This is the world built out of its shelves. Fourteen bookcases, three times as many as any other room here, and thirty-four small treasures to fill them with: bookends, a globe, a jar of pencils, the things a bookseller keeps beside the till. Fill the walls first, then let the stacks spill onto the floor, then leave one chair free.
Set a book on the counter and it belongs to the counter. Move the counter afterwards and the bell, the stack and the cat go with it. Slide a rug under the armchair without thinking about it, and push a stack behind the ladder when it gets in the way.
Turn the evening on. Sixteen lamps and lanterns are real lights in here, and a bookshop at closing time is exactly the picture they make: one warm circle around the reading chair, the aisles going quiet behind it.
Nothing is timed and nothing is scored, and it saves itself while you are still deciding where the ladder goes.
