Letter to the Archivist

by Arendse Lund

About the Author: Arendse Lund is an international award-winning writer whose work has appeared in The Fabulist, The Asahi Shimbun, Audeamus, Alchemy: Journal of Translation. Her short story The Toll Bridge won the 2021 Staunch Prize for thrillers, and her world building has been called “vividly imagined and genuinely creepy.” In 2019, she won a top prize for science journalism from the Association of British Science Writers. She is currently a Writer-in-Residence at the Seattle Public Library.

Excerpt

Write to me of the library, Archivist, that maze of twists and turns, the memories and inventions of our time, the dreams of our future. Tell me of the new acquisitions, those works with embossed covers and firmly inked and set words, descriptions of places and events known, unknown, and retold.

Describe for me the older works, stored, conserved, and studied—the manuscripts of vellum and careful scribal invention—the octavos filled with ink, highly abbreviated from rim to gutter, and the folios with wide margins and careful script, with rubrications demarcating and illuminations shimmering.

Relate to me the books of hours, the gospels, the martyrologies. The antiphons sing to me over this great distance, their notes inscribed in red and black. How heartsick I am to not greet them in person. To stroke their bindings and whisper to them as old friends as they settle in my heart.

Remind me, Archivist! The feel of the weight of the books in my hands, adjusting the book cradles to support the spines, curling the weighted snakes across corners to keep the pages gently open. Oh, the feel of the parchment under thumb and forefinger, turning leaves, seeking treasures …

Do the visiting scholars love these works like I do? Do you tell them of me and that the manuscripts were mine first? Maybe some day I will write up my findings; but even if I never do, they belong to me. Their knowledge, their secrets—I know them all.

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