...of libraries

I felt the excitement tinged with gloom and foreboding that I first experienced when I was ten and joined the town library (called formidably Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute) and could not get in without passing the wicked-looking stuffed moa standing at the foot of the stairs, and a sharp-tongued librarian who sat behind a grille dispensing tickets and fines and books and keeping her eye on the adjoining Reading Room where the old men sat, petrified by the SILENCE notices.
It seemed to me that books must be wonderful treasures if they were to be reached only at the end of such a forbidding journey, and that books were only for brave people who were not afraid of giant stuffed birds with glass eyes.
And the fact that there were notices demanding Silence when one would never have dreamed of speaking made it seem, that the room contained secret presences which had to be controlled and which related in a strange way the death and painstaking reconstruction of the moa and the mice-like letters that were wired with meaning and resurrected to make words, and placed in imposing attitudes on the pages of the books. So it was for her own protection that the librarian hid behind a grille and pinned notices on the wall; she had to make every effort to subdue more than the timid subscribers tiptoeing between the shelves.

[Faces in the Water, Frame, J.]