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present.”
    Mr. Berger was starting to feel light-headed.
    â€œWould you like a cup of tea?” said the old gent.
    â€œYes,” said Mr. Berger, “I rather think I would.”
X
    They sat in the gentleman’s living room, drinking tea from china cups and eating some fruitcake that he kept in a tin. A fire had been lit, and a lamp burned in a corner. The walls were decorated with oils and watercolors, all of them very fine and very old. The style of a number of them was familiar to Mr. Berger. He wouldn’t have liked to swear to it, but he was fairly sure that there was at least one Turner, a Constable, and two Romneys, a portrait and a landscape, among their number.
    The old gentleman had introduced himself as Mr. Gedeon, and he had been the librarian at the Caxton for more than forty years. His job, he informed Mr. Berger, was “to maintain and, as required, increase the collection; to perform restorative work on the volumes where necessary; and, of course, to look after the characters.”
    It was this last phrase that made Mr. Berger choke on his tea.
    â€œThe characters?” he said.
    â€œThe characters,” confirmed Mr. Gedeon.
    â€œWhat characters?”
    â€œThe characters from the novels.”
    â€œYou mean they’re alive?”
    Mr. Berger was beginning to wonder not only about his own sanity but that of Mr. Gedeon as well. He felt as though he had wandered into some strange bibliophilic nightmare. He kept hoping that he would wake up at home with a headache to find that he had been inhaling gum from one of his own volumes.
    â€œYou saw one of them,” said Mr. Gedeon.
    â€œWell, I saw someone,” said Mr. Berger. “I mean, I’ve seen chaps dressed up as Napoleon at parties, but I didn’t go home thinking I’d met Napoleon.”
    â€œWe don’t have Napoleon,” said Mr. Gedeon.
    â€œNo?”
    â€œNo. Only fictional characters here. It gets a little complicated with Shakespeare, I must admit. That’s caused us some problems. The rules aren’t hard and fast. If they were, this whole business would run a lot more smoothly. But then, literature isn’t a matter of rules, is it? Think how dull it would be if it was, eh?”
    Mr. Berger peered into his teacup, as though expecting the arrangement of the leaves to reveal the truth of things. When they did not, he put the cup down, clasped his hands, and resigned himself to whatever was to come.
    â€œAll right,” he said. “Tell me about the characters. . . .”
    â€¢â€ƒâ€ƒâ€¢â€ƒâ€ƒâ€¢
    It was, said Mr. Gedeon, all to do with the public. At some point, certain characters became so familiar to readers—and, indeed, to many nonreaders—that they reached a state of existence independent of the page.
    â€œTake Oliver Twist, for example,” said Mr. Gedeon. “More people know of Oliver Twist than have ever read the work to which he gave his name. The same is true for Romeo and Juliet, and Robinson Crusoe, and Don Quixote. Mention their names to even the average educated man or woman on the street, and, regardless of whether they’ve ever encountered a word of the texts in question, they’ll be able to tell you that Romeo and Juliet were doomed lovers, that Robinson Crusoe was marooned on an island, and Don Quixote was involved in some awkwardness with windmills. Similarly, they’ll tell you that Macbeth got above himself, that Ebenezer Scrooge came right in the end, and that D’Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos were the names of the musketeers.
    â€œAdmittedly, there’s a limit to the number of those who achieve that kind of familiarity. They end up here as a matter of course. But you’d be surprised by how many people can tell you something of Tristram Shandy, or Tom Jones, or Jay Gatsby. I’m not sure where the point of crossover is, to be perfectly honest. All I know is that, at some