For example, the death of Charles Dickens in June 1870 precipitated the single greatest mass arrival of characters in the Caxton’s history. Mr. Torrans, the librarian at the time, at least had a little warning of the impending influx, for he had received a large quantity of pristine Dickens first editions in the mail a few days earlier, each carefully wrapped in brown paper and string, and without a return address, as was traditional. No librarian had ever quite managed to figure out how the books came to be sent; old George Scott, Mr. Torrans’s predecessor, had come to the conclusion that the books simply wrapped and posted themselves, although by that stage Scott was quite mad and spent most of his time engrossed in increasingly circular conversations with Tristram Shandy’s Uncle Toby, of which no good could possibly have come. For those unfamiliar with the institution, the Caxton came into being after its founder, William Caxton, woke up one morning in 1477 to find a number of characters from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales arguing in his garden.
