Listing to Port

1. Miss Helen Thirnwicket, London. Unlike the other librarians on this list, Miss Thirnwicket was not a natural adventurer. Rather, she was the unfortunate victim of a typo. Instead of signing on, as she thought,  as a librarian of Acton (West London) she found herself under contract to be a librarian of Action (no location specified). The local authority duly supplied her with a small mobile library and instructions to take it to perilous locations. Miss Thirnwicket dutifully hauled the library through a selection of mountains, caves, cliff faces and urban wastelands. Although she prided herself in introducing the works of the Bronte sisters to places they had not previously been, in practice very few withdrawals were made from the library, because many of her clients did not have the necessary ID on them to be issued with a library card. However her small store of Kendal Mint Cake and whisky soon became rightly famous among thrill-seekers.
2. Mr. Dalton Kingsbury, Charlotte. Mr. Kingsbury was unfortunate in inheriting a particularly rowdy library. The words would squeeze out of the books at night and gallop around the library floor, often leaving surfaces splattered with exclamation marks. Instead of wearily cleaning up the mess each morning, however, Mr. Kingsbury took a more confrontational approach. Each night he chased the wild words with a small net, often stuffing them back into the wrong books and locking them in. In later years he became famous as a word-tamer and wrote a number of extremely tightly-controlled books. He was never quite trusted by words, however. He died at age 45 after choking on a rogue ‘incarnadine’ that had somehow made it into his clam chowder.
3.  Omar of Alexandria, Egypt. That we do knot know more about Omar of Alexandria is testament to his unfortunate end. Omar was one of the last librarians to desert the Library of Alexandria before its destruction, and managed to save a number of books that had been thought lost. These included Berossus’ Babylonaica, the complete works of Hypatia, and a humorous book about cats thought to have been written by Sappho under a rather weak pseudonym. Having become obsessed with the idea that libraries were unsafe, Omar took to keeping these books under his pillow. As a result, he was unable to sleep well. Eventually he fell asleep on an elephant with the books under his arm, and both he and they fell into the Nile and were drowned.  
4. Mrs. Vera Hawthorne, Rye Central Library. Mrs. Hawthorne is famous for having gone to extraordinary lengths in chasing down a particularly obscure inter-library loan. As it turned out, the requested book’s entry in the British Library catalogue was in error, the book having been stolen by pirates in 1823. Undeterred, Mrs. Hawthorne joined a group of international literary vigilantes, tracked down the descendants of the pirates, and ascertained that the book had been abandoned when the pirates’ ship was beached on an obscure subantarctic island. After a brief course on sailing at the local marina, Mrs. Hawthorne set off to collect the book in a small dinghy, surviving due to her remarkable facility in making friends with dolphins. The book had been used as unconventional nesting material by a large colony of penguins but Mrs. Hawthorne devotedly reassembled it, before stowing away on an Antarctic Research vessel to bring the book home. Sadly, the original submitter of the loan request had passed away by this time, and the British Library declined to take the book back due to its strong odour of penguin guano. Instead, Mrs. Hawthorne took it home with the intention of reading it and possibly writing an autobiography. Nothing has been heard of her since. Interestingly, the original loan request is no longer available, so the identity of the book itself remains obscure.  
5. Dr. Loic Laplace, Paris. Dr. Laplace is the head librarian of the International Centre for Perilous Books in Paris, a combined library and safe house for books that have, through no fault of their own, been used as accesories to murder. The collection includes a number of curiousities that require particularly careful handling: books that have been treated witch contact poisons; those that are particularly large, heavy or spiky; books that have been hollowed-out to make space for weapons; and books that are highly radioactive. As a result, Dr. Laplace has been hospitalised sixteen times and is missing two fingers and half the hair on his head. It is a testament to his great love of difficult books that he perseveres. The Centre is entirely funded by donations; ten thousand euros is believed to be enough to obtain a no-questions-asked library card and certain specialised instructions from the staff.