A
Aharon Appelfeld, Badenheim 1939, trans. Dalya Bilu (1980). Something between a parable and history.

B
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (1999). The greatest anthology of anything (everything) ever.

C
William Cowper, Selected Poems (1984). Pronounced ‘Cooper’. Hymn writer and poet.

D
John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916). Philosophy of education; educational philosophy.

E
Willem Elsschot, Cheese, trans. Paul Vincent (first published 1933; English edition 2003). Short comic novel about cheese (Edam).

F
William Fiennes, The Snow Geese (2002). Natural history.

G
W.S. Graham, Selected Poems (1996). On silence &c.

H
T.E. Hulme, Selected Writings, ed. Patrick McGuinness (1998). Proto-modernist.

I
Michael Innes, Appleby’s End (1945). Booksy crime.

J
Humphrey Jennings, Pandaemonium (1985). English equivalent of Benjamin’s Arcades Project (see ‘B’ above).

K
Harry Kemelman, The Rabbi David Small mystery series. The title of the series is self-explanatory.

L
Sven Lindqvist, Bench Press, trans. Sarah Death (2003). Body-building.

M
Mary McCarthy, The Groves of Academe (1952). Satire.

N
John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864). Spiritual autobiography.

O
Timothy O’Grady and Steve Pyke, I Could Read the Sky (1997). Threnody.

P
Tim Parks, Adultery and Other Diversions (1998). Essays as good as — if not almost better — than his fiction.

Q
Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Oxford Book of English Prose (1923). Available in all good (second-hand) bookshops.

R
Gillian Rose, Love’s Work (1995). Philosophical autobiography.

S
Richard Stark, Point Blank (first published as The Hunter,1962). Existentialism minus the philosophy, plus guns.

T
Antonio Tabbuchi, Declares Pereira, trans. Patrick Creagh (1995). Moral fable.

U
Fred Uhlman, Reunion (1971). Another moral fable. With autobiographical elements.

V
Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Sociology?

W
Charles Willeford, Pick-Up (1955). Classic American noir.

X
There is no ‘X’.

Y
Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (1966). Ancient memory systems.

Z
Rafi Zabor, The Bear Comes Home (1997). Meditation on music and art by saxophone playing bear. Features inter-species sex.

‘When’s your book coming out?’ ask friends and family.

‘Erm. It was published a while ago, actually,’ I say.

‘Oh,’ they say, ‘Really?’

‘Yes, really,’ I say.

I suppose the real miracle is that anyone published the book in the first place. They may not be selling like hot cakes, but still I believe what I’m doing is interesting and important — why else would I be doing it? Let me make a couple of grand and ludicrous claims about the importance of librarians and libraries, in order to justify my having spent years writing books about them.

First, I believe, the librarian is Everyman. The librarian inhabits the realm of books and bookishness, the realm of ideas and the imagination: the librarian is like a priest, or an adept, an intellectual, a romantic. And yet the librarian is also merely a book-stacker and book-caretaker, performing an under-appreciated and often tedious, humbling, and sometimes humiliating job: the librarian is a public servant, a functionary, a nameless nonentity. A bit like me and you.

Second, the library is a place of magic and transformation, a realm of possibility, a site of reinvention and self-discovery. It’s also often covered in graffiti, and smells of mould and misuse. These seem to me to be interesting paradoxes and tensions, worth exploring. And the mobile library — and, I suppose, I hope, The Mobile Library – is all of this in miniature, the library and the librarian at extremes.