The Library
The shelf ends somewhere.
We have not checked.
The reading room is open.
Please return the ladder.
On the recovery
The volume was never missing. The catademy library shelves by length, and THE PRINCIPLES OF LENGTH, VOL. I stood where it had always stood, at the end of a shelf nobody had reached the end of.
It was printed in 1903. The author is given as E. Professorsson, of whom the faculty knows one further fact: he is the great-grandfather of the present one.
Volume II was to contain the proof of finitude, and the cause. It was never completed. The manuscript, according to the only surviving note, kept getting longer.
So the volume does what no later account has managed either. It measures the lengthening exactly, in a unit of its own devising, and it cannot say why it happens. A chapter near the end considers six causes and sets aside all six. The last of them is set aside on the grounds that the author does not understand it.
*54.43. ⊢. THE CAT IS LONG The above proposition is occasionally useful.
The principles of length
A volume by E. Professorsson, published in 1903. It measures the lengthening exactly and cannot say why it happens.
Eight plates are available below. The remaining shelf plate is still uncatalogued.
Choose a plate to read it closely, then take a copy if you like.
Go to the catalogueCatademy fiction. None of this is real scholarship.
The photographed plates
Plate IX
The Shelf
Uncatalogued. Not yet in the reading room.The cylinder
Recovered from the same gap in the shelf: one wax cylinder, in a tin labelled by hand.
The recitation settles nothing. The librarian has continued playing it.
The reading room is open. The stacks are not.
Return to the school