The City of Dreaming Books

Part One

Dancelot’s Bequest

Optimus Yarnspinner

Where shadows dim with shadows mate

in caverns deep and dark,

where old books dream of bygone days

when they were wood and bark,

where diamonds from coal are born

and no birds ever sing,

that region is the dread domain

ruled by the Shadow King.

A Word of Warning

This is where my story begins. It tells how I came into possession of The Bloody Book and acquired the Orm. It’s not a story for people with thin skins and weak nerves, whom I would advise to replace this book on the pile at once and slink off to the children’s section. Shoo! Begone, you cry-babies and quaffers of camomile tea, you wimps and softies! This book tells of a place where reading is still a genuine adventure, and by adventure I mean the old-fashioned definition of the word that appears in the Zamonian Dictionary: ‘A daring enterprise undertaken in a spirit of curiosity or temerity, it is potentially life-threatening, harbours unforeseeable dangers and sometimes proves fatal.’

Yes, I speak of a place where reading can drive people insane. Where books may injure and poison them - indeed, even kill them. Only those who are thoroughly prepared to take such risks in order to read this book - only those willing to hazard their lives in so doing - should accompany me to the next paragraph. The remainder I congratulate on their wise but yellow-bellied decision to stay behind. Farewell, you cowards! I wish you a long and boring life, and, on that note, bid you goodbye!

So . . . Having probably reduced my readers to a tiny band of reckless souls at the very outset, I should like to bid the rest of you a hearty welcome. Greetings, my intrepid friends, you’re cut from the cloth of which true adventurers are made! Let us waste no more time and set out at once on our journey. For it is a journey on which we’re embarking, a journey to Bookholm, the City of Dreaming Books. Tie your shoelaces good and tight, because our route will take us first across a vast expanse of rugged, stony terrain, then across a monotonous stretch of prairie where the grass is dense, waist-high and razor-sharp, and finally - along gloomy, labyrinthine, perilous passages - deep into the bowels of the earth. I cannot predict how many of us will return. I can only urge you never to lose heart whatever befalls us.

And don’t say I didn’t warn you!

To Bookholm

In western Zamonia, when you’ve traversed the Dullsgard Plateau in an easterly direction and finally left its rippling expanses of grassland behind you, the skyline suddenly recedes in a dramatic way. You can look far, far out across the boundless plain to where, in the distance, it merges with the Demerara Desert. If the weather is fine and the atmosphere clear, you will be able to discern a speck amid the sparse vegetation of this arid wasteland. As you advance, so it will grow larger, take on jagged outlines, sprout gabled roofs and eventually reveal itself to be the legendary city that bears the name of Bookholm.

You can smell the place from a long way off. It reeks of old books. It’s as if you’ve opened the door of a gigantic second-hand bookshop - as if you’ve stirred up a cloud of unadulterated book dust and blown the detritus from millions of mouldering volumes straight into your face. There are folk who dislike that smell and turn on their heel as soon as it assails their nostrils. It isn’t an agreeable odour, granted. Hopelessly antiquated, it is eloquent of decay and dissolution, mildew and mortality. But it also has other associations: a hint of acidity reminiscent of lemon trees in flower; the stimulating scent of old leather; the acrid, intelligent tang of printer’s ink; and, overlying all else, a reassuring aroma of wood.

I’m not talking about living wood or resinous forests and fresh pine needles; I mean felled, stripped, pulped, bleached, rolled and guillotined wood - in short, paper. Ah yes, my intellectually inquisitive friends, you too can smell it now, the odour of forgotten knowledge and age-old traditions of craftsmanship. Very well, let us quicken our pace! The odour grows stronger and more alluring, and the sight of those gabled houses more distinct with every step towards Bookholm we take. Hundreds, nay, thousands of slender chimneys project from the city’s roofs, darkening the sky with a pall of greasy smoke and compounding the odour of books with other scents: the aroma of freshly brewed coffee and fresh-baked bread, of charcoal-broiled meat studded with herbs. Again we redouble our rate of advance, and our burning desire to open a book becomes allied with the hankering for a cup of hot chocolate flavoured with cinnamon and a slice of pound cake warm from the oven. Faster! Faster!

We reach the city limits at last, weary, hungry, thirsty, curious - and a trifle disappointed. There are no impressive city walls, no well-guarded gates in the shape, perhaps, of a huge book that creaks open at our knock - no, just a few narrow streets by way of which Zamonian life forms of the most diverse kinds enter or leave the city. Most of them do so with stacks of books under their arms - indeed, many tow whole handcarts laden with reading matter behind them. Were it not for all those books, the cityscape would resemble any other.

So here we are, my dauntless companions - here on the magical outskirts of Bookholm. This is where the city has its highly unspectacular beginnings. Soon we shall cross its invisible threshold, enter its streets and explore its mysteries.

Soon.

But first I should like to pause for a moment and tell you why I came here at all. There’s a reason for every journey, and mine was prompted by boredom and the recklessness of youth, by a wish to break the bounds of my normal existence and familiarise myself with life and the world at large. I also wanted to keep a promise made to someone on his deathbed. Last but not least, I was on the track of a fascinating secret. But first things first, my friends!

Lindworm Castle

When a youthful inhabitant of Lindworm Castle¹ becomes old enough to read, his parents assign him a so-called authorial godfather. The latter, who is usually some relation or close family friend, assumes responsibility for the young dinosaur’s literary education from that time on. The authorial godfather teaches his charge to read and write, introduces him to Zamonian literature and tutors him in the craft of authorship. He makes him recite poems, enriches his vocabulary and undertakes all the steps required to ensure his godchild’s artistic development.

My own authorial godfather was Dancelot Wordwright. A maternal uncle who might have been hewn from the primeval rock on which Lindworm Castle stands, he was over eight hundred years old when he became my sponsor. Uncle Dancelot was a workmanlike writer devoid of any exalted ambitions. He wrote to order, mainly eulogies for festive occasions, and was considered to be a talented composer of after-dinner speeches and funeral orations. More of a reader than an author and more of a connoisseur of literature than an originator thereof, he sat on countless juries, organised literary competitions, and was a freelance copy-editor and ghost-writer. He himself had written only one book, The Joys of Gardening, in which he expatiated in impressive language on the cultivation of cauliflowers and the philosophical implications of the compost heap. Almost as fond of his garden as he was of literature, Dancelot never tired of drawing comparisons between the taming of nature and the art of poetry. To him, a home-grown strawberry plant was the equal of an ode of his own composition, a row of asparagus comparable to a rhyming pattern and a compost heap to a philosophical essay. You must permit me, my long-suffering readers, to quote a brief passage from his book, which has long been out of print. Dancelot’s description of a common or garden blue cauliflower conveys a far more vivid impression of my authorial godfather than I could transmit in a thousand words:

The cultivation of the blue cauliflower is a rather remarkable process. What pays the price in this case is not the foliation, for a change, but the inflorescence. The gardener encourages the umbel’s temporary obesity. Crowded together into a compact head, its countless little buds swell, together with their stalks, into an amorphous mass of bluish vegetable fat. Thus, the cauliflower is a flower that has come to grief on its own obesity before flowering; or, to be more precise, a multiplicity of unsuccessful flowers, a degenerate panicled umbel. How in the world can such a bloated creature, with its plump and swollen ovaries, propagate itself? It, too, would return to nature after an excursion into the realm of the unnatural, but the gardener gives it no time to do so: he harvests the cauliflower at the zenith of its aberration, the highest and most palatable stage in its obesity, when the taste of this adipose plant approximates to that of a rissole. The seed collector, on the other hand, leaves the bulbous blue mass in its corner of the garden and permits it to revert to its better self. When he goes to look at it after three weeks, instead of three pounds of vegetable obesity, he finds a very loosely freely flowering bush with bees and flying beetles humming round it. The unnaturally swollen pale-blue stalks have converted their thickness into length and become fleshy stems tipped with a number of sparsely distributed yellow flowers. The few buds that have proved durable turn blue and swell up, then flower and produce seeds. Honest and true to nature, these gallant little survivors are the saviours of the cauliflower fraternity.

Yes, there you have Dancelot Wordwright as he lived and breathed: in tune with nature, in love with language, unfailingly accurate in his observations, optimistic, a trifle eccentric, and - where the subject of his literary labours, the cauliflower, was concerned - as tedious as could be.

All my memories of him are pleasant, discounting the three months that followed one of Lindworm Castle’s numerous sieges, during which a stone launched by a trebuchet struck him on the head and left him convinced that he was a cupboard full of dirty spectacles. Although I feared at the time that he would never re-emerge from his delirium, he did, in fact, recover from that severe blow on the head. Unfortunately, no such miraculous recovery occurred in the case of his final and fatal bout of influenza.

Dancelot’s Death

When Dancelot breathed his last at the conclusion of a long and fulfilled dinosaurian existence spanning eight hundred and eighty-eight years, I was a mere stripling of seventy-seven summers and had never once set foot outside Lindworm Castle. He died of a minor influenzal infection that proved too much for his weakened immune system (an occurrence which reinforced my fundamental doubts about the reliability of immune systems in general).

On that ill-starred day I sat beside his deathbed and noted down the dialogue that follows. My authorial godfather had requested me to record his last words in writing. Not because he had grown so conceited that he wished his moribund sighs to be preserved for posterity, but because he thought it would provide me with a unique opportunity to gather authentic material in this special field. He died, therefore, in the execution of his duty as an authorial godfather.

Dancelot: ‘I’m dying, my boy.’

I (inarticulately, fighting back my tears): ‘Huh . . .’

Dancelot: ‘I far from approve of death, either from fatalistic motives or with the philosophical resignation of old age, but I suppose I must come to terms with it. Each of us is granted only one cask and mine is tolerably full.’

(I’m glad in retrospect that he employed the cask metaphor because it indicates that he regarded his life as rich and fulfilled. A person who looks back on his life and likens it to a brimming cask, not an empty bucket, has accomplished a great deal.)

Dancelot: ‘Listen, my boy. I have little enough to leave you, at least from the pecuniary aspect. That you already know. I have never become one of those opulent Lindworm Festival authors with sacks full of royalties piled high in their cellars. I intend to bequeath you my garden, although I know you aren’t too keen on vegetables.’

(This was true. As a young Lindworm I had little use for the glorification of cauliflowers and hymns to rhubarb in Dancelot’s treatise on gardening, and I made no secret of it. Dancelot’s seed germinated only in later years, when I had established a garden of my own, grew blue cauliflowers and derived much inspiration from the taming of nature.)

Dancelot: ‘I’m rather clammy at present . . .’

(I couldn’t help laughing, despite the depressing situation, because ‘clammy’ is Zamonian slang for ‘broke’, and there was something unintentionally amusing about his use of that word in his present sweaty state. Had I myself employed this ill-judged resort to black humour in an essay, Dancelot would probably have red-pencilled it. I managed to smother my guffaw in a handkerchief and pass it off as tearful nose-blowing.)

Dancelot: . . . so I can’t leave you anything from the material point of view.’

(I made a dismissive gesture and sobbed, this time with genuine emotion. Even at death’s door, he was concerned about my future. It was touching.)

Dancelot: But I do possess something worth considerably more than all the treasures in Zamonia. At least to an author.’

(I stared at him with brimming eyes.)

Dancelot: ‘Yes, not counting the Orm, it might be described as the most precious thing any author can acquire in the course of his existence.’

(He was really making a meal of this. In his place I would have tried to get the requisite information off my chest with all due speed. I leant towards him.)

Dancelot: ‘I’m in possession of the most magnificent piece of writing in the whole of Zamonian literature.’

(Oh dear, I thought. Either he’s becoming delirious, or he wants to leave me his dusty library and is referring to his first edition of Sir Ginel, that hoary old novel by Doylan Cone, an author he found so admirable and I so unreadable.)

I: ‘What do you mean?’

Dancelot: ‘Some time ago a young Zamonian writer from outside Lindworm Castle sent me a manuscript accompanied by the usual bashful blah-blah-blah: this was only a modest attempt, a hesitant step into the unknown, et cetera, and would I care to tell him what I thought of it - and many thanks in advance!

‘Well, I’ve made it my duty to read all such unsolicited manuscripts, and I can justly claim that reading them has cost me a not inconsiderable proportion of my life and a certain amount of nervous energy.’

(He emitted an unhealthy-sounding cough.)

Dancelot: ‘It wasn’t a long story - only a few pages or so. I was seated at the breakfast table, having finished reading the newspaper and poured myself another cup of coffee, so I tackled it at once. My good deed for the day, I thought. Why not get shot of it right away, over breakfast? Many years of experience had inured me to the usual literary hiccups of a young writer wrestling with problems of style and grammar, pangs of unrequited love and cosmic despair, so I sighed and began to read.’

(Dancelot heaved a heart-rending sigh. I couldn’t tell whether it replicated his sigh on that occasion or heralded his imminent demise.)

Dancelot: ‘When I picked up my coffee cup some three hours later, it was still brim-full and its contents were stone-cold. But it hadn’t taken me three hours to read the story; I had devoured it in less than five minutes. I must have spent the rest of the time in a kind of trance, sitting there motionless with the manuscript in my hand. Only a missile from a trebuchet could have dealt me a blow of comparable impact.’

(I was briefly but unpleasantly reminded of the time when Dancelot had thought he was a cupboard full of dirty spectacles. But then, I must confess, an outrageous thought occurred to me. What went through my head the next moment, and I quote it verbatim, was: ‘I hope he doesn’t kick the bucket before he’s told me what was in the confounded manuscript!’

No, I didn’t think: ‘I hope he doesn’t die!’ or ‘Please don’t die, authorial godfather!’ or anything of that kind. My thought was couched in the words cited above, and it still shames me, even today, that they included the phrase ‘kick the bucket’. Having gripped my wrist like a vice, Dancelot sat up and fixed me with staring eyes.)

Dancelot: ‘The last words of a dying man on the point of imparting a sensational revelation - make a note of that literary device, it’s a guaranteed cliffhanger! No reader can resist it!’

(Although Dancelot was dying, nothing seemed more important to him at that juncture than to teach me a cheap trick favoured by trashy romantic novelists. This was godfatherly devotion to duty of the most consummate and touching kind. I sobbed, overcome with emotion, whereupon Dancelot relaxed his grip and sank back against the pillows.)

Dancelot: ‘The story wasn’t long, only ten handwritten pages, but I had never, never in my entire life, read anything even approaching its perfection.’

(Dancelot had been an obsessive reader all his life, perhaps the most industrious bookworm in Lindworm Castle, so I was duly impressed by that statement. He was fanning my curiosity into a blaze.)

I: ‘What was it about, Dancelot? Tell me!’

Dancelot: ‘Listen, my boy, I don’t have time enough left to tell you the story. It’s tucked into my first edition of Sir Ginel, which I intend to leave you with the rest of my library.’

(Just as I thought! My eyes filled with tears once more.)

Dancelot: ‘I know you aren’t particularly fond of the book, but I suspect that you’ll grow into Doylan Cone some day. It’s a question of age. When you get a chance, dip into it again.’

(I promised to do so, nodding valiantly.)

Dancelot: ‘What I want to tell you is this: the story was so perfectly, flawlessly written that it wrought a drastic change in my life. I decided to give up writing, or largely so, because I knew I could never produce anything approaching its perfection. Had I never read that story, I should have continued to cling to my vague conception of great literature, which lies roughly in the Doylan Cone price range. I should never have discovered what perfect creative writing really looks like. As it was, I now held a sample of it in my hands. I resigned, yes, but I resigned gladly. I retired, not from laziness or fear or some other reprehensible motive, but in deference to true artistic aristocracy. I resolved to devote the rest of my life to the workmanlike aspects of writing and confine myself to subjects that are communicable. You already know what I mean: the cauliflower.’

(A long silence ensued. I was just beginning to think he’d died when he went on.)

Dancelot: ‘And then I made the biggest mistake of my life: I wrote the young genius a letter in which I advised him to take his manuscript to Bookholm and look for a publisher there.’

(He heaved another big sigh.)

Dancelot: ‘That was the end of our correspondence. I never heard from him again. He probably took my advice but had an accident or fell into the hands of highwaymen or Corn Demons on the way to Bookholm. I should have hurried to his side - I should have taken him and his work under my wing - but what did I do? I sent him off to Bookholm, that lions’ den, that haunt of skinflints and vultures who make money out of literature! I ask you, a city teeming with publishers! I might just as well have sent him into a forest full of werewolves with a bell round his neck!’

(My godfather’s breath rattled in his throat as if he were gargling with blood.)

Dancelot: ‘I hope that I have compensated in your case for all I did wrong in his. I know you have what it takes to become Zamonia’s greatest writer and acquire the Orm. Reading this story will help you to attain that goal.’

(Dancelot still clung to the old belief in the Orm, a kind of mysterious force reputed to flow through many authors at moments of supreme inspiration. We young and enlightened writers used to laugh at this antiquated hocus-pocus, but respect for our authorial godfathers prompted us to refrain from making any cynical remarks about the Orm in their presence, though not when we were in the company of kindred spirits. I know hundreds of Orm jokes.)

I: ‘I’ll read it, Dancelot.’

Dancelot: ‘But don’t be alarmed! You’ll find it a terribly traumatic experience. It will dash all your hopes and tempt you to abandon a literary career. You may even consider doing away with yourself.’

(Was he raving? No piece of writing on earth could possibly have that effect on me.)

Dancelot: ‘But you must surmount that crisis. Go travelling! Roam the Zamonian countryside! Expand your horizons! Get to know the world! Sooner or later the trauma will transform itself into inspiration. You’ll sense a desire to pit yourself against that perfection and one day, if you don’t give up, you’ll match it. There’s something within you, my boy, that no one else in Earthworm Castle possesses.’

(Earthworm Castle?! Why had his eyelids started to flicker like that?)

Dancelot: ‘There’s one more thing you must bear in mind, my boy: it doesn’t matter how a story begins or ends.’

I: ‘What does matter, then?’

Dancelot: ‘What happens in between.’

(He had never given vent to such platitudes during his lifetime. Was he losing his reason?)

I: ‘I’ll make a note of that, Dancelot.’

Dancelot: ‘Why is it so cold in here?’

(The room was sweltering because we had lit a big open fire for him in spite of the summer heat. The look he gave me conveyed that the Grim Reaper was already celebrating his triumph.)

Dancelot: ‘So damnably cold . . . Could someone shut the cupboard door? And what’s that black dog doing in the corner? Why is it looking at me like that? Why is it wearing spectacles? Dirty spectacles?’

(I looked, but the only living creature in the corner of the room was a small green spider lurking in its web beneath the ceiling. Dancelot drew a slow, stertorous breath and closed his eyes for ever.)

The Manuscript

It was several days before I investigated Dancelot’s parting words, I was far too busy making funeral arrangements and settling his estate. Being his authorial godchild, I had to compose a funeral ode, an anthemic poem of not less than a hundred alexandrines. This I read aloud at his cremation in the presence of all the inhabitants of Lindworm Castle. After that it was my privilege to scatter his ashes from the summit of the castle rock. For a moment, Dancelot’s remains hovered in the air like a wisp of grey smoke; then they dispersed into a fine mist that slowly subsided and finally disappeared altogether.

I had inherited his cottage, together with his library and garden, so I decided to leave my parental home at last and move into it. This took several days, but I eventually set about incorporating my own books in Dancelot’s library. Sheets of manuscript came fluttering out of some of his volumes, having possibly been inserted between their pages to conceal them from prying eyes. They ranged from brief notes to rough outlines and whole poems. One of them read:

For ever shut and made of wood,

that’s what I am. My head’s no good

now that it by a stone was struck.

Old spectacles besmirched with muck

repose within me by the score.

I’m just a cupboard, nothing more.

Oh dear, I was quite unaware that Dancelot had been trying to write during his spell of mental derangement. Although I briefly considered removing this piece of doggerel from his literary legacy, I thought better of it - after all, an author owes a duty to the truth. Good or bad, Dancelot’s efforts belonged to the reading public. Laboriously, I continued to sort through his books until I came to Doylan Cone’s Sir Ginel and recalled my authorial godfather’s mysterious statement on his deathbed: a sensational manuscript was concealed between its pages. Afire with curiosity, I opened the book.

Sure enough, between the front cover and the title page was a folded sheaf of manuscript. Was this what my godfather had raved about so fervently? I removed the ten foxed, yellowish sheets and weighed them in my hand for a moment. Dancelot had not only whetted my curiosity but coupled his revelation with a warning. Reading the story might change my life just as it had changed his, he had predicted. Well, why not? I thirsted for change! I was still young, after all, having only just turned seventy-seven.

The sun was shining outside. Inside the house I felt oppressed by the lingering presence of my late godfather: the smell of his countless pipes, the crumpled balls of paper on his desk, a half-written after-dinner speech, a half-empty teacup and, on the wall, an ancient portrait of him as a youngster with eyes like saucers.

He was still omnipresent, and even the prospect of spending the night alone in the house unnerved me, so I resolved to find a quiet spot and read the manuscript in the open air. Sighing, I made myself a sandwich with some of Dancelot’s home-made strawberry jam and went outside.

I will never, I’m sure, forget that day till I die. The sun had long passed its zenith, but it was still warm and most of the castle’s inhabitants were out and about. The pavement cafés were crowded and sun-loving dinosaurs were lounging on the castle walls, some playing cards, others engrossed in books or reading their latest effusions aloud. The laughter and singing that filled the air were typical of a late summer’s day in Lindworm Castle.

It was far from easy to find a quiet spot, so I strolled on through the streets until I finally began to peruse the manuscript while walking.

My first thought was that every word was in the right place. Well, there was nothing so special about that - every piece of writing makes the same initial impression.

It’s only on closer inspection that one notices occasional solecisms: the misplacing of punctuation marks, the insidious spelling mistakes, the use of cock-eyed metaphors, the spurning of one word where two will do, and all the other blunders a writer can make. But that first page was different. Even without absorbing its contents, I gained the impression that it was a flawless work of art. It resembled the kind of painting or sculpture that tells you at a glance if it’s kitsch or a masterpiece. No handwritten page had ever had that effect on me even before I’d read it. This one looked as if it had been inscribed by a calligrapher. The characters, each of them a work of art in its own right, were choreographed across the page like an enchanting ballet. It was quite some time before I could tear myself away from this captivating general impression and at last begin to read.

‘Here, every word is really in the right place,’ I thought after reading the first page. ‘No, not just every word but every punctuation mark, every comma.’ Even the spaces between the words seemed to be of inalienable importance. And the text itself? I can divulge this much: it conveyed the thoughts of an author in a state of horror vacui, or fear of a blank page - an author paralysed by writer’s block and desperately wondering what sentence would best begin his story.

Not a particularly original idea, I grant you. Many essays have been devoted to this classic, almost stereotypical bane of the author’s profession. I must know dozens, a few of them written by myself. They usually testify to the writer’s incompetence, not his greatness: he can’t think of anything, so he writes about his inability to think of anything. He’s like a trumpeter who has forgotten his music and toots away meaninglessly, merely because it’s his job.

But this writer’s treatment of a hackneyed idea was so brilliant, so ingenious, so profound and, at the same time, so amusing that I found myself in a state of feverish exuberance after only a few paragraphs. I felt as if I were dancing to heavenly music with a lovely girl dinosaur in my arms, slightly tipsy after imbibing a glass or two of wine. My brain seemed to be rotating on its own axis. Ideas rained down on me like spark-trailing meteors that landed with a hiss on my cerebral cortex. Giggling, they permeated my brain and made me laugh, made me loudly endorse or contradict them. Never had any piece of writing evoked such a lively reaction from me.

I must have made a thoroughly demented impression as I strutted up and down the street declaiming at the top of my voice, brandishing the letter, laughing hysterically now and then, or stamping my feet with enthusiasm. However, eccentric behaviour in public is the done thing in Lindworm Castle, so no one remonstrated with me. People may have thought that I was rehearsing for some play in which the protagonist had been smitten with insanity.

I read on. The author’s way of writing was so absolutely right, so perfect, that tears sprang to my eyes - something that usually happens only when I’m listening to stirring music. There was an unearthly finality about its grandeur. Sobbing unrestrainedly, I continued to read through a veil of tears until a new idea of the writer’s tickled me so much that my tears abruptly ceased and I roared with laughter. I guffawed like a drunken idiot and pounded my thigh with my fist. By the Orm, how funny it was! I gasped for breath, quietened briefly with one paw clamped to my mouth - and, despite myself, burst out laughing again. As if under some strange compulsion, I repeated the words aloud several times, interrupted by recurrent paroxysms of hysterical laugher. Ha, ha, ha! That was the funniest sentence I’d ever read! An absolute scream, a joke to end all jokes! My eyes now filled with tears of mirth. The punchline was quite spontaneous - I could never have thought of anything as witty, not in my wildest dreams. By all the Zamonian Muses, how stunningly good it was! It was a while before the last great tidal wave of laughter subsided and I could read on, still gasping and wheezing with mirth, still shaken by occasional titters. I had wept buckets and the tears continued to stream down my face. Two distant relations came towards me. They raised their hats with a lugubrious air, believing me overcome with grief for my late godfather. Just then I involuntarily emitted another bellow of mirth, and they walked off quickly pursued by my peals of hysterical laughter. At last I quietened sufficiently to be able to continue reading.

The next page resembled a string of pearls, a series of associations so fresh, so relentlessly original and profound that I felt ashamed of the banality of every sentence I myself had written until then. They transfixed and illumined my brain like shafts of sunlight. I uttered a jubilant cry and clapped my paws several times, but I would sooner have underlined each sentence twice in red and written ‘Yes! Yes! Precisely!’ in the margin. I still remember kissing every word of every sentence that particularly pleased me.

Passers-by shook their heads as they saw me prancing exultantly through the streets with the manuscript in my hand. Those simple characters inscribed on paper had induced a state of sheer ecstasy. Their writer, whoever he was, had transported our profession to a realm that had hitherto been terra incognita from my point of view. I breathed heavily, overcome with humility.

Then came a paragraph that struck an entirely new note - a note as high and clear as that of a glass bell. The words suddenly transmuted themselves into diamonds, the sentences into diadems. These were ideas produced by concentrated intellectual high pressure, words ground and polished into gems of crystalline perfection reminiscent of the precise, unique structure of snowflakes. The cold emanating from them made me shiver, but it wasn’t the mundane frigidity of ice: it was the grand, exalted, eternal chill of outer space. This was creative thought and writing in its purest form. I had never read anything even half as immaculate.

I will quote one sentence from this text, namely, the one with which it ended. It was also the sentence which finally dissolved the writer’s block that had inhibited the author from starting work. I have since used it whenever I myself have been gripped by fear of the blank sheet in front of me. It is infallible, and its effect is always the same: the knot unravels and a stream of words gushes out on to the virgin paper. It acts like a magic spell and I sometimes fancy it really is one. But, even if it isn’t the work of a sorcerer, it is certainly the most brilliant sentence any writer has ever devised. It runs: ‘This is where my story begins.’

I lowered the manuscript, my knees went weak, and I sank exhausted to the ground - no, let’s be honest, dear readers: I lay down at full length. My ecstasy subsided, my rapture gave way to desolation. Icy rivulets of fear trickled through my veins, filling me with apprehension. Yes, Dancelot had predicted that this manuscript would traumatise me. I wanted to die. How could I ever have presumed to be a writer? What did my amateurish attempts to scribble ideas on paper have in common with the literary sleight of hand I had just witnessed? How could I ever soar to such heights without this writer’s wings of purest inspiration? I began to weep again - bitter, despairing tears this time.

Compelled to step over my supine form, people anxiously enquired what the matter was. I paid them no heed. As if paralysed, I lay there for hours until darkness fell and the stars began to twinkle overhead. Somewhere up there my authorial godfather was smiling down at me.

‘Dancelot!’ I shouted up at the vault of heaven. ‘Where are you? Come and bear me off to your kingdom of the dead!’

‘Pipe down and go home, you drunken sot!’ called an angry voice from a window.

Two nightwatchmen, who probably mistook me for a young and inebriated poet in the throes of creative endeavour (a not entirely false assumption), linked arms with me and conducted me home with many an encouraging cliché (‘You’ll feel better in the morning!’, ‘Time is a great healer!’, et cetera). Once there I flopped down on the bed as if felled by a trebuchet. Not until the small hours did I notice that I was still clutching the jam sandwich, now squashed flat, in my fist.

The next morning I decided to leave Lindworm Castle. Having spent the whole night running through various ways of overcoming the crisis - hurling myself from the battlements, taking refuge in drink, abandoning my literary career and becoming a hermit, cultivating cauliflowers in Dancelot’s garden - I resolved to follow my authorial godfather’s advice and set out on a longish journey. I wrote my parents a consoling farewell letter in sonnet form and made up a bundle containing my savings, two jars of Dancelot’s jam, a loaf of bread and a bottle of water.

Leaving the castle at dawn, I slunk through the deserted streets like a thief and did not breathe easier until I reached open countryside. I walked for many days, seldom resting because I had but one objective: to get to Bookholm and pick up the trail of the mysterious author whose artistry had filled me with such exaltation. In my youthful optimism I imagined him taking Dancelot’s place and becoming my tutor. He would, I thought, bear me upwards to the sphere in which writing such as his originated. I had no idea what he looked like - I didn’t know his name or even if he was still alive - but I was sure I would find him. Ah, the boundless confidence of youth!

That is how I came to Bookholm. So here I now am with you, my undaunted readers. And it is here, on the outskirts of the City of Dreaming Books, that my story really begins.

The City of Dreaming Books

Once I had grown accustomed to the overpowering smell of mildewed paper that arose from the bowels of Bookholm and survived some allergic sneezing fits occasioned by the ubiquitous clouds of book dust, and once my eyes had stopped watering in the acrid smoke from a thousand chimneys, I could at last begin to take stock of the city’s countless marvels.

Bookholm had more than five thousand officially registered antiquarian bookshops and roughly a thousand semi-legal establishments that sold, in addition to books, alcoholic beverages, tobacco, and intoxicating herbs and essences whose ingestion was reputed to enhance your pleasure and powers of concentration when reading. There was also an almost incalculable number of itinerant vendors with printed matter of every conceivable kind for sale in shoulder bags or on handcarts, in wheelbarrows and mobile bookcases. Bookholm boasted over six hundred publishing houses, fifty-five printers, a dozen paper mills and a steadily growing number of factories producing lead type and printer’s ink. There were shops offering thousands of different bookmarks and ex-libris, stonemasons specialising in bookends, cabinetmakers’ workshops and furniture stores filled with lecterns and bookcases, opticians who manufactured spectacles and magnifying glasses, and coffee shops on every street corner. Open for business twenty-four hours a day, most of the latter had inglenook fireplaces and were venues for authors’ readings.

I saw countless fire stations in Bookholm, all extremely spick and span, with gigantic alarm bells above the entrances and horse-drawn engines towing copper water tanks. Disastrous fires had destroyed a substantial proportion of the city and its books on five separate occasions, for Bookholm was accounted the biggest fire hazard in Zamonia. Because of the strong winds that were constantly blowing through its streets, the city was cool, cold or icy depending on the time of year, but never warm, which was why its inhabitants preferred to remain indoors, heat their houses well and - of course - read a great deal. Their ever-burning stoves and the sparks that flew in the immediate vicinity of old and highly combustible books created a truly dangerous state of affairs in which a new conflagration might break out at any minute.

I had to resist the impulse to dash into the nearest bookshop and root around in its stock, for I would not have emerged before nightfall and first I had to find somewhere to stay. So I strolled past the windows with shining eyes, endeavouring to make a note of the shops whose wares seemed especially promising.

There they were, the ‘Dreaming Books’. That was what the inhabitants of this city called antiquarian books because, from the dealers’ point of view, they were neither truly alive nor truly dead but located in an intermediate limbo akin to sleep. With their existence proper behind them and the prospect of decay ahead, millions upon millions of them slumbered in the bookcases, cellars and catacombs of Bookholm. Only when one of them was picked up and opened by an eager hand, only when it was purchased and borne off, could it awaken to new life. And that was what all these books dreamed of.

I spotted a first edition of Tiger in My Sock by Caliban Sycorax! The Shaven Tongue by Drastica Sinops - with Elihu Wipple’s celebrated illustrations! Hard Beds and Soiled Sheets, Yodler van Hinnen’s legendary, humorous travel guide - in mint condition! A Village Named Snowflake by Ivan Palisade-Honko, the much admired autobiography of an arch-criminal written in the dungeons of Ironville and signed in blood by the author himself! Life Is More Terrible than Death, the despairing maxims and aphorisms of Parsifal Gunk, bound in batskin! The Ant Drum by Semolina Edam - the legendary mirror-writing edition! The Glass Guest by Zodiak Glockenspiel! Hampo Harrabin’s experimental novel The Dog that Only Barked Backwards! All these were books I’d longed to read ever since Dancelot had sung their praises to me. I flattened my snout against each window in turn, groping my way along like a drunk and progressing at a snail’s pace until I finally pulled myself together. I forbade myself to take note of any more titles and resolved to gain a general impression of Bookholm. I had failed to see the wood for the trees, or rather, the city for the books. After my cosy, dreamy existence in Lindworm Castle, which was enlivened at most by an occasional siege, the streets of Bookholm bombarded me with a hailstorm of impressions. Images, colours, scenes, sounds and smells - all were novel and exciting. Zamonians of every species passed me and each was a stranger. The castle had had nothing to offer but the same old procession of familiar faces, friends, relations, neighbours, acquaintances. Here, everything was alien and unfamiliar.

I did, in fact, run into one or two visitors from Lindworm Castle. When that happened we paused for a moment, said a polite hello, exchanged a few empty phrases, wished each other a pleasant stay and bade each other goodbye. We all cultivate this stand-offish manner when travelling, if only because no one goes abroad in order to meet others of his own kind.

On you go, I told myself, explore the unknown! Haggard poets were standing everywhere, loudly declaiming their own works in the hope that they would capture the attention of some passing publisher or wealthy patron. I noticed some singularly well-nourished individuals prowling round these street poets: corpulent Hogglings who listened attentively and made occasional notes. Far from being generous patrons of the arts, they were literary agents who bullied budding authors into signing cut-throat contracts and then subjected them to merciless pressure, using them as ghost-writers until they had milked them of their last original idea. Dancelot had told me about their kind.

Members of the Bookholmian constabulary were patrolling the streets on the lookout for illegal dealers operating without