The Anonymous Book Boxes

The first box arrived at the Elm Street School library on a Monday in October. Aoife found it on her desk, wrapped in brown paper, with no note, no invoice and no return address.

Inside were twelve brand-new paperbacks. They were not the prize-winners she would have chosen. They were short novels in large print, graphic stories, a thin mystery with chapters only two pages long, and a book about trains.

She shelved them anyway. By Friday, nearly every one had been borrowed, mostly by students who had never taken anything home before.

The next box came on the first Monday of November, and another followed in December. The principal knew nothing about them, and neither did the parents' association. Aoife began to wonder who had been watching her shelves so carefully.

The only clue was the delivery slip. It had been stuck to the paper with a strip of tape, and it showed a courier stamp, a reference number and a sender code. One evening, after the children had gone home, she phoned the courier company and read out the code.

"That account belongs to a small joinery," the clerk said. "On Ridge Road, behind the old cinema. I'm afraid I can't give you a name."

On Saturday, Aoife walked there. The workshop smelled of sawdust and varnish. A man of about thirty-five was sanding a table leg, and he looked up at her with an expression that was not quite surprise.

"You must be the librarian," he said.

"I am. And you are…" She hesitated, because she knew his face from somewhere, and then the years slid away. A boy at the back of the library, eating his lunch behind the atlases, every single day for two winters.

He had been unable to read aloud in class without his stomach hurting. The canteen had been too loud, and the playground had been worse. So she had written him a pass in pencil that said "Lunch in the library," and she had never asked why.

"I still have it," the man said. He took out his wallet and, from behind a bank card, unfolded a small square of paper, soft as cloth. Her own handwriting looked back at her.

"I couldn't read a menu until I was fifteen," he explained. "The first book I ever finished was a thin one with short chapters. I thought, if I ever could, I'd send those to the next kid."

"They are the most borrowed books in the building," Aoife said.

"Please don't tell anyone it's me. I'd rather they think it's magic."

She kept her promise. On the first Monday of the next month, a new box appeared on her desk. She shelved all twelve books and slipped a small card inside each cover. It said, in her careful pencil: "A gift from a reader."