The institution is on the rails today*, leaving the department to man the front desk, and having taken at least one of these new arrivals with them:

• Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin: it turns out that the recently acquired first in this series by Tchaikovsky scratched an itch the institution didn’t know it had. “Get more of these,” came the command; what could we do but obey?
• Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory: ah, see above. Note also that the minimum purchase limit on loyalty card stamps at the department’s local purveyor of literature means it’s almost always better to buy two books on the same day, if you know you’re gonna buy the second one at some point in the not-too-distant…
• Delany, Babel-17: … though that’s not necessarily a good justification for buying a third. Nonetheless, this particular Delany has been referenced a number of times in the last few weeks, in various different places, and had never heretofore been accessioned here. That omission has been amended.

* — The institution is, at time of this posting, en route by rail to a village just outside Wiemar, where they will be spending much of the week in a mansion which once owned to a founding figure in German poetry, discussing the theoretical work of one Nelson Goodman with twelve people they’ve heretofore never met.