Sherlock Holmes was in the corner when I arrived this morning. He had been there for some time, by the look of it. He was holding a paperback at an angle to the light in the particular way of a man who has found a clue at a crime scene and is not yet ready to share what it means.
I said good morning.
He said: "Western Cape, 2019. The annotations stop at page 89. That is where the book got her."
I looked at page 89. There was a date in the margin, written in pencil, in the careful handwriting of someone who wanted to remember exactly when.
"Good morning", I said again, because it seemed important to try. He did not consider this worth responding to. I have learned not to take this personally. Watson apparently took thirty years to reach the same conclusion.
He had already moved to the next shelf with the restless purposefulness of a man between cases who has found something marginally more interesting than shooting holes in his own wall, and who intends to make the most of it before boredom overtakes him again.
He picked up a collection of South African short stories. He was quiet for a moment longer than usual.
"Previous owner," he said, "read this in order the first time and then went back and read only the sad ones. They are marked, you can see.... very small dog-ears, top right corner. Seven of them." He paused. "This person understood something about stories that most readers take years to arrive at."
I asked what that was.
He looked at me with the expression of a man who has explained things to Watson for so long that he has simply run out of ways to be surprised by the question.
"That a story does not have to make you feel better", he said. "It only has to make you feel less alone in what you already feel." He put the book down carefully. "That is also why people keep them."
He moved through the rest of the shelves in silence, picking things up, replacing them, occasionally making a small sound that could have been approval or could have been its opposite. It was impossible to tell. "A history of the Anglo-Boer War: university student, bought for an essay, never wrote the essay, kept the book out of guilt." He said this with the confidence of a man who has never once in his life googled something and does not intend to start. "A novel with a cracked spine: read on a long-haul flight, the reader did not finish the chapter they were on and came back to it much later in a completely different state of mind." A slim volume of Afrikaans poetry, which he held for a long moment without saying anything at all.
I waited.
"Someone loved this", he said finally, "and gave it away anyway. These are always the most interesting ones."
He is not always helpful, in the conventional sense. He does not assist with packing. He has opinions about the organisational system that he expresses through the particular quality of his silence rather than through words, which is somehow worse. He once left a note on the counter with three titles and a name that was not his, and I found two of the three and sent them, and I am still looking for the third, and I do not know who the name belongs to or how he knew.
But his presence reminds me of why this matters. Every book that comes through here has been somewhere. Has been held by someone who needed it, or didn't, or needed it without knowing they did until page 89 on a Tuesday in March. The history is in the object. You just have to look.
If you are looking for something, whether it's a title, a memory of a book, something half-remembered that you can describe only by how it made you feel, write to me. I pay attention to these things. I have been paying more attention than usual lately.
And I have good company.
You can contact me at info@thestorystation.co.za.
PS: Sherlock deduced three things about me on his first visit that I have not told anyone. He has not brought them up again. This is either professional courtesy or he is saving them for later. I am choosing to believe it is the former.