Michael Malone - Weebly

part two
chapter 12
The librarian Sidney Blossom loved what lay upon
the leaves of books. Those stories of loss and gain, of
pride and prejudice and great expectations, were as
alive to him up on their shelves as were their living
counterparts in Dingley Falls. His predecessor, and the
town's last official historian, had honored, however,
only trees. Gladys Goff had dated within a decade the
foot-wide oak boards on the floor of the Prim Minster
Inn and had charted all the best local families out to the
most distant twig on a branch. Nothing created after the
Revolutionary War was of any interest to Miss Goff,
genealogically or architecturally. She was not a reader.
If told that salaciousness or socialism lay between the
covers of one of those books she kept so carefully
covered, she removed that book from Dixwell Library.
She did not take it home and read it first. If told that
individuals in the town had disgraced their genealogy,
she removed them from her mental chart and had in her
time lopped away whole limbs. But she did not tell