This is the booknook of the cosmos — and the locals will tell you, if pressed, that they may have invented all the other worlds over one very long afternoon. Nobody can prove it and nobody minds. You travel here by walking through books; you arrive somewhere warm and lamplit and faintly mad with good company.

It rains, of course it rains, so that reading and writing can get done in peace. And just under the patter of it there’s a jazz trio — the most luscious quiet trio you’ve ever almost heard — playing always just out of earshot, so that you lean in, and stay, and never quite catch the tune. You came to think. You came to be quietly, productively unwell with ideas.