The stall stacked with books

The keeper is enormous and grey and has a pair of reading glasses balanced on tusks that were not designed for them. The books are not thick. That is the first surprise.

“Everybody wants the big one,” he says, not looking up. “The one with a world already in it. Then they get it home and find their own world does not fit inside it.” He taps a slim volume. “This is the other thing. It goes underneath. Whatever you have got — the wood you played in as a child, the one your friend has been describing for eleven years and never written down — it holds it up and tells you what a fall costs.”

“The price,” he adds, “is that you have to bring your own world. That puts most people off.”