“Sure, I’ll grab that book about Grover Cleveland you requested! Wait here for a week or three.”

Librarians at the University of Maryland don’t give half a damn.

Other readers may proclaim their love for books. They may think they’re devoted, willing and ready to pick up a book in the most trying of situations. Compared to these librarians, other readers are soft.

As Karen Adams reports for WNEW, ten percent of UMD’s library, about twenty thousand volumes, was attacked by mold this summer.  The problem is so bad that librarians have shut down an entire floor of the library. Clean-up costs are projected to run to $100,000. But, as library spokesperson Eric Bartheld tells Adams

Students will still be able to check out the moldy books. However, if a student needs one of the books, they can request it through the library and a staff member will locate it, clean off the mold and deliver the book to the student.

That’s right. Students will still be able to check out books. Books that are buried in an entire floor full of mold. All because some hard ass librarian is willing to pick up their sweat-grimed machete, daub their eyes with grease paint, and march off into the alien jungle that has sprung up around them. Not only will some tough-as-nails librarian wade hip deep in spores to fetch that book you’ll probably only skim, but they will then, before taping closed their own green-smeared wounds, a broken cigarette dangling from cracked and slime-flecked lips, wipe that book clean. All this so you and your dainty lungs can read without worrying about toxic, toxic mold.

The mold is non-toxic and he says, “generally harmless to people although we urge anyone with sensitivities and allergies to stay away.”

Well, okay, maybe not toxic, but imagine Bartheld’s sneer of derision as he said the word “allergies,” his own lungs a marshy terrarium of mucous and layer upon layer of twitching mold. You are just going to leave this book, unread, in a stack by your bed for a week and then blindly cite it in a paper anyway. Meanwhile Bartheld and his cadre of hard-bitten librarians taste the grave every time they burp.

“Making the library mold-free is no easy task,” Adams writes. “Cleanup could take anywhere from a couple weeks to a few months.” During which time, presumably, UMD’s librarians will be sleeping in shifts, lest their torches go out and the mold ease silently forward to take root in the moist corners of their eyes while they sleep, while they twitch, dreaming their green dusty dreams.

Think, reader, the next time you break from your book to complain about your immaculate breeze-swept lawn being a bit too scratchy, or if you find yourself in a black mood because the pillows under your head just don’t feel perfect. Think of these befouled warriors for literature, the wild-eyed mold-scrubbers of the UMD library. Think and know that you may be a reader, but these, these are librarians.