The anomaly was first documented by a physicist who spent too much time in the reading room of the British Library. She went in at two in the afternoon. She came out, by her reckoning, forty minutes later. The clock above the entrance said seven-thirty.
She published nothing. She went back the next day.
Subsequent researchers – working quietly, funding themselves, mostly ignored – found the effect was consistent. Not just the British Library. Any library with sufficient density of old text showed measurable temporal dilation. The older the books, the stronger the effect.
The leading theory is that time is, in some meaningful sense, stored in language. Every sentence ever written represents a moment of consciousness arrested and preserved. Pack enough of them into a room and the local flow of time thickens, slows, bends slightly inward on itself.
Libraries are not buildings. They are, the researchers now believe, very small black holes made of words.
This would explain why people who read a great deal always seem to have more time than everyone else.
It would also explain why the last librarian to retire from the oldest library in Oslo was, by any reasonable medical estimate, forty years younger than she should have been.
