One assignment took me into the Special Collection, where I was shown about by two of the librarians, Guy Aron and Sam Gibbard, gracious, quietly enthusiastic men. The books in their care are fantastic beasts. If I abandon the homunculus metaphor for a moment, the RMIT University Library Special Collection is the bibliographic equivalent of one of those abyssal habitats found at the bottom of the Pacific or Atlantic. It’s strangely lit, and quiet.