Father and daughter waited several minutes.  Each time they heard the rumble, they looked expectantly at the lit board.  Drew grew more anxious as time passed.  He knew that books that were rarely requested were kept in more distant parts of the downstairs bookshelves.  After almost five minutes of waiting, Jenny heard the rumble and its stop.  Moments later, three of their numbers appeared on the screen.  She turned excitedly to her father who indicated with a nod that she should retrieve the requested items.  Drew, though, fretted as he wondered which of his volumes was so unpopular that it had been banished to sit amidst the ranks of the largely forgotten.  When Jenny returned with the three books, Drew took a quick look at the titles.  He sighed in relief. His sophomore publication was the missing volume.  He was not proud of that set of poems, released to the world more quickly that they should have been due to the publisher’s desire to take advantage of the awards his first volume had received.  The fact that it had been banished to the library’s remote shelves gave him faith in the discernment of poetry readers.

“We’ll get the other one later,” Drew told Jenny in low tones. “Let’s sit and look at these.”

He placed his hand on her shoulder and guided his daughter to turn around.  Her attention had been so focused on retrieving the books that she had never looked at the room behind her.  As she turned, Jenny saw the Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library, a room larger than she thought a room could be.  Drew smiled at the wonder he saw in her expression.  The room was rectangular, much longer than wide, and it had an echoing quiet.  Its ceilings were three stories high and painted with murals depicting clouds.  .Very long tables, two abreast, spanned the room, ranked in rows across its narrower side on either side of a center aisle.  The oak tables had a dull shine that seemed to be the result of loving use rather than wax or sprays.  Wooden chairs with armrests were randomly placed along both sides of each long table. There were several sources of light.  The lower portion of the walls along the length of the room were solid, but large glass fan windows were spaced  along the upper half of the walls, the expanse of the glass made less intrusive by the dark black metal that held the panes in place.   Brass lamps with black lampshades were set into each table and evenly placed along its center. Chandeliers with dozens of bulbs arrayed in a pattern that resembled an inverted wedding cake hung from the ceilings in parallel rows above the two rows of tables.

Dozens of people sat at tables throughout the room, but they were dwarfed by the room’s size and height and humbled by the room’s purpose. It was a cathedral for the worship of books.  Those readers were acolytes.  Jenny felt she had found a congregation to which she could belong.