The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
I am one of the last indoor places that wants nothing from you.
One of me burned at Alexandria and we are still annoyed about it.
I file the entire universe of knowledge using decimal numbers.
I lend. I do not sell.
Shelves, books, and quiet.
Library
Dewey designed his system in 1876 out of sheer frustration with the shelves in front of him. Most of the world still files by it.
The oldest one we can still read belonged to Ashurbanipal at Nineveh in the seventh century BC, and it survived because the building burned: the clay tablets were fired hard by the flames that destroyed everything else. Alexandria's decline was slower and duller than the legend, a matter of funding and neglect across centuries rather than one great blaze. The modern public library is largely a Victorian invention, and Andrew Carnegie paid for over two and a half thousand of them, on one condition — that the town commit to running the place afterwards.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #17 · today's mystery · the vault
Previous: mystery #16. Next: mystery #18. Or try #12, #13, #14, #15, #16, #18.