which was a dead end (yet one could see the top arc of G from the end of the street, and residents had asked for a connecting road to be built – something that Denoel rejected since that would have ruined the perfection of his Alphabetopia). The close connection between E and F, however, lent it a kind of grid look, and they were the only ones with a continuous road through the middle; going from the crossbar of H into G was pointless because the middle of G was a dead end). Anyone living right of M would tend to use the Z exit, but V and W could not be bypassed with a simple straightaway, but required driving in a long zigzag. Worse still was when one came to Z because one had to drive a full mile to the edge of its top where one could see the outside of the subdivision, double back in a diagonal that is about a mile and a half, and then another mile to the exit. All told, the distance of Z was 3.5 miles, or 2.5 miles more than a straight cut through it would take. To drive from point A to Z, although a distance of only 26 miles if measured end to end, was actually over 55 miles.
S is for scenic, and anyone driving through S would have to travel the entire distance of it to get to T (driving in the opposite direction to R was much shorter). Apart from V and W that must be driven in their entirety, my neighbouring section L also required this, but it seemed a much simpler path since it only required taking one right or one left at a straight angle, pending direction.
The division runs west to east through the alphabet, which means each letter is bisected into north and south. The twinned letter sections were B, D, C, E, H, I, O, and X (some people counted S, but that required a double flip: once vertical and once horizontal). Although income disparity was very slight at that time, the northern sections were just a hair more affluent than the south, and this showed by the quality of the lawn ornaments. I do not include those letter section where the mirroring occurs solely on a vertical axis since I have not seen much difference between east and west.
X was the only section with a four way stop, and thus also had the highest rate of traffic accidents. For this reason, and because of the longer drive through V, W, and Z, my commute direction was (and still is) A, and the only time I touched the north was in L, K, and J. And, for reasons I cannot understand or it being merely statistical coincidence, section J had the highest amount of crime (at 2 thefts in the first year, and one spousal abuse incident – court case pending).
Alphabetopia did attract the occasional tourist who made it his goal to drive through each letter, or otherwise snap a picture of himself in each section that spells his name. A brief-lived community action group in A tried to incite alarm by claiming that “alphabetourism” will increase traffic and crime. However, the number of tourists our little urban planning oddity receives every year is barely above double digits. Another failed bid by those living in H was to make Alphabetopia the Scrabble capital of the world. And, still others tried a variety of alphabet-based schemes to draw attention, make money, or both.
It has been seven years and our Alphabetopia bears only slight resemblance to its initial plan. Agitating voices lobbying city hall, mixed with declining real estate values as the area saw an increasing exodus, prompted the building of a two-lane road cutting right across the middle of each section. It passes by my house. Another road linking the beginning of Z cutting in a south-eastern direction has mangled the Z to make it appear like a triangular hourglass. Commercial zoning was permitted in a few areas, especially where roads intersect with maximum access such as at E, the middle of W, and X. There are plans to extend the bottom of F to make it a second E which will be the site of a new series of affordable high-rise apartment blocs. This may necessitate the laying down of another road that will run along the bottom from F to A. As well, many of the homes in O were bought out and demolished to accommodate a new garbage dump. This wil
l mean N and P will soon become vacant, and people already speak derisively of those living “east of M.” The second generation of Alphabetopia transplants are urging the city to adopt a Hippodamian plan that would grid the plumping population and make the subdivision more traffic accessible. If this goes through – and I have no reason to suspect it would not – then I would find myself living in a gradually disappearing alphabet. Soon, there will be no alphabet in Alphabetopia, and in 20 years hardly anyone will know why this suburb was called this any more than one might question why a particular street is named Woodlawn or, another, Clarke.
Urban planning and art have been harmonious in the past, but art seems to be outpaced by need. At that point, urban planning and art have nothing in common but conflict, and the utility side of urban planning always wins. I end here with another memory, the one I hope to lay down on this page as I once helped lay down on an urban scale, this dream of Denoel of a place that was Alphabetopia in both name and meaning:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
25
Bibliotheca Prohibitorum
I was entering that most sacred of places once again, this time without the supervision of the mad Librarian. Every answer and every question was housed right here, in this infinite space. I had found the portal between Setzer's realm and Castellemare's, aided only with my own methods. The death toll was now two: Setzer and the double-agent Angelo. Would there have to be three deaths so that three may live? I thought of the waiting people in the rooms far above... if I could say what was up or down in this space. But that was the real trick of the labyrinth: it was not a measure of space, but of timing, and those rooms I had wandered through were not adjacent to the Library, but before, subsequent to, prior in succession. Here I was, in a timeless space with no boundaries.
The door could only be opened using a console with a keypad lock. The strange console read Input 216, which I now knew to have something to do with the book I compiled in the first room of the labyrinth. I went about inputting the first letter from every page of the book. Once the last letter was inputted, the sound of a heavy latch mechanism signaled the door was now open.
What I saw were endless shelves of books stretching off into forever. From what I knew of this vast and interminable Library was that it would provide me with what I wanted so long as I thought of it. It would have proven so easy to spend the rest of my days in this Library, discovering all I ever wanted to know and more. I didn't know how someone like Castellemare managed it, how he could tear himself away from a place where one would never need the outside world anymore. It was all in here, a totality.
Castellemare had insinuated something awry about the Library, and Angelo had been more forceful in his opinion that the Library was in peril. It was hard to think of it in those terms when the whole area as peaceful, tomblike, constant. It seemed as though nothing could imperil this Library, tucked away from reality as it was.
“May I help you?” a kindly voice with an accent said, startling me.
I turned to see an old man with his grey hair combed back, his eyes stunned with blindness. He was attired in a frumpy suit, but his face spoke generousity, imperturbably patient wisdom, and honesty.
“I am... looking for answers,” was my reply.
“The questions are far more interesting, I find,” he said with a smile, eyes untrained. “Paradoxes, enigmas, labyrinths of thought... these are sustaining.”
“I had not thought anyone worked here save for Castellemare.”
“My title is one thing, but I am more a caretaker. This is the true task of the Librarian.”
“Are you the Librarian?”
“As I said, it is just a title, and little stock do I place by it. I am a humble caretaker of the books.”
“Castellemare says he is the Librarian. I do not understand.”
He smiled indulgently. “There are as many self-appointed librarians as there are books in this vast expanse of a library. He may choose to believe anything he wishes – it does not concern me. Only the books concern me, not so many wizards behind curtains.”
His face was starkly familiar, as if I had met him before. He continued: “It's a lovely library, isn't it. One can very easily find oneself lost within it, and joyously so.”
“I don't mean to be impolite, but does not your affliction compromise your duties as a librarian?”
“My affliction for thinking? Oh, you must mean my blindness. Gone are all the colours, even the most faithful ones – but I do think back on them with fondness. But in a place of total knowledge, what need I of eyes? It is everywhere. One learns, in time, how to read without reliance on such things as eyes. A colossal memory, perhaps, taken in through the skin, through the spirit. I am happy. Sometimes it occurs to me that my eyesight was the source of much more blindness than what I experience now.”
“Librarian, do you have a name?”
“I do, but what matter names? I am multiple. There is a version of me who writes me, another that unwrites me, one that collects accolades, and another who is my Judas. It is the same with every one of us. You as well. We cannot so fixedly insist on names.”
“How did you come to be the Librarian?”
“I am not so comfortable with the title, despite the honour you give me by uttering it. As I say, I'm merely the caretaker, the conduit through which books pass. As we all are. It is folly to think that by reading books we come to own them. They pass, like water, and the structure that is identity is ephemeral. We arrest knowledge for but a moment, and then it passes again to someone other, and the process repeats. This place is the place of dreams, and dreams possess us.”
“I must admit that you seem to be the kindliest person I have met in my journey.”
“Fraught with peril is the quest for knowledge. But so beautiful, too. In the end, the riddles are what matter, guaranteeing the permanence of the endless journey. I have written on libraries in my time, and even occupied the role of librarian. And here I am now, gifted by forces unknown to continue occupying the role I so cherished in life, out there, in that place of the warm and the quick.”
“In my world?”
“All worlds are one, in their way, a collection of possibilities, an aleph. This was my flash of intuition then, and it proved correct.”
It dawned on me who my conversant was. “Argentina?”
He flashed another kindly smile. “Yes, in one incarnation. But in this incarnation, I am entrusted to be the guardian of the books, although I find 'caretaker' more appropriate. You've guessed the name of one of my identities, and even that one identity is multiple.”
“Jorge Luis Borges.”
“At the service of the Library,” he said, his blind eyes tracking nothing in particular.
It had occurred to me that I had not encountered Setzer's library in my travels in the labyrinth. “What do you know of Anton Setzer?”
“If I wave my hand over these books, that would be a fair answer. I am sure you would find all you wanted to know and more by performing a search. Shall I be of assistance?”
“I was actually hoping that you might have some information on Anton Setzer's library. Castellemare denies that the merger went through.”
“A merger? Oh... that, yes. The library of Anton Setzer is safely housed in this Library. I had the pleasure of cataloguing and shelving the books myself. They are intercalated in the collection. Some very interesting titles, I might add, titles for which it is not necessary to have eyes with which to scan them.”
“Why would Castellemare deny the merger went through? When last I saw him, he and his agents were busying themselves destroying what Setzer's machine was producing.”
“Was he? Well, that is an act of bad faith. I have never been fond of those who destroy books. It is a vain act on his part since he fails to understand the real nature of the Library: all of Setzer's productions already exist, after a fashion, here. I personally delight in what Setzer does, for his is the true spirit of the fabulist, the novelist, t
he creator of impossible worlds, the fictionalist. The line between what we consider reality and fiction is a blurry one. I have always thought so.”
“Setzer was murdered.”
“Oh, was he?” he said, as if I had told him it was raining outside. “Well, that's unfortunate, but he lives on – as we all do – in the books.”
“What is the history of the Library?” I chanced to ask, to which his face visibly lit up.
“That is one my primary concerns... Or, rather, it is one of the perks of my tenure here. You see, there are as many histories of the Library as there are sand grains along a beach, each one a gleaming and sparkling one. I cannot say that I have read them all, for such a task would require countless lifetimes. In one version, the Library's contents were deposited by ancient and knowledgeable gods. In another, the books spontaneously created themselves. In another, the books are tied to the dreams of men in a co-creative transference.”
“Castellemare claims that it is the central hub of all possible worlds following the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.”
“Such a vile destruction makes me wince, I apologize. Yes, that is one of many theories, one of many histories. It is not that Castellemare is wrong, but that it is just one view, one facet of an infinitely faceted crystal. I admit that at one point, long ago, I sought for some way for a Library as this one to be justified until I came to the realization that it requires no such justification – it is its own justification.”
The Infinite Library Page 38
