Walk with WASD or the arrow keys (Shift to hurry), or your left thumb on a phone. Look by dragging. Click or tap the floor to walk there.

Look closer. Scroll the wheel, pinch the trackpad or the screen, or press + / − to zoom in on the shelves and read the spines; Z or the magnifier steps through 1×, 2.5× and 6×, and Esc zooms back out. Zoomed in, the title of the book you aim at shows at the bottom of the screen.

Books. The east wall is the golden wall: gilt shelves backed in oxblood, under brass lights. The narratives stand at its heart, with the WPA interviews above them, lit, and a gilt runner leading to them: begin there; to one side are Africa and the diaspora and the radical tradition, to the other the speeches and essays and the historians. The fiction, the poets and the witnesses stand in gilt beside the fire, with scripture and the spirit; useful knowledge and natural history are on the south wall; the great books of the world, in leather with dark title labels, fill the Great Hall. The books of the person you read as glow for you. The plain old volumes are the room's own. Click a book to take it down; you carry one at a time. Click an open shelf to put it there, or a table to start a pile. Piles stay where you leave them.

The Great Hall. The double doors on the south wall, across from the fire, open when you finish your first chapter. Behind them is a domed hall with a card catalog at its centre, and shelves for the library to grow into. Off its east side, the Banned Books gallery opens when you finish your first whole book (some are short). In a friend's room, the doors follow the host's reading.

Read. Sit in any chair, sofa, stool or window seat while holding a book and it opens. Or press R to read standing up. Your place in every book is kept. The speaker button in the reader reads the book aloud to you.

Notes in the margin. In the reader, select a few words (or tap a paragraph) and choose Note. Your notes stay with the book; in a shared room, friends see them too.

The cinema. Pull the cord by the fire and a screen comes down over the mantel; the projector behind the sofa rises to show race films and early Black cinema, all in the public domain. Click the projector to choose a film, or paste a direct .mp4 or .webm link, or a YouTube link (which plays in a window). In a shared room everyone sees the same film. To watch it filling your own screen, press G or the full-screen button; M or the speaker button mutes it for you alone. Esc closes the window.

Rearrange. Press Tab (or Arrange) to move furniture, turn it with Q and E, add new pieces or put them away. Bookcases you add come with empty shelves for your own sections.

Read together. Invite makes a link. Friends who open it walk into your room as their reader, see what you're reading and can talk in the room. On the shared claude.ai page there is no link to send: everyone who opens the page walks into one shared library (up to six at a time is comfortable), and books and furniture stay where you all leave them.

The texts are U.S. public domain, from the Project Gutenberg editions; see SOURCES.md.