When Anthony Monday studies the exterior of the Hoosac Public Library he notices how:
"it was covered with fantastic carvings. The carvings nestled in all the angles and corners of the building. They showed stone dwarfs hammering on stone anvils, stone scholars reading stone books, stone dragons breathing curls of stone steam, and many other strange things."
Much of this reads as generic images, the sort of things you'd find carved in stone work on castles or cathedrals all over Europe. While it is likely a throwaway line, we did find something similar in the text of The Counterpane Fairy, a 1898 book by American author and artist Katharine Pyle (1863-1938). Perhaps the book was something Bellairs picked up at the library in his youth:
In every forge were little dwarfs dressed in leather and hammering at pieces of red-hot iron that lay on the anvils.
Do dwarfs hammering on anvils bring anything particular to mind or just images of Tolkien, Dungeons and Dragons, or other fantasy tropes?
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