Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines -- it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.

After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this:A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.

Her home is the burrow of a bibliophile hobbit -– low-ceilinged, close-walled, and brimming over with books.

Books of silver; books of bone; and yet the strangest thing you see in all your years at Galvanic is a boy in a ski-mask, sitting in a basement, using a computer.

The Golden Horn of Griffo is finely wrought," Zenodotus said, tracing his finger along the curve of Telemach's treasure. "And the magic is in its making alone. Do you understand? There is no sorcery here..."“Magic is not the only power in this world,” the old mage said gently, handing the horn back to its royal owner. “Griffo made an instrument so perfect that even the dead must rise to hear its call. He made it with his hands, without spells or dragon-songs. I wish that I could do the same.

Of course, of course. Drugs, music, a new age dawning … and you came for an old book.

I tell him, and I write it down as I go. It makes me feel better, as if the weirdness is flowing out of my blood and onto the page, through the dark point of the pen

I always thought the key to immortality would be, like, tiny robots fixing things in your brain,” she says. “Not books.