Alice:             There’s no use trying… one can’t believe      impossible things.

White Queen:I daresay you haven’t had much practise… When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day.  Why, sometimes, I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

- Lewis Carroll

Through the Looking Glass, p.100

This is a place for the believing of impossible things. 

This is a place that reteaches imagination; this is a place that reawakens the slumbering characters of childhood fiction; this is a place that relieves burdened thoughts… if only for awhile.  A library devoted solely to fiction is an invitation to detach from the clinging hold of ‘reality’.  It is an opportunity for release and for realization: release of preset notions and realization that “we are so often ignorant of what is, we need a rich sense of what might be” (p.21, Maitre).  It is an introduction, through literature, to the self and possible selves - characters to assume and characters to befriend; “a fictional universe doesn’t end with the story itself but extends indefinitely” into our thoughts and spaces (p.85, Eco).

The collection of fanciful stories housed within the library mingles with the scattered readers - tucked into their unique corners.  These users (an appropriate term given its addictive connotations) seek escape; the Oxford English Dictionary defines escapism as that “tendency to seek distraction or relief from reality”.  Relief is available and the willing, although perhaps not yet convinced, enter cautiously.  Potentially converted by the discovery of a lost or newfound passion, the ‘born-again’ readers return frequently to reserve that favourite spot among the shelves claimed as their own.  The specific cause of their need to escape is particular, although perhaps they suffer from that ailment preferred by James Joyce of his audience: “an ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia”. 

The spaces of the library are conducive: conducive to the thoughtful activities of resolve, meditation and abandon, and conducive to more physical gestures.  Read aloud; or better still, laugh out loud.  Cry without shame.  Pause for far-off glances.  Madly scribble notes when inspiration strikes.  Attempt that balancing feat described in great detail or unconsciously loosen your collar as tension increases.  Sleep.  There is no fear and no inhibitions; an appeal is made to the senses through a series of tight and introverted spaces.  The alien and alienating tendency of libraries is replaced by an environment for the individual - book in hand.