The library in Húsavík sits two streets back from the harbor, in a low white building that was, until 1978, a fish-processing shed.

On the front desk, on the morning I visited, were three things: a hardcover of Halldór Laxness's Sjálfstætt fólk, a small brown envelope of carrot seeds, and a brass key with a paper tag that read fiddle, no. 2.

The librarian is named Sigríður Hallsdóttir. She is sixty-one. She has run the library since 2003.

She does not call it a library of things. She calls it a library. The other things, she says, are simply also there.

The seed collection began in 2009, after a local farmer brought in a jar of his grandmother's turnip seeds and asked if anyone would like some. Sigríður put them in a drawer beside the card catalog.

The instruments came in 2012. A music teacher had three fiddles she no longer used. She asked if the library would lend them. Sigríður said yes before she had thought about it.

The bicycles came last, in 2017. There are now nine of them, kept in a shed behind the building, available for two-week loans.

None of this, Sigríður insists, is innovation. She points to the original Icelandic word for library, bókasafn, which means simply a collection of books. She points out that the word safn on its own means collection, gathering, hoard.

“None of this, Sigríður insists, is innovation.”

"A library," she says, "is a place that holds what the town wants to share. The books came first because the books were what we had."

In the back room she keeps the ledger. It is hand-written. She has been keeping it for twenty-three years, in violation of several recommendations from the regional library authority.

She showed me an entry from February of 2019: a single name, a single date, a single line that read fiddle, no. 1; two weeks; returned with new string.

The man who borrowed it, she said, had not played in forty years. He returned it, played a piece for her in the children's section, and then asked to borrow it again the next month.

Húsavík has a population of just over twenty-three hundred. The library has thirty-one hundred and forty-two active card holders. The discrepancy is explained by the seasonal workers at the whale-watching companies, who all get cards.

The seed library is run on what Sigríður calls the two-for-one rule. You take seeds. At the end of the season, you return twice what you took, dried and labeled. Most people, she says, return more.

The carrot envelope I saw on the desk was from a family in the next valley. Their grandmother had grown the same variety since the 1940s. They had brought in enough for eighty packets.

I asked Sigríður whether she worried about losing the seeds, or the fiddles, or the bicycles. She said she did not, mostly, because the town was small and people knew each other.

She said the only thing she had ever permanently lost was a copy of an Alice Munro story collection, in 2011, which a tourist had taken on a flight to Berlin and never returned.

The Munro, she said, was more replaceable than the fiddle.

She showed me the children's reading room, which has a low shelf at knee height containing books, a basket of wooden blocks, and a pair of small rubber boots in size 24.

The boots, she explained, were for children whose families had forgotten theirs. They were lent the same way as the fiddles. Two weeks. No questions.

I asked her what she thought a library was for. She did not answer right away. She straightened the carrot envelope.

"A library," she said, "is the thing a town keeps when it cannot agree on anything else. Books, seeds, fiddles. It does not matter. What matters is that it is kept."