A nomenclature consultant is paid to name things, mainly products, but in this satire the unnamed hero is hired to pick a new name for the town of Winthrop. Winthrop has a hotel, a bar, and of course a library. In fact one of the town's former librarians wrote a history of the town. This is provided to the consultant who supposes that "writing your town's local history was the librarian version of climbing Everest". Maybe so, as long as it doesn't get too badly edited for not being "ass-kissy" enough.
While the consultant does meet one of the librarians (Beverly) and has some between-the-stacks type fantasies about her, he doesn't really get to use the library as it is being moved from one building to another during his visit. Descriptions of the nearly empty space have a definite dystopian air
The place was a husk. The books were gone. Where he would usually be intimidated by an army of daunting spines, there were only dust-ball rinds and Dewey decimal grave markers. As if by consensus, all the educational posters and maps had cast out their top right-hand corner tacks so that their undersides bowed over like blades of grass. Nothing would be referenced this afternoon, save indomitable market forces.
Even the globe was gone. Over there on a table in the corner he saw the stand, the bronze pincers that once held the world in place, but the world was gone.
One would be forgiven for thinking that this was a description of a contemporary library once Moms for Liberty had their way with it.
Beverly "a young white chick with dyed black hair [and] twenty or forty bracelets on her wrists...made an unlikely librarian, stereotype-wise". Nevertheless the consultant decides that she must be wearing "one bracelet for every shush".
A quick fun read that I picked up at my local library.
