A University of Cape Town professor and a Cambridge undergraduate were walking down the steps of the Smuts Memorial last summer and discussing what a small world it was. Over a leisurely lunch, talking about the relative merits and downfalls of dissertation titles, conversation was punctuated by those diversions that, when overheard, are completely nauseating. “Oh, do you know X, he’s my ex-colleague’s son’s best friend’s squash partner?” “No! But he lives down the corridor from my supervision partner’s college son’s sister.” And so on. When tattle turned to the University Library, however, the tone became suddenly animated: He knew Bird-Man and Penguin Boy, and though both confessed themselves too afraid to approach the bookish Trojans to read their name tags, suddenly English undergraduate and 60-year old professor of Modern African History were joined in an earth shattering moment of discovery: Cambridge UL librarians are the scariest in the whole world.

These guardians of the bookstacks eye you so carefully as you hand over the History of South American Amphibians that you might wonder if (i) they were asking themselves if you might be merely after a new doorstop; (ii) they were using their inbuilt Iris Recognition System to identify overdue library-fines, or (iii) they were daring you, kiddo, to stub out your next cigarette on page 213 and try and bring that book back. I was only too pleased to hear from my professor friend that having the fancy title makes them no more fraternal.

Alongside this motley crew of literati-in-league are those who perpetuate this cruelty and who, in what can only be described as a masochistic display of martyrdom to their thesis, bolster the power of said guardians with brio. These people have buried their identities, personal relationships and quite possibly their hopes of any paid profession in order to walk into the Library every morning and, sluggishly pushing those gilded doors like literary Stepford Wives, reach towards the ultimate prize: the day when they, too, can order their own thesis from the West Room. Last year, I was approached by a woman who announced “I’ve come all the way from Cardiff to find my new book on Newton.” I kid you not.

The UL is a stalker’s paradise. There are enough empty bookcases in the North Front for all manner of peeking through the darkness. Have you ever noticed how many of those timed switches don’t actually work (read permanently disabled by some sweaty nutcase in an ‘I love Plato’ t-shirt)? And do you really know if all those trolley-pushing drones are actual employees – trolleys that, I might add, are always curiously empty?

The UL is also an OCD sufferer’s paradise. If you have ever seen the look of terror twist on bookish faces during a library fire alarm, you will know precisely the dangers of breaking such an intricately planned daily routine. A rough estimate might suggest that approximately 63.4% of UL attendees arrive at exactly the same time each day, leave according to an equally regular schedule, sit on the same beige seat in South Front 3, and cut their cheese scone at 8 minutes past lunchtime with exactly the same perpendicular stroke of the knife.

Germaine Greer wrote in the Guardian this week on the wonders of the public library. “Where once libraries went to considerable lengths to keep people out”, she effuses, “now they struggle to entice all kinds of people in, the young, the poor, the lame, the blind.” One imagines she did not have our own UL in mind. With the rate of library fines, the creaky buildings reminiscent of World War Two bomb shelters, and the murky pull-cord lighting, “the poor, the lame and the blind” who leave the building might not have arrived in such a state.

Returning to our favourite librarians: it would be possible to be angry, to rail at the unfairness of staffing a university library with the type of people who petrify readers to the extent of dissuading them from actually reading the books (while themselves no doubt working their way through the Ladybird books at lunchtime and throwing Milton at the dog when they get home). But it is precisely these fantasies that make the UL, rather than an object of ire, a place of fascination with urban myths stretching as far as the slopes of Table Mountain. If this article has intrigued you enough, it is always possible to peruse Charles E Sayles’ 1905 tome, The University Library, Cambridge. Order from the Rare Books Room, classmark Adv.d.119.4. Show your unabashed love of our beloved bibliotheque; just don’t expect a smile.

Olivia Day