Word: gridley
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...hours later, Gridley slipped away, exhausted. He sat on a window sill debating with himself the best way to enter the Houghton stacks. There was the easy way, the tunnel from Widener, or he might go in by the front door and use the staff entrance in the Houghton first basement, that unobtrusive little door that leads to so much. "The tunnel's safer," he decided and searched for another key. Soon he had traversed an empty tunnel and let himself into Houghton's impregnable, immaculate catacombs. All was silence except for the air-conditioning system maintaining a constant temperature...
...Room and the Richardson collection, he drew away the crimson sash and opened the glass door of the Emily Dickinson Room furnished with Miss Dickinson's own furniture and piano, her library, her family portraits, and a sampler she sewed herself. In an august bureau against the far wall, Gridley located the autograph manuscripts of her poems, left just where they had been found at her death. Now, of course, the pages were enclosed in leather folders, but each folder also contained the original strings that Emily Dickinson used to tie up the poems...
...Gridley looked at his watch. 4:30. There was just time to look at the new exhibit downstairs. He descended a magisterial, winding staircase and turned right into a large display salon whose bookshelves held nothing but incunabula, volumes from the cradle of printing between Gutenberg and 1500. The Houghton staff had just prepared an "Exhibit of Catalogues of Imaginary Books." In one case Gridley observed the "greatest of literary hoaxes," a brochure for the sale of the library of the Comte de Fortsas, 1840. Across the room was a "bibliography of the works of Sylvester Marmaduke (celebrated Aleutian Islands...
...Gridley looked up and realized that his time was almost up. He walked across the hall and asked the attendant to buzz him into the reading room. The old man pushed a button, electric locks disengaged, and Gridley walked on through, past the austere scholars and the academic secretaries clicking away at their silent typewriters. He waited for another buzz and then took the bridge to Widener, re-entering the stacks at Level 1, where he took the elevator up beyond Level 6, beyond the Church History section and Migne's Patrologia Latina with its 200-odd volumes, finally exiting...
...last he regained the Main Reading Room and his favorite seat. But, to Gridley's utter amazement, his books were gone. In their place was a crisp envelope from the Head Librarian. He opened it quickly and read: "Because of your flagrant disregard for circulation time limits and overdue book fines, the Library Committee has been compelled to suspend your reader's privileges in the coming term." For the second time that day Gridley smiled sardonically. He was thinking about the new tunnel he had found, the one that led to squash court 9 in Lowell House. He was still...