Word: gridley
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Sitting at his favorite place in the Widener reading room, near the windows and directly off the center aisle, Gridley often wondered why Nathan Pusey had chosen Massachusett Hall for his office and left the real seat of power to any chance comer. He turned to the left and surveyed the Yard; all of Harvard lay below his throne. A bearded old man hurrying to finish his last book sat across from a closely twined couple not even pretending an interest in the copy of Burckhardt open before them. Through the main arch he could just make out the automatic...
...real springs of power lay to the left, through the humming catalogue, past the circulation desk processing 300,000 volumes a year, and into the stacks. Gridley entered at Level Four, quickly bypassed American Literature and the Men's Room, with its outhouse graffiti, to plunge into the fields of light, the PZ section, home of pulp fiction and an unrivalled assortment of detective novels which came from the library of an egyptologist named George A. Reisner '89. Reisner died during the war and left the University crates of material, crates that held no hieroglyphs. Instead, his bounty...
Picking out an old Michael Innes, Gridley took the elevator down to Level D, struggled with the vault-like door and issued into the moderate gloom that enshrouds Sections HunL, Oc and Ind (Hungarian Literature, Oceania and Indic Studies). Gridley chuckled sardonically as he walked through the country's largest Hindi collection, musing that Harvard didn't teach the language. Finally he reached his destination, Ang and F. Ang means Angling and F stands for Daniel B. Fearing, a former mayor of Newport who donated, in 1915, several thousand titles having to do with fish and fishing. "What a gold...
...Good old Fearing," laughed Gridley. "His best trick was the lead bookends. They looked exactly like real books, complete with library numbers and titles like Mainly Bracing and Etwas Wundervoll. I'll never forget when I was a stackboy and they sent me to get End of the Line, F.102.9. I couldn't believe it was that heavy...
...reference librarian still laughs at me even now that I quit the job, but I'll bet he wouldn't be smiling if he knew I'd duplicated his keys." Gridley strode confidently up to Level B and out the back entrance to the stacks. A sinister smile played over his features as he hurried down the tiled hallway toward the main elevator. Checking to see that no one watched him, he slipped into a dark alcove and fitted a key into what looked like a closet door. "Section X," be exclaimed as he plunged into the fabled Inferno that...