MISQUAH — The library has spent the summer being proud of its record forty-one summer-reading enrollees in the abstract. This week, with the smoke advisory canceling the outdoors, it got them in the concrete — substantially all of them, substantially all at once, for three consecutive days that staff will remember as the week the building found out what forty-one means.

It means the beanbags rotate on a system. It means the read-aloud corner ran continuous sessions “like a ferry,” in the words of Megan Tollefson, who has minded the desk all summer during Ruth Aune’s recovery and who instituted the ferry schedule on day one, before the need was general. It means the picture-book shelves were reshelved three times daily by a volunteer force of the readers themselves, organized by Brynn Solberg, grade 5, whose management style was described by one subordinate as “nice but real.”

The animal-sticker reading ladder on the wall, which has tracked the summer’s progress rung by rung, gained a new rung Thursday — added not in pencil, as the last one was, but in ink, a change of medium Tollefson authorized on the grounds that “there is no version of this summer where we take it back down.”

Mrs. Aune, home and recovering and under orders that this newspaper respects, is reported to be receiving the week’s numbers by telephone each evening, and to have asked twice whether the ink rung was straight. It is straight. Tollefson used a level, on advice from the hardware store, where Walt Sorensen threw in the pencil for nothing. Cards for Mrs. Aune may still be left at the desk, where the pile, like everything else in the building this week, has needed reshelving.