During my time conducting research at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, I came across a text I hadn't expected to find. The text in question was Aʿzam's Rosegarden, an anthology of Persian poets composed in South India in the nineteenth century. I had seen a copy once before, but only as a manuscript at Aligarh Muslim University in India, and, until this point, was unaware the text existed in print, and in the library, no less, where I spent most of my waking hours. I was relieved to be able to look over the text again and not be solely reliant on my notes made several months earlier. Maybe I missed something. I probably missed something.

Curiously, the book was not held in the African and Middle East Division (AMED), home to the library's Persian materials, where I sat staring at the catalogue screen, but in the library's Asian Division downstairs. By this point, I had been researching at the Library of Congress long enough to know which reading rooms held which materials, but not once had I discovered, nor been informed otherwise by the library's staff, that Persian books could be found anywhere other than in the AMED reading room. Persian materials, like those in Arabic, Hebrew and Turkish, were kept in the AMED reading room and that was that. I jotted down the call number and hurried out the door, around an exhibition on discovering the Americas, down a marble staircase and through a throng of visitors and students before finally arriving at the end of a long corridor where the Asian reading room was tucked away.

By now my small sojourn had elicited a larger, admittedly disproportional, sense of joy at making an unexpected discovery. I promptly filled out the request form and handed it over to the librarian at the circulation desk. Just as promptly, the little green slip was back in my hand, unprocessed. My clearly euphoric interest was met with a blank stare. ‘This book isn't here. Can't be. Persian materials are kept in the AMED reading room. Second floor’, I was told. ‘No, no, it's here, the catalogue says so’, I replied.