This article is taken from PN Review 287, Volume 52 Number 3, January - February 2026.
from The Accidental Curator
#4 OUT
‘I’m sorry, you don’t qualify for admission to the Round Reading Room.’
The clerk has been friendly, all eye contact and smiles, but he is absolutely not going to let me in. I am sitting in front of his desk in the Reader Admissions Office, tantalisingly close to the famed dome.
Just before this interview I walked the few metres past the office entrance to look through the windows of the stout wooden doors guarding the Reading Room itself. There, like a glimpse of a celestial domain, were its soft blue colours and, because the doors don’t shut snugly with each other, a visual sliver of the high shelves.
One of the doors says in large lettering IN, the other says OUT. They’re designed to avoid accidents among absent-minded readers caught between intellectual concentration and the urgencies of the outer world. To me they resonate like judgements.
In the Reader Admissions Office I think I have a bona fide case. IN, if it be God’s pleasure.
I’ve explained about the Highlands writer I am studying, Neil M. Gunn. Key novels are out of print. The magazines his articles appeared in are unavailable, too. The Library has them all, or as near as dammit.
It has the typescript of the only three-act play he wrote, too. For centuries, right up to 1968, the producers of any new play had to send its script to the state censor The Lord Chamberlain before it could be performed. The texts were kept ...
‘I’m sorry, you don’t qualify for admission to the Round Reading Room.’
The clerk has been friendly, all eye contact and smiles, but he is absolutely not going to let me in. I am sitting in front of his desk in the Reader Admissions Office, tantalisingly close to the famed dome.
Just before this interview I walked the few metres past the office entrance to look through the windows of the stout wooden doors guarding the Reading Room itself. There, like a glimpse of a celestial domain, were its soft blue colours and, because the doors don’t shut snugly with each other, a visual sliver of the high shelves.
One of the doors says in large lettering IN, the other says OUT. They’re designed to avoid accidents among absent-minded readers caught between intellectual concentration and the urgencies of the outer world. To me they resonate like judgements.
In the Reader Admissions Office I think I have a bona fide case. IN, if it be God’s pleasure.
I’ve explained about the Highlands writer I am studying, Neil M. Gunn. Key novels are out of print. The magazines his articles appeared in are unavailable, too. The Library has them all, or as near as dammit.
It has the typescript of the only three-act play he wrote, too. For centuries, right up to 1968, the producers of any new play had to send its script to the state censor The Lord Chamberlain before it could be performed. The texts were kept ...
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