What happened next… Well, I’ll tell you what happened next, after a long hike they reached The Last Bookshop in the World, unfortunately the sign on the door said, ‘Closed’.
Only yanking your anchor, what it actually said was – ‘Closed for Lunch (be back sometime, not sure when as time no longer exists)’. And everybody lived unhappily ever after, end of story!
No, but seriously, the shop was open for business and looked not unlike The Old Curiosity Shop in Charles Dickens’s story of the same name.
‘Well, it appears I was wrong, The Last Bookshop in the World isn’t just a fairy story it really exists, when I write this in my next travelogue everybody will say ‘Oh Hans not another one of your fairytales!’ Hans Christian Andersen said in wide-eyed wonderment.
No sooner had they come through the door did a bell sound and they were greeted most courteously be an old gentleman who looked even older than Old Father Time. This certainly gave Old Father Time a second wind, making him feel young and as spritely as a newborn unicorn, or so he was later to admit to Gulliver.
‘Welcome to The Last Bookshop in the World. May I take your hats and coats and dogs? You can retrieve them later from the rest room, unless you desire to keep them on your person,’ the wizened-looking old man said as he smiled serenely. ‘Now before we go any further, you must sign a contract to say you will not breathe a word of the exact location of our fine establishment, after all, we have a reputation for exclusivity and a client list that includes kings, queens, princes and princesses, prime ministers and heads of state from all around the globe. If you feel you cannot hold your tongue, then please close the door on your way out!’ the wizened old man said without a trace of malice in his voice or on his face, although what he said he meant most earnestly.
All seven members representing Queen Elizabeth I of England and the Golden Hind were more than happy to sign this agreement. Beagle even signed it with his paw print, although he hoped the wizened old man was joking about putting him in the rest room along with the hats and coats, as he was as excited as anybody to see what this vast emporium contained. Gulliver knew full well he could hold his tongue as he put his fingers to his mouth and did just that, ‘Yes, I can hold my tongue, see?’ Gulliver said acting like a child.
‘What if we were to break this agreement?’ enquired the coxswain inquisitively, which was exactly what the other members of the Golden Hind were wondering.
‘Well, if you tell anyone where this shop resides then you’ll find out!’ said the old man and by the look in his eyes, for the first time you could see he meant business. In fact, he had the look of a captain of a pirate ship who was about to tell one of his captives he would soon be keel hauled around the bottom of the ship’s barnacles and all, before taking a long walk off a short plank in shark-infested waters! Gulliver thought that this man would probably throw the book at them if they reneged on this contract, literally!
‘Now, although from the outside this little shop of ours looks, well, looks little, tiny, minute even, however, inside it is almost as endless as the universe itself and we have a copy of every book ever written,’ the old man continued without hardly drawing breath. ‘Now if you want a guide we will provide you with one and all our assistants can levitate, which I’m sure you will find a great help as the bookshelves almost touch the sky. And you will most certainly need a map and a compass and a portable telescope as the bookshop is so vast. Transport is also provided; we have everything from a penny-farthing and a magic carpet, to a boat that literally flies through the air, one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s latest inventions. Mr Da Vinci is one of our best customers, do you know him?’ the old man enquired but didn’t wait for a reply before continuing on as if he was in a hurry. ‘We also have hot air balloons and airship, although they are both comparatively small compared to the ones you see in the skies above us.
‘Now some of the books upon our shelves are very lifelike, in fact, you can get so lost in the story you might never leave, not being able to put it down and being so mesmerized by what you find within its pages, reading it over and over and over again. Some books will drag you in from the very first sentence and before you know it you will literally find yourself trekking through the lost world of the Amazon jungle, or fighting off sea monsters around the Cape of Good Hope, or flying side by side with Icarus on his way towards the sun, that one I wouldn’t recommend!
‘The Bible is a good case in point, some readers have picked up the book, sailed off into a world of imagination in their head and have never left. A boy can come into our bookshop and leave an old man like myself, although I’m not that old, I’m only 708 years old, hardly as old as Methuselah!’ said the wizened old man as he took the contracts from each crewmember of the Golden Hind and put them under the counter, chuckling under his breath as he did so, muttering, ‘The old jests are the best.’
The old man added that as long as they did not open the pages of the book they would not be drawn into the story and as such would not be sucked into the story.
It seemed that The Last Bookshop in the World operated under the same rules as the universe, ordered chaos!
This was a lot of information for everybody to take in in such a short space of time but everybody seem to take it in their stride. Gulliver thought the old saying was true, ‘never judge a book by its cover, or a bookshop by its outward appearance.
‘Well, off you go. As they say, time waits for no man,’ the old man said as he winked at Gulliver and disappeared under the counter, literally!
Gulliver took out his brass spyglass from his pocket and held it to his left eye, criss-crossing the bookshop to see what he could see. Gulliver spied an old man resting his back against one of the tall bookshelves which appeared to tower over him like a mountain. The man was staring dreamily into space holding a book called Dreams and their Meanings. Gulliver asked the proprietor who this man was and the proprietor, having disappeared out of sight, now reappeared as if by magic, actually exactly by magic would be a better description of this happening. The wizened old wizardly man, peering over his half-moon spectacles, couldn’t see who the man was as he was too far away so Gulliver handed him his spyglass. A few seconds later the Guardian of Books, as Gulliver liked to think of him, as if he was in fact an anthropologist protecting an endangered species rather than inanimate objects, having picked the man out with the spyglass who was staring dreamily into space, said with a smile on his face, ‘Oh, that’s another of our loyal and respected customer. He’s always in here, in fact sometimes I think he lives here. He goes by the name of Mr Dreams. Oh, and Mr Fairytale is over there, he wrote the book on the magical and the unbelievable.’
Gulliver thought he must engage in conversation with these two men at some point, what with him being a dreamer and like most children, a teller of fairytales and as such they were obviously both on the same page as him. However, now was not the appropriate time for such a conversation as Gulliver could see by the look upon Mr Dreams’ face that he was utterly engrossed in the book entitled Dreams and their Meanings. Mr Fairytale, well, he was away with the fairies, which was only to be expected!
Gulliver then asked the wizened old man another question. ‘As Mr Dreams is so engrossed by the story, why hasn’t he been sucked into the book yet?’
‘Well, I’m not sure Mr Dreams is engrossed in the story, he suffers from narcolepsy and he’s prone to walking in his sleep, so right now he might well be asleep dreaming,’ continued the proprietor without batting an eyelid, as if this sort of behaviour was the most normal thing in the world, which in The Last Bookshop in the World it quite clearly was. Gulliver then spied another book which was taller than he so inquisitively he asked the proprietor what was in the book. The wizened old man smiled and said, ‘It’s full of tall stories,’ Gulliver smiled back because he was pretty sure the old man was yanking upon the tassel of his bookmark. Perhaps he should take a leaf out of his book and disappear into a book, he thought wistfully.
Gulliver found a suitable bookshelf, shut his eyes and picked a book from one of the shelves at random. He sometimes took books off the shelf of his library in this random manner, taking them home without reading the blurb on the back cover either, to find he had found a treasure chest full of rare jewels, or a treasure chest that was as empty a vessel as the writer who wrote it. Gulliver picked a book up called The Search for the Lost Plot by Grimstone Cadwell. Gulliver looked at the back of the book so he had some idea of the plotline as in this magical bookshop he knew he couldn’t be so cavilier in his approach to new reading material. The plotline was that the author had lost the plot, or to be more precise, his manuscript, and spends the entire book looking for it, and when he eventually finds it, the story ends. It seemed to Gulliver that the author certainly had lost the plot. Gulliver opened the first page and read the opening line, half expecting to be sucked into the book at any minute and half not. Nothing happened so Gulliver flicked through the book and read random pages and still nothing, so he closed the book.
Now you would have thought Gulliver would have replaced the book on the shelf in its proper place as all librarians hoped the reader would do. This was only good library etiquette, however, Gulliver didn’t, instead he placed the book upon the floor, which being a fairly weighty book of 700 plus pages long, he was happy to do so.
Gulliver was then momentarily distracted as out of the corner of his left eye he spied what he thought were giant butterflies, the sort you see in the rainforest, or the sort he had only ever seen on the Eden and the Discovery Channels on television. However, as he drew closer he could see they were books that were opening up like a butterfly wings as if to tempt you to dive straight into the story. Despite everything, Gulliver was still a little cautious, he wanted a little more to go on before he jumped in feet first, like the title of the book or a brief synopsis of the story on the back cover, at least that would give him some idea of what awaited him inside the book. Despite everything, Gulliver wasn’t feeling adventurous enough to take this sort of devil-may-care attitude, despite being named Gulliver and despite his unbelievable adventures up until this point in non-time.
Gulliver then went back to Grimstone Cadwell’s less-than-riveting book which he had placed upon the floor not a moment earlier and stared at it for the briefest of moments, he then stood upon the book, which meant he was able to rest his left foot on the second rung of the bookshelf, from where he proceeded to climb, as if he was a seasoned mountain climber.
Within a very short space of time Gulliver and Alice were both scaling large dusty bookcases and pulling out musty-smelling books, with pages with gold edging that rustled like leaves in the breeze when you turned the snowy white pages. Gulliver picked up a book called Scaling the Mountains of the Andes, and within seconds of getting into the book he got into the book literally as he soon found himself trekking across the vast mountainous lands of the Andes.
This antiquarian bookshop really did house a cornucopia of weird and wonderful delights as Hans Christian Andersen was finding out as he picked up a book with a dark cover written by the Brothers Grim and was sucked into the book never to be seen again.
Alice had picked up a little book called The Arabian Nights; not many people had heard of it and, having read the first paragraph and while not even halfway into the second, she was transported into the land of the Arabias. Here Alice found herself riding on the back of a white stallion with the wind sailing through her hair as the sands of time flowed all around her like a river.
Drake picked up a book called General and Rare Memorials written by Dr John Dee and he was instantly sucked into the book, literally like a star being sucked into a black hole. The book’s cover was made of brown leather with several ships sailing across with a smiling sun in the sky and an angel in the heavens playing a lyre. The spine looked as if it were made of gold, probably because it was.
For Drake, this book was like looking into his own future for it mentioned Queen Elizabeth I, him and Walter Raleigh. On the title page the title was followed by the words: ‘Pertaining to the Perfect Arte of NAVIGATION’ and underneath that was written: ‘Annexe to the PARADOXAL Cumpus, in Playne: now firft published: 24. yeres, after the firft Inuention thereof’.
Now one must remember that in the sixteenth century the language and writing was different from today, which didn’t make it any easier for someone suffering with dyslexia to understand. Gulliver gave these books a wide berth as he couldn’t make sense of a word the author had written. Gulliver certainly found it easier to understand the Victorians in this world than he did the Elizabethans.
The coxswain Horace Hortop and Able Seaman Gracegirdle had reached for the same book at the exact same time, a book called The Great Whale. Now, as the coxswain could read and the able seaman couldn’t, the coxswain was kind enough to read it to him. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your point of view, both men were soon sucked into the pages of the book. The wind blowing their hair to the four winds as they shrank and disappeared in between the pages of the book ending up floundering in the Southern Oceans just off New Holland as a great whale came into sight on the horizon.
Old Father Time, not wishing to be wise after the event, although being as old as he was he always would be no matter what and, having seen his friends and colleagues disappear into the pages of the books they were reading, decided to simply browse. This Old Father Time did by hiring a penny-farthing and a lantern upon a stick so he could ride around the bookshop at his leisure imagining the stories which were hidden behind the musty covers rather than actually picking up the books and turning the pages. Quite frankly, he was just too old to be gadding about on such adventures at his time of life, he surmised wisely. Or as he was to later put it in his memoirs – ‘Going on one adventure of a lifetime is more than enough for a man who has previously spent most of his life housed within an old clock in Greenwich marking time.’