Forgery League

Yesterday I popped by the Royal Ontario Museum to visit the library and photocopy a few articles for an out-of-town friend. I’d never been to their library, so it was a neat adventure. Little did I know that in the month since I was last there, they’d moved the main entrance around the side of the building to the group entrance (soon to be the “back” of the building, once the renovations are complete).

Inside, I signed in and since there was no direct route to the library, what with the renovations, I had to wait a bit for someone to escort me through the labyrinthine back corridors to the library, where a very nice lady (who looked startling like an Indian version of my mother) fetched the required books.

One of them was a seventy-year-old German bibliography and list of hominid fossils, with a terrifyingly brittle cover bearing the title Fossilium catalogus. I: Animalia — Editus a W. Quenstedt. I couldn’t find the proper pages at first, and it turned out that the pages hadn’t been cut apart. “You must be the first person to read this book,” the librarian remarked as she went to fetch the Page Cutting Knife.

Once I’d copied the articles, it was back to the outside world, which seemed to be an even longer way, including going up a flight of stairs and then down in an elevator. Very mysterious. Must remember this all for future writings.