Four Floors Below the Library

Nobody up there had any idea that, four floors beneath their feet, under a university library in Porto, there were people taking thousands of freshly restored books out of enormous boxes and placing them, one by one, on the shelves of an endless corridor.

And there we were, without a trace of boredom, in a kind of solemn daze. We thought we were getting slow.

The routine was simple. While two of us opened boxes and shelved books, the other two brought the boxes down. And yet something didn't feel quite normal. Every round felt like an hour. We started asking ourselves what was taking so long. It was a long way down, to be fair: two different lifts, a series of doors closed to the public, and a maze of corridors you could genuinely get lost in.

Still. An hour?

So I timed it. The clock gave us an answer we weren't expecting: fifteen minutes. Every round, start to finish.

We stood among the shelves and looked at each other. Then we spent a long while talking about it, the way you talk about something you can't explain, because it was the strangest thing that happened to us all week.

The phone rang twice

A few months ago we moved nine thousand books to a university here in Porto (A Hundred and Sixty Boxes, and One Book). It was enormous work (nobody warns you how heavy paper is) and, for us, a little solemn. We thought that was the whole job.

Then the phone rang again. This time the books weren't going from one address to another. They were going from one floor to another, and from the boxes onto the shelves. When we arrived, we found there were far more books than the ones we had brought. Nine thousand had become something like fifteen thousand. One week, four people, full days.

Written down, the task is simple: open a box, take out a book, find its place, next. In practice it means every one of those books passes through your hands, one at a time. To me, every book is a world, and the work felt like holding thousands of worlds, one after another.

What was in the boxes

Texts far older than any country we've lived in. Books in more languages than we could name, bound in cloth and in leather, some with illustrations finer than anything I had ever held.

Many of the words on those shelves are thousands of years old. The paper carrying them is a few hundred. The oldest thing down there was never the book. It was what was written in it.

I spent years as a librarian at my own university. One of the team came from printing. So for at least two of the four of us, this was a week inside the thing we have always loved, and we worked it that way: more ritual than shift. Some books stopped us where we stood, taking us back to old days of studying and reading.

Four floors up, the university carried on: students in black capes, notebooks, coffee, the whole hive. Down where we were, none of it reached us. Tall shelves, the next box, the next book, and the quiet of a lot of paper in one place.

The clock and the calendar say we spent eight hours a day down there, seven days in a row. For us it was months, in cycles of many, many more than eight hours.

Going back up

On the last day we finished at the end of the working day. We climbed slowly up a spiral staircase that seemed to have no end. The students had gone home and the whole building was quiet, so the slow time came up the stairs with us. Then the street, and Porto's traffic, and little by little it mixed us back in with everyone else, until we were just four more people on their way home.

I wasn't ready to come up. Some days I still think about going back down there, just for a while.

Libraries, collections, a whole house, or one thing that needs more care than any box can give — in Porto and across Portugal. Clear coordination, no pressure. Tell us what needs moving and we'll agree the next step with you.

We look after your things. But we also try to look after the moment you're going through.