Thank you all. I was told to speak for five minutes, so I will take ten, which is the usual rate in a library.
In forty years I have stamped, by my own calculation, four hundred thousand books. People think a librarian's job is silence. It is not. It is attention. Silence is only the sound that attention makes.
I will confess something. I never read the books that people asked for. I read the one next to it. That is where the surprise lives.
Many years ago, a boy took out the same atlas every Saturday for six months. One day I asked him why. He told me he was planning to run away to Peru. I thought for a moment. I did not stop him. I gave him a better atlas, one with the mountains in it. He is now an engineer in Lima, and he sends me a postcard every year with a drawing of a bridge.
Some of you know that the council wishes to "modernise" this building. The shelves on the ground floor may be replaced with a café. I have nothing against coffee. I have been drinking it behind the desk since 1984. But I do have something against forgetting what a place is for. A library is the last room in town where you can sit for as long as you like and nobody asks you to buy anything.
I do not know what will happen to these shelves. I know only that someone, tomorrow, will look for the book next to the book. Please leave them something to find.
Fiction note: All people, places and events in this text are fictional.