Converting his father's gold to cash was easier than getting a library
card without an address. There was an old assayer whom the golems had
described to him before his first trip to town. The man was cheap but he
knew enough about the strangeness on the mountain not to cheat him too
badly. The stern librarian who glared at him while he walked the
shelves, sometimes looking at the titles, sometimes the authors, and
sometimes the Dewey Decimal numbers had no such fear.
The Deweys were fascinating. They traced the fashions in human knowledge
and wisdom. It was easy enough to understand why the arbiters of the
system subdivided Motorized Land Vehicles (629.2) into several
categories, but here in the 629.22s, where the books on automobiles
were, you could see the planners' deficiencies. Automobiles divided into
dozens of major subcategories (taxis and limousines, buses, light
trucks, cans, lorries, tractor trailers, campers, motorcycles, racing
cars, and so on), then ramified into a combinatorial explosion of
sub-sub-sub categories. There were Dewey numbers on some of the
automotive book spines that had twenty digits or more after the decimal,
an entire Dewey Decimal system hidden between 629.2 and 629.3.
To the librarian, this shelf-reading looked like your garden-variety
screwing around, but what really made her nervous were Alan's excursions
through the card catalogue, which required constant tending to replace
the cards that errant patrons made unauthorized reorderings of.
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