The Library of Alexandria

Just after Greece was found by the Greeks (long before it was found by tourists all looking to go somewhere to get away from each other), the Greeks built a fabulous library. The library had been built for the sole purpose of having a place to store all the till receipts from the city of Alexandria, for they were sticklers for accounting. One gloriously sunny morning a young accountant had been reading a particularly good book called the Iliad. It had been such a page turner he took it into work with him and finished it on the sly, whilst his supervisor dealt with a particularly vexing tax return of the local jam miner. Having no where to put his book when he had finished and not wanting to be seen leaving with it at the end of the day he popped it onto a high shelf. Over the course of a few months the young and lets be frank bored accountant snuck in with the complete works of homer and then polished off Hesiod’s poems and many more. Soon he had to start finding other shelves on which to put his books. After a while he began to notice that some of his books would go missing and then return a few weeks later. Curious he placed a note in the front of all his tomes with a date of when it had been placed on the shelf. Now it had been strange that the books went missing but what was extraordinary was that when they came back the borrower would write the return date in. And so the first library in the world was started. Isn’t it marvellous what a little bit of boredom can do.