The bindery sits on the third floor of a building on Vico Lungo del Gelso, in the Spanish Quarter of Naples. To reach it one climbs a stone staircase that has been worn into a slight bowl by four centuries of feet.

The bookbinder is a man named Pasquale Russo. He is seventy-eight. He has been binding books since he was eleven.

His sister, Carmela, is eighty-one. She has been sitting in the workshop, on the same wooden chair, since she was twelve.

She does not bind books. She has never bound books. She comes to the workshop, every morning, because it is what she has always done.

What she does, when asked, is recite the catalog of the Biblioteca Comunale di San Lorenzo. She recites it by heart. She recites it in the order it was shelved.

The Biblioteca Comunale di San Lorenzo was a small public library in the parish of San Lorenzo Maggiore, founded in 1879 and closed in 1956 after structural damage from the war that had finally become unignorable.

Its collection, approximately eleven thousand volumes, was dispersed. Some went to the Biblioteca Nazionale. Some went to the parish itself. Some, by less formal routes, went into private collections.

Carmela's father had been the binder for the library. He had repaired its books for thirty-four years. He had brought them home, two and three at a time, in canvas bags, and he had repaired them in the workshop on Vico Lungo del Gelso.

Carmela had watched him repair them. She had also, beginning at about the age of nine, begun to memorize them.

She did not, she has said, set out to memorize the catalog. She simply remembered the books. She remembered the bindings, the titles, the order in which they came home.

“She did not, she has said, set out to memorize the catalog.”

Her father had kept a small handwritten ledger of which books were in the bindery for repair. Carmela had read the ledger every evening. She had read it for nine years.

When the library closed, in 1956, Carmela was twelve. By that point she knew, she has said, where every book in the library belonged.

She did not tell anyone for many years. There seemed no reason to. The library was gone. The books were dispersed.

In 1994 a graduate student from the University of Naples came to the bindery looking for information about a particular volume she believed had once been in the San Lorenzo collection.

Pasquale, who was then in his late forties, told her he did not remember. Carmela, who had been listening, asked the student to describe the volume.

The student described it. Carmela told her, without hesitation, that the volume had been on the second shelf of the third bookcase from the door, between a copy of Vico's Scienza Nuova and a Latin grammar.

She also told her that the volume had been rebound in 1948, by her father, in dark green calfskin, and that the title had been stamped slightly crooked because her father had been ill that week.

The student wrote this down. She came back the next week with three more questions. Carmela answered all of them.

The graduate student is now a professor of book history at the University of Bologna. Her name is Lucia Romano. She has been visiting Carmela, three or four times a year, for thirty-one years.

Romano has, over those years, transcribed approximately seventy percent of the catalog as Carmela remembers it. The transcription is now eight hundred pages long.

Romano has cross-referenced Carmela's memories against archival records wherever possible. The records, where they exist, confirm Carmela's account in every detail Romano has been able to check.

I visited the bindery in April. Carmela sat in her chair. She did not look up when I entered. She was watching her brother work.

Romano asked her, in Italian, about a particular volume. A copy of Manzoni's I promessi sposi, an edition from the 1870s.

Carmela closed her eyes. She said the volume had been on the fourth shelf of the seventh bookcase. She said the binding had been brown morocco. She said it had been donated to the library in 1903 by a widow named Esposito whose son had died of fever.

She said her father had repaired the spine in 1951. She said the repair had taken two days. She said her father had complained that the leather was too dry.

Romano nodded. She had verified, from a parish record, the donation in 1903. She had not been able to verify the repair. She believed it.

Carmela opened her eyes. She looked at me for the first time. She said, in Italian: "The library is not gone. It is only that the building is gone."

I have thought about this sentence many times since. I am not sure I understand it. I am also not sure I need to.