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Page SpineStitch
Name: Page SpineStitch
Title / Role: Chief Librarian of the EverLasting Library
Species: Threadling
Affiliation: The EverLasting Library, and the Threadbare, its librarians and archivists
Core Thread: Memory
Home: The EverLasting Library, Frays End
Status: Active
Themes: Wonder, Reading, Stewardship, Family, Stories Yet to Be Told
"Every story that has ever been written is somewhere on these shelves. So is every story that hasn't been written yet. I only have to look after both."
-- Page SpineStitch
Page SpineStitch is the Chief Librarian of the EverLasting Library, and the keeper of every story it holds: every tale ever written, every tale half-told and abandoned, and every tale that has not yet been written at all. The Binders, the Menders, the Listeners, the Watchers and the Unbound all answer to her, and so, on a good day, does the Library itself.
She is tall, unhurried and gently commanding, with the kind of voice that makes a crowded reading room fall quiet without anyone quite noticing why. She knows the name of every archivist, most of the books, and all of the doors. She has never once been lost in the Library, which the Threadbare consider far stranger than anything on its shelves.
Page is warm with visitors, patient with children, and fiercely protective of both. Her one rule for every reader who comes through the Threshold of Unbinding is the same: take your time. The Library, she says, is not going anywhere. That is the whole point of it.
The Threadbare will tell anyone who asks that a place in the Library is never inherited. The Library calls its own keepers, drawing them to Frays End until they arrive at its doors, often without knowing why they came. And yet, in every generation since the Library was a single room, it has called a SpineStitch. The Threadbare stopped finding this surprising a very long time ago.
A spine stitch is the stitching that binds the gathered pages of a book to its spine, so that they hold together however often they are opened. The SpineStitches have held the Library together in much the same way, and they have always named their children for the parts of a book. Their portraits hang in a long, crooked corridor behind the Atrium of First Words, each one holding the book they loved best.
- Tome SpineStitch, the first of the line, was the single keeper of the Library's single room in its earliest age, tending a handful of tales too precious to lose. They are said to have fitted in the pocket of her apron. Somewhere in the Atrium of First Words there is a sentence in her hand, and every SpineStitch since has looked for it. None has ever found it, and none has ever stopped looking.
- Folio SpineStitch built upwards. It was Folio who first asked the shelves to grow, and the shelves, to everyone's surprise, agreed. The tallest ladders in the Stackwood still carry her initials.
- Margin SpineStitch, Page's great-grandmother, wrote small notes in the margins of every book in the Stackwood, meant for whoever read them next: You're nearly at the good part. This bit made me cry too. Keep going. Readers still find them, faded to the colour of weak tea, exactly when they need them.
- Chapter SpineStitch, her grandfather, divided the Stackwood into chapters so that no reader need ever lose their way, and hung a ribbon bookmark at the end of every aisle. The ribbons are pale now, and Page will not let anyone replace them.
- Zine SpineStitch, her aunt, set up a hand press on the Library steps and began printing little folded stories that anyone could make and anyone could take. The Binders were appalled. The Zine Stair is now the busiest corner of the Library, and the Binders have never quite forgiven her.
- Quarto and Octavo SpineStitch, her uncles, are twins, one very tall and one very small, who have disagreed about how to shelve the Stackwood for sixty years and are, by their own account, both right.
- Novel SpineStitch, her mother, was Chief Librarian before her, and is said to have read every book in the Stackwood at least once. The only story she never finished was her own. Its pages sit on Page's desk, in a neat stack tied with string. Figment LooseEnd has asked for them more than once, for his Archive of the Unfinished. Page always tells him the same thing: not yet.
- Index SpineStitch, her younger brother, is a Listener, who walks out into the world gathering stories before they are lost. He can tell you where every story in Threadbare was first told, and has never once known where he left his hat.
- Footnote SpineStitch, her niece, is the youngest of the family, and the smallest. She is always to be found at the bottom of things, and she asks the best questions in the Library.
Page was named for the smallest part of a book. Her mother said it was the most important, because every story, however long, is made of them. There is an old saying in the family that their naming began with the first page ever written, which the Elder Rune wrote on a pressed leaf at the Ink Well. Rune has never confirmed it, and never denied it, and he keeps a careful record of every SpineStitch who has ever held the post.
On a lectern at the centre of the Atrium of First Words rests the Catalogue of Everything: the Chief Librarian's ledger, and the only book in the Library that no one but a SpineStitch has ever been allowed to write in. It lists every story ever written, in every hand and every script, from the ReedKin's stitch-script to last week's Daily Rag.
It also lists every story that has not yet been written. Those entries appear on their own, in faint pencil, in a hand that no one recognises, and they darken to ink on the day someone, somewhere in Threadbare, begins them. Out in the Not-Yet Wing, a blank spine takes its title at the same moment, and the Watchers hear the shelves shift.
Page reads the new pencil lines every morning, before the doors open. It is the one part of her work she has never been able to explain, and the part she loves most. Some mornings there are a dozen. Some mornings there are hundreds. She has never yet seen a morning with none.
The Chief Librarian carries a ring of keys, heavier than it looks, with one key for every door the Library has ever had. Some of those doors have long since been papered over. A few, Page suspects, have not been built yet. She has learned not to try the keys she does not recognise, and to keep them oiled anyway.
The Library has no fixed floor plan, and it never shows itself the same way twice. But it has always shown Page the way she needs to go, if not always the way she wanted. She says the trick is to walk as though you are already reading the next page.
The Void has always been hungriest for the written word. Where it spreads, ink fades, books go blank, and the shelves of the Lost Library, the great forgotten archive of Threadbare, stand half-empty. Page has walked the Lost Library once. She has not spoken about it since, except to say that she will not let it happen here.
She sees the Void's work first in the Catalogue. Now and then, instead of darkening to ink, a pencil line fades: a story that someone, somewhere, has given up on before it began. This is Null's first denial, Not: nothing could be otherwise, so why begin? Page does not cross those lines out. She reads each one aloud, every morning, so that at least someone has imagined it, and she leaves the Catalogue open on those pages, in case a visitor would like to take one home and try.
Page is tall and slightly stooped from a lifetime of reading the bottom shelf, with spectacles on a silver chain and ink-dark fingers. She wears a long coat stitched, in the manner of the Threadbare, from countless mismatched threads, but hers are the threads of old bindings: cloth covers, headbands and faded bookmarks, one for every book she has mended with her own hands. Chapter's last ribbon is tied in her hair, and her ring of keys hangs at her belt, chiming very softly as she walks.
Page is the heart of the EverLasting Library, and one of the first friendly faces the StoryWeaver meets at Frays End. She is a natural guide to the Library's halls and wonders, a quest-giver for any story that begins with a missing book, a faded page or a line in the Catalogue, and a gentle ally against Null's first denial, Not.
For contributors, Page is the right voice for stories about reading, libraries, research, and the joy of discovering a story for the first time. The SpineStitch family is an open invitation: any contributor may add a SpineStitch, past or present, named for a part of a book.
- The EverLasting Library - the eternal repository of story at Frays End, which she keeps
- Rune - Keeper of the LoreQuests, who wrote the first page
- Perrin PageSpun - cataloguer of the EverLasting Library
- Figment LooseEnd - Curator of the Archive of the Unfinished, who would dearly like her mother's pages
- Muse - Keeper of the StoryQuests
- The Lost Library - the great forgotten archive
- Frays End - the last bastion of hope against the Void
- Threadlings - the people of Threadbare
- Null - the Dark Elder, and the denial Not