Margaret Rogerson is the writer of the New York Instances bestsellers An Enchantment of Ravens and Sorcery of Thorns. She has a bachelor’s diploma in cultural anthropology from Miami College. When not studying or writing she enjoys sketching, gaming, making pudding, and watching extra documentaries than is socially acceptable (in accordance with some). She lives close to Cincinnati, Ohio, beside a backyard filled with hummingbirds and roses. Go to her at MargaretRogerson.com or on Twitter @MarRogerson.
Libraries are on the forefront of my new e book, Sorcery of Thorns, during which the Nice Libraries of Austermeer include harmful magical grimoires that whisper on the cabinets and rattle beneath iron chains. Sword-wielding librarians referred to as wardens are charged with their care and maintaining. The principle character, Elisabeth, was orphaned on the steps of a Nice Library and raised there among the many books. She goals of changing into a warden—a future that appears fated on account of her particular reference to the grimoires, which have personalities of their very own and supplied her with friendship and firm throughout an in any other case lonely childhood.
Very like Elisabeth, I spent a variety of time in a library rising up. I went by means of books so rapidly that my dad and mom took me there for a brand new stack of novels each week. Inhaling that musty, vanilla-like odor distinctive to libraries at all times appears like coming dwelling to me. And I’ve little doubt that my native library modified my life without end. On a snow day throughout my sophomore yr of highschool, a librarian handed me Magnificence by Robin McKinley, the e book that went on to encourage my debut novel, An Enchantment of Ravens. In developing with the thought for my second novel, I knew I wished to jot down a couple of matter I felt really captivated with, and books and libraries sprang immediately to thoughts. Sorcery of Thorns is a love letter to libraries, each actual and fictional, and all of the readers like me who discovered themselves in books.
Belle’s Library
I do know I’m not the one one who printed on the library in Magnificence and the Beast at a younger age. Who amongst us didn’t completely lose their thoughts when the Beast gave it to Belle as a present? The balconies! The ladders! Sufficient books to retire completely from society and spend the remainder of our lives studying in entrance of an enormous baroque hearth! I feel this scene altered me without end in two methods: 1) it gave me impossibly excessive relationship requirements, and a couple of) it lit the spark that ignited my lifelong love of fantasy libraries.
Unsurprisingly, plenty of Magnificence and the Beast–impressed components discovered their manner into Sorcery of Thorns. I couldn’t resist together with a luxurious magical manor home with a fantastical library-turned-study, or a love curiosity who broods there in isolation inside the grip of a darkish household curse.
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The Clayr’s Library
The Clayr’s LibraryIf I had been pressured to decide on my absolute favourite library in any fantasy world, it must be the Clayr’s Library in Lirael by Garth Nix. This library is a much less a regular library and extra a repository of information—it holds not solely books, but additionally magical artifacts and collections of objects from across the globe. There are even monsters imprisoned deep inside its Previous Ranges. Studying it as a young person, I keep in mind being obsessive about the element that everybody who labored there needed to carry a whistle and different precautionary tools in case they discovered themselves at risk and wanted to name for assist. As if this weren’t unbelievable sufficient, the library is constructed deep inside a frozen glacier. Lirael was such an enormous supply of inspiration for Sorcery of Thorns that I included a white cat within the story as a reference to one in every of my favourite characters, Mogget. For anybody excited by books about magical libraries, it will at all times be my first suggestion.
The Citadel Library
I’m optimistic I had the identical awestruck e book nerd expression on my face as Samwell Tarly when he first entered the Citadel library in season 6 of Sport of Thrones. This was lengthy earlier than I began writing Sorcery of Thorns, and the imagery left such an enduring impression on me that it was one in every of my first sources of visible inspiration once I started creating Austermeer’s Nice Libraries. I wished to seize the same sense of scope and grandeur, nearly like a cross between a library and a cathedral. I really like how the Citadel library makes use of mirrors and lenses to refocus mild from its excessive clerestory home windows as an alternative of endangering its flammable books with candles. This design affect ended up expressing itself probably the most within the Royal Library, the biggest and grandest of the Nice Libraries, whose large stained glass ceiling resembles the night time sky. And the books are equally chained—albeit for utterly totally different causes.
The Hogwarts Library
I can’t write about magical libraries with out together with the dearest place to my coronary heart, Hogwarts. Although many of the books listed here are inanimate, those which have a life and can of their very own left the most important impression on me—the tome that screams at Harry within the restricted part, The Monster E book of Monsters, even Tom Riddle’s sinister diary. Part of me at all times wished that we may have seen extra of these forms of books within the sequence, or that we may have visited a large wizarding library exterior of Hogwarts. I wrote Sorcery of Thorns as a love letter to the entire fictional libraries on this checklist, however the Harry Potter sequence most of all. With out it, I’m unsure I ever would have give you the Nice Libraries’ sentient sorcerous grimoires that whisper and spit ink, that sing on moonlit nights and rattle beneath iron chains.
The Biblioteca Joanina
How a couple of real-life library uncommon sufficient to belong in a fantasy world? The magnificent Biblioteca Joanina in Portugal is an 18th century baroque library with a secret lurking behind its gilded cabinets: creatures which have dwelled there for hundreds of years, and that the librarians even declare they will hear chittering to one another on overcast days. What are these secretive residents? Bats. Even stranger—they stay there with permission. The bats have a symbiotic relationship with the library, rising from behind the cabinets each night time at nightfall to feast on bugs that may in any other case hurt the priceless, weak books. Once I first heard about this, it nearly appeared stranger than fiction. It acquired me excited about what sorts of pests may exist in magical libraries, and finally led me to one in every of my favourite creations, the booklice that develop to monumental sizes and close to invincibility after gorging themselves on enchanted parchment.
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