HISTORY OF THE LIBRARY

There is a Hotel in every history that has recently died. In Moscow. In Madrid. In Egypt. In Brooklyn. We have encountered it in Budapest. In Jakarta. We heard rumors of it in Kingston and in Dublin. We walked through its doors in Paris. There was the Middle American, Navite American Mystic named Still Born in Taos who said he saw a library once emerge from the sands, a mirage at first, a shimmering hallucination, and begin to grow into a Hotel. We did not believe him until we were in Norway and saw it for ourselves, from the snow, now, not from the sands. We watched a snow become a library, and then we watched a library become a Hotel. We knew the Hotel. We remembered the Hotel. We greeted the Hotel like an old friend. We sat in the library in the Norwegian hotel, in mahogany and leather reading chairs, our heads bent as though in prayer, the only sound the ruffling of pages, and the slow and steady, distant beating of a heart.

The only printed matter that remained in the Library of the Hotel St. George, when at last we acquired it, in its newest location, was a blue-print of the hotel, a fortuitous finding, since all that remained of the hotel, when we acquired it, was its library. We were in Brooklyn at the time. We are in Brooklyn, at this time. We cannot say if the Hotel was here before the library, and was destroyed, or if the Library had fled its Hotel, in Norway, or Taos, and emerged, here, from the asphalt. But we will remain content to occupy the Library, and to restore the Hotel to its original form, until such a time that this Hotel, also, its heart broken, becomes a building that has recently died.

We are reading, in the meantime, to pass the time. Join us.