There is a particular ceremony to the closing of a shop that has been open for forty years, and Cedric Fowler, who is sixty-seven and who has been the only owner of Fowler’s Books since 1986, refused to observe any of it. There was no speech. There was no final sale. There was no photographer. There was, on Friday afternoon, a small gathering of the volunteer cataloguing committee in the front room of the shop, drinking tea from Mr Fowler’s mismatched mugs and eating a sponge cake that Dorothy Cresswell-Hume had baked that morning, and at ten minutes past five Mr Fowler looked at his watch and said, in the mild voice he uses to decline requests he has no intention of entertaining: “I believe we should let the shop close at the usual time.”

The usual time is half past five. It has been half past five since 1986. At twenty-five past, Mr Fowler walked to the door, turned the hand-lettered sign from OPEN to CLOSED — the sign is cardboard, dated to the mid-1990s, and slightly buckled — and stood for a moment beside it looking at the empty shelves. The front room had held, at the beginning of March, approximately four thousand volumes. On Friday afternoon it held seventy-three: a single shelf of poetry that Mr Fowler had decided to keep, and which he proposes to take to his sister’s house in the Eastfold, where there is, he says, “a spare room and not enough books in it.”

At half past five exactly, he stepped outside, locked the door behind him, and put the key in the inside pocket of his jacket. Then he walked the two hundred and forty metres to Cooperage Lane, where Millicent Graves’s lending library stands on its handcart beside Penrose’s flooded cellar, and returned a volume of Thessarine lyric poetry in translation that he had borrowed on the fourth of April. Mrs Graves marked the return in her ledger — the handwritten ledger in which every borrowing and return has been recorded since the library opened in March — and offered him another volume. He accepted a collected edition of the harbour verses of Cressida Loane. He said he would return it in a fortnight.

“I am not leaving the city,” he told me, walking back up Threadneedle Street in the last of the afternoon sun. “I am only leaving the shop. There is a difference.”

Where the books have gone

The cataloguing effort — forty-three volunteers, seven weeks, a small sub-committee for the sorting of the natural history section — has placed eleven thousand two hundred and forty volumes in institutions, schools, private hands, and the homes of volunteers who refused, politely, to be paid for their labour and accepted a book or two instead.

The Polytechnic Library has taken three thousand one hundred volumes: maps, surveys, natural history, a near-complete run of the Bobington Harbour Pilot from 1848 to 1952, and a small collection of technical manuals that Sylvia Hatch, the Polytechnic’s deputy librarian, described as “the sort of thing one finds only once.” The Royal Institute took four hundred volumes, mostly biographies and histories. The Marchmont Street Primary received two hundred and fifty children’s books, boxed and delivered by Mrs Alleyn in person on Thursday. The Thornhill branch library, recently reopened after the winter damp, took six hundred volumes of fiction in three editions of varying quality. The Millgate Mission, which runs a reading room for sailors and mill workers, took one hundred and eighty volumes including a complete collected Cressida Loane in the 1937 edition.

The remainder — some six thousand volumes, largely fiction and miscellaneous non-fiction — has been distributed through the Cooperage Lane lending library (which now holds approximately one thousand two hundred books, with a third handcart under construction by Herbert Finch), the Dockside Free Library, and the unexpectedly enthusiastic cultural clubs of the Edgeminster Workingmen’s Institute, whose representative made the journey by the morning train on three separate Tuesdays and each time returned with a steamer trunk.

Approximately two thousand eight hundred volumes remain unsold, unplaced, or in the process of being placed. Cedric Fowler has taken these to his sister’s house. “They are the ones I could not decide about,” he said. “I will decide about them there.”

The Birch volume

The single most significant item in the shop — the first edition of Clement Birch’s Fauna of the Lower Ashwater with margin annotations in Birch’s own hand — has been formally accepted into the Polytechnic Library’s rare books collection. The transfer was completed on Wednesday morning. Sylvia Hatch carried the book across the city herself, wrapped in acid-free tissue and then in a canvas bag, and refused to accept a porter’s assistance.

The book has been assessed by the Polytechnic’s conservation team and found to be in better condition than the catalogued copies. Its annotations — which expand Birch’s published harbour seal observations and include the folded sketch map of 1891 haul-out sites — are being transcribed by Dr Annalise Fenn-Coulthard, whose current seal monitoring programme has, in the last three weeks, been organised in substantial part around the locations Birch marked on his map.

“He counted them four times,” Fenn-Coulthard said at the Polytechnic on Thursday, turning the book’s pages with a gloved hand. “He was not guessing. He came back, and he watched, and he wrote it down. I am doing the same thing, one hundred and thirty-five years later, in the same place, and I believe he would recognise what I am doing. I would like to believe that.”

Sylvia Hatch has confirmed that the book will be available for scholarly consultation from 1 June, and that a facsimile edition is under consideration by the Polytechnic Press. She declined to give a figure for the book’s monetary value. “It is now a library book,” she said. “Library books have no price.”

The key in the pocket

Cedric Fowler has declined to name a buyer or a new tenant for 12 Threadneedle Street. The lease has reverted to the landlord — a property trust based in Caldwell — and the ground floor is being advertised at a rent approximately double what Fowler was paying. Nothing has been signed. The front window, which for forty years displayed whatever book Fowler most wanted the street to notice, now displays a single volume: a copy of Clement Birch’s Fauna of the Lower Ashwater, second edition (not the annotated first, which is at the Polytechnic), opened to the page describing the harbour seals of 1891. Beside it, a small handwritten card in Fowler’s own hand reads: “They came back.”

Asked whether he would attend any future event marking the shop’s closure, Fowler shook his head. “There will not be an event,” he said. “There will only be a shop that used to be here.”

He walked home along Threadneedle Street, past the grocers, past the tailor, past the shuttered frontage of what used to be Moresby’s Tobacco. The key was still in his inside pocket. He had not, he said, any particular plan for what to do with it, but he thought he would probably keep it for a while.

“It is the only key I own that opens anything worth opening,” he said. “I am in no hurry to give it up.”