The Book Thief
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
from the introduction:
It may have seemed strange in the late evenings of the spring of 1994
to see a small man in his early thirties carrying a duffel bag almost as
big as he was through the front doors of Columbia University’s Butler
Library. By 10:30pm the various component libraries that made their
home in the large building had been closed for five hours and the
circulation staff – the only operation still open – was getting ready to
shut down their concern. This included closing the stacks. It was true
that the reading rooms would be staying open the whole night, but
usually the sorts of people who would be studying that late had started
well before the time when Daniel Spiegelman and his large bag
wandered in.
But living in Manhattan tends to put a damper on one’s
interpretation of strange, so the unusual man easily escaped notice.
Even his age wouldn’t have turned any heads: He could convincingly
have passed for one of the many graduate students populating the
library late into the night. In truth, so intent were most students on
their studies that Spiegelman probably could have walked into the
main portico on horseback, gone up the stairs that went either left or
right to the third floor, down the hall, and into the main reading room
and only gotten a few stares, meeting his gaze to tell him to keep the
racket down.
So it happened that no one noticed when he walked past the
circulation desk and disappeared into the stacks, quickly jetting left
and then up the narrow stairs a few flights. Lots of people came in late
to gather last minute books. And though the stacks would be closing
in a short while, for a person who knew what he was doing, a book
could be grabbed off its shelf, checked out and opened on a table in
the reading room in less than ten minutes. Hurried and erratic
behavior might even be considered the norm late at night in Butler. In
fact, the only thing missing from Spiegelman’s demeanor to betray the
fact that he was not a student was the look of slight panic. By this
time even so much as a raised pulse was in his distant past...