For sixty years, she’d assumed it was a typo. “Barring code,” she’d whisper to new assistants. “As in ‘excluding.’ Whatever’s behind there, the code doesn’t want us to find it.”
It was about keeping the reader in.
Then the budget cuts came. The library was to be gutted, turned into a co-working space. Mrs. Penvellyn, aged seventy-two, decided she had nothing left to lose. barring code