The Glass Catalogue

TW-124 is stored in an archival container in Sector 2. Access is restricted to Level 3 and above. Personnel who read entries are to record the recalled text in full and submit it for archiving. No personnel is to read more than one entry per month due to risk of catalogue-memory displacement, in which recalled texts begin overwriting genuine memories.

TW-124 is a library catalogue, printed on standard library card stock, that contains entries for books that do not exist. The entries are written in standard cataloguing format and include call numbers, summaries, and author biographies. Researchers who read an entry in full find themselves able to recall the full text of the described book, including passages, chapter structure, and emotional responses to reading it — despite the book never having been written. The recalled texts are internally consistent and cannot be distinguished from genuine literary memory.

TW-124 was recovered from a university library that was undergoing deaccession. A librarian noted the catalogue did not correspond to any holdings and that she had spent 3 days 'reading' books she could not locate on any shelf.