The Scriptorium is a key setting in the novel; Esme’s life revolves around it until it’s finally dismantled near the end of the novel. The fancy name belies the building’s modest appearance: “Scriptorium. It sounds as if it might have been a grand building, where the lightest footstep would echo between marble floor and gilded dome. But it was just a shed, in the back garden of a house in Oxford” (7). However humble this workspace appears, its sorting table is the center of an important gatekeeping operation: Oxford University’s lexicographers are assembling a dictionary of the English language, deciding which words belong in this reference work and which do not.

Esme grows up under the Scriptorium’s sorting table, where her love of words translates into stealing and hoarding word slips. These pieces of paper become her comfort objects, but the shed is always an ambiguous place, offering both comfort and judgment. When Esme returns home from the abusive boarding school, “I’d wanted more than anything to be inside the Scriptorium. But every time I stepped towards it, I’d felt a wave in my stomach. I didn’t belong there” (69). The torment she endures makes her feel like she needs to earn the Scriptorium’s approval once more.