6,412 Letters Asked ‘Did My Book Once Say Something Else?’ She Answered Every One.

ABERYSTWYTH, Wales — Rosalind Quayle-Abendroth ran the variant-editions enquiry desk at the deposit library in Aberystwyth from March 1983 until June 2024. She died on 9 April at her home in Borth, aged 88. The cause, her executor says and the certificate records, was pneumonia.

Her executor has given this newspaper her logbooks. Forty-one volumes, one to a year, recording every enquiry the desk took.

Six thousand four hundred and twelve letters, all asking one question: did my book once say something else?

What people wrote in about

A line remembered differently. A character who dies in the reader's memory and does not die on the page. A sentence somebody could quote from the age of nine and cannot now find in the book.

There is a real thing underneath the question. Books are reset between printings. Compositors correct errors and introduce them. Publishers cut for school editions without saying so on the title page. A deposit library holds the successive settings in order of receipt, which is much of what a deposit library is for.

Her desk existed to go and look.

The three columns

She confirmed a genuine setting or printing variant in 903 cases.

In 4,988 she found none. The book had always said what it says now, and the reader's memory had done the rest.

And 521 she left open. She did not close them, and instructed her deputy — after 1996, her successor — not to close them either. The last column for these reads o/s, outstanding, in some cases for thirty years.

The rule about the shelf

Every reply gave a shelfmark.

The rule is written inside the cover of the 1983 volume in her hand and repeated in the joining note she gave to two successors.

The answer was never the service. The service was that somebody told no could take a train, present a reader's ticket, ask for the book at that number and look at the page.

Eighty-five per cent, not eighty-six

Of the 5,891 enquiries she resolved, 4,988 were told that no variant existed. That is eighty-five per cent.

The figure read out at her memorial was eighty-six. It comes from a summary sheet she typed in 2019 — 4,654 of 5,412 — and it stops five years short. We print the discrepancy because she would have.

Her training note for the 1996 deputy says the answer is usually no, and that the desk is not there to produce yeses. It is there so that a question stops being a rumour and becomes a shelfmark.

Three boxes in a barn

The card index behind the logbooks, roughly 41,000 sheets, is recorded as destroyed in the 2014 move. The inventory lists eleven boxes, pulped.

Three were found in August 2025 in a barn near Kington, in Herefordshire, by Bronwen Astley-Nwosu, a retired stack supervisor who had put them in the back of her car rather than watch them go, and had told nobody for eleven years.

We counted a tray. About 11,000 cards. The library's record still says pulped, and the other eight boxes are accounted for by nobody, including two people who signed the inventory.

Enquiry 214, in another hand

She retired in June 2024. In November she wrote to her old desk, on the public form, as an ordinary member of the public, and did not mention that she had built it.

She asked about a line in a novel she had read as a girl and had catalogued herself in 1974. She quoted the line, said she had checked the three settings she could reach, and could not resolve it.

Her letter is not among the 6,412. It is in the volume after hers, in another hand, as enquiry 214. The reply is dated 6 February 2025.

Dear Mrs Quayle-Abendroth,

Thank you for your enquiry of 18 November. The library holds four settings of this title: the first, the reset second of the same year, the school edition of 1958 and the 1971 reissue. I have collated the relevant leaf in all four.

The line you quote appears in none of them, and no variant is noted in the publisher's file deposited with us in 1983. I am recording the enquiry as resolved, no variant found.

The four settings are at bay 41, shelf D. The reading room is open Tuesday to Saturday and you would be very welcome.

N. Ilminster-Vaughan, enquiries assistant, variant editions

What this desk records

She was eighty-seven, she had catalogued the book herself, and she was wrong about it. The answer came back in the form she had spent forty-one years insisting on: a collation, a finding, a shelf number and an invitation.

Her successor's reply to this newspaper, printed below, takes our ending away from us. She did not go to bay 41. She was never going to. The rule was never that people go; it is that a desk which cannot name a shelf is not answering an enquiry, only reassuring somebody.

She was not a librarian, and that letter is correcting a draft of this obituary in which we had called her one. She was an enquiries assistant, grade 4, for thirty-one of her forty-one years. She applied twice for the senior post and was appointed neither time, and the second time she trained the man who got it. The title is on the last line of all 6,412 replies.

Of the 521 open cases, eleven correspondents are alive. Two answered the telephone. Both asked whether the desk had ever got back to them. It had not. It is still open, which is the answer she would have given.