National Library of Australia, Canberra.
Photo: iPhone 12 Pro Max

My primary school librarian was a lady called Mrs Roberts. She had tightly hand-curled roller gray hair and grandmotherly librarian glasses that would hang around her neck on a plastic chain when not in use.

Mrs Roberts loved books. She covered them in shiny thick plastic and they cracked as you opened them, and she would sit us all down on the floor cross-legged in a circle on occasional Fridays and show us the newest arrivals and they would each one crack and she would turn each page with a slow respect and her glasses chain would clinkle and the paper would make that swoosh sound as each page slid open and she would read from them and hold them up so we could see any pictures and tell us to “never leave a book open face down” and “never fold a corner down to mark your place” and we would sit there happy not to be in class and we would browse fiction and non-fiction and meet astronomy and Charlotte’s Web and The Digging-est dog and encyclopedias and ghosts and other things and she would close each book and hug it for a moment against her chest and tell us which shelf it would be found in before picking up the next one and we would sit there bathing in the scintillating quiet ASMR of it all before that was even a thing.