Imagine our world of mirabile dictu: haggard, fraying at the edge, and then imagine words floating above all of this: tales of love and revenge and revolutions and dictionaries filled with strange words and atlases with names of places one will never visit. The librarians hold the key to all this: they are the keepers of lost collections. Imagine looking for the stain, the damage to the beloved, pages removed: Gauguin gone.