No good ever comes of it—don’t. The Munsell Book of Wisdom I pushed open the doors and walked inside. The library was large and open-plan, with a circular void in the upper floor from where light descended vertically. Dotted around were tables and chairs, and a few mirrors on stands, useful for directing light to study. Or at least, it would have been, had there been any books to look at. As Tommo had already mentioned, the shelves were pretty much empty, and what books remained were so read-worn front and back that barely the middle chapters remained. Reading a book these days was a bit like learning what someone was doing, but never knowing how they got to be there or how it eventually turned out. It hadn’t always been like this. Successive Leapbacks had stripped the shelves of science, history, biography, geography, cookery, self-help, poetry, art—and now fiction, genre by genre. There were still books other than the strongly encouraged Very Racy Novels, but they were so few and far between that they were always either being borrowed, in transit or worn out.
