White 08 (The Rose White Bookstore)

Amongst the many shelves bursting with ancient volumes, and stacks of antiquated papers there are untold treasures. As books make their way through the hands of the City's citizens, they almost always return to the Rose White Bookstore, the unofficial library for the City's cultured, curious or bored. Nothing is organized anymore, and half the fun of a trip to Rose White is sifting through the mountains of anonymous drivel, searching for something interesting and unique. There is an illusory tininess to the store... it seems so much larger on the inside than its unassuming exterior lets on. When the bell on the front door jingles, the shopper finds herself in an amazing puzzle box that affords the sort of mental thrill which comes from the realization that something amazing could be right around the corner, or just beneath that pile of dusty encyclopedias. You can find hand written journals, or intricate maps, illuminated texts, battered paperbacks annotated by the last owner or unpublished manuscripts, brilliant and sad in their isolated readership. The amount of knowledge set down by hand or typeset or lithographed is staggering. The history of the City breathes in verses by old poets, adventures by authors who never left their homes, and dissertations by crusty academics so immersed in their ideas that they become worlds of their own.
And beyond what a book contains inside, the book itself, the covers, leaves and spine, is often a talisman in itself. The look and smell of a relic, a time capsule in the heart of a dead reader... a bookshelf becomes a museum. A moment is captured in a butterfly net and pressed and tacked for good between two thick cardstock covers, stitched up and set apart forever. Time stands still, and the only difference years afford to the book is some wear on the leather, or the weakening of the binding. It's a static thing, aging like some prehistoric tortoise, moving in its own little dimension of timelessness while the real world races swiftly outside of it, leaving it virtually unmolested, letting it exist of its own accord. So that even more than just a display of history and accomplishment, a bookshelf, the Rose White Store in its entirety even, is an ever-expanding universe in and of itself. Visitable and enjoyable, but operating by its own distinct rules. Governed by laws that mortals, stuck in their progression of change and rotting from the inside out are not privy to, understandable only in the abstract. Their places shuffle, their owners vary, but beyond death by fire or the obliteration of the words, the book's world is nearly interminable. As much as the dying sun and collapsing universe are immortal. Timeless in comparison to the brevity of life.
Most casual readers do not operate under this laborious pretense of course... to them a book is enjoyment, a diversion. A book might be an escape, or an abandonment of reality. Perhaps it is a means to collect data, to organize thoughts. A teaching aid. Or a memento of things already known, a memory more reliable than the ones in our head. Or it might be dull work. Effort expended in the name of enrichment, or a task completed for the sake of completion itself. It can be a touchstone to connect disparate lives in the shared experience of all knowing a certain story. Most readers do not believe in the internal reality of the book. They do not think of a living world existing in the finite space between covers. It's a collection of words with a beginning and an end, and nothing else really. The parallels between that story and your own might be interesting, even enlightening, but the division is always absolute. For most readers.
The proprietor of Rose White might disagree. She's read enough to know that nothing is actually new, nothing is truly novel, and that every growth of fiction is plucked from an overarching or underlying truth. Fiction takes on its own truth, and reality, she knows, is a very fluid thing indeed. She's lived in other people's stories, and lived in her own... the differences aren't as rigid as most people might think.
It's a commonly used tactic amongst literacy advocates to equate reading with breathing life into something, that to read is to bring a story alive. But that denies a book its own vitality. It puts the impetus of creation (or at the least, mere animation) on the reader. But a reader is still passive. Just an observer. The hubris of an observer thinking she is the reason for a world's existence is enormous. If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

Arrogant child. Of course it does.