Listing to Port

I wouldn't sail this ship if I were you

Five things to look out for in libraries at night

1. On nights when the moon shines through the windows, the books in the horticultural section may rise up on their ribbonlike stems and open up to the moonlight. The energy gained from moonlight powers the growth of new pages, often detailing highly unusual plants. Therefore it is worth your while as a librarian to site the horticultural books near a window with a good view of the sky. The opening of the books is often accompanied by a great swarm of b’s out from the other books in the library to sip at the illustrated nectar. By the morning they will be back in place, just a little fatter and shinier.
2. Gymnastics books like to slip from the shelves in the dark and practice bending and stretching. Often they can be observed (if one has set up a book hide in the library, that is) performing slow flips across the floor and back again. This is why books on gymnastics often have cracked spines.
3. Much of the nature section will be particularly quiet, for fear of waking up the animal books. Animal books hibernate for most of their lives, but can be induced to wake by a dark but noisy environment - for example if the library is situated next to a nightclub or main road. The other books dislike this and will sometimes sing book lullabies in the hope of stopping it happening. The consequence of a mass book waking is usually a vast and savage bookfight between works on predators and works on prey. Sometimes a book on both may even attempt to devour its own interior pages in a frenzy of curiosity. Needless to say this also wakes up the b’s, which will grumpily swarm around and may sting any stray librarians who have the misfortune to still be present.
4. Books for babies often wake up in the night and will sometimes fling themselves off the shelves or spit up pages onto the floor. Those without fluff or mirrored pages can be found poking those with these things. Books for slightly older children, usually shelved in an adjacent section, can sometimes be found jumping back and forth in an effort to rock the baby section back to sleep.
5. Needless to say, many of these happenings involve a fair bit of mess. Look out for those unusually conscientious books who clean up the mess, mend pages and poke the plant books back into their dust covers in the morning. It is difficult to say which books will take on the role of book shepherd - it varies by library - but often large print fiction, young adult novels and works of philosophy can be found helping out.

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