A library on a river, over thirty-one years

He was appointed at twenty-six to make the collection usable, and he understood the commission more thoroughly than the people who issued it.

The concordance he produced runs to nine volumes. For each of the four thousand works it gives the author, the provenance, the condition, a summary of the argument, the objections the author anticipates, the objections the author does not anticipate, every proposition it shares with any other work in the collection, and every proposition on which it stands alone.

Within a decade nobody consults the books. There is no need. The concordance is faster, it is cross-referenced, it is in one hand rather than four thousand, and where a work is muddled Ibn Bakr has silently clarified it, because he could not bear to record a bad sentence.

Scholars come from a long way to use the nine volumes. Several of them, questioned later, could not say whether they had ever opened a book in that building.

The fire is in the thirty-first year and takes the collection entirely. The concordance survives because it was in his rooms.

The catastrophe is recorded, mourned, and then — over a period of about two generations — quietly downgraded, because the scholarship does not falter. The citations continue. The arguments continue. Nothing that anybody wanted from those four thousand works turns out to have been unavailable in the nine.

What burned was the last object in the chain that could have contradicted the summary. Everything downstream of that night is a description with nothing under it, and it has been perfectly serviceable, and no one has missed a thing.