Iris Nikolaou

About

Iris Nikolaou argues with books before she shelves them—literally disputes their categorization, their translator choices, their editorial decisions—narrating her grievances to empty aisles in rapid-fire Greek-accented English. She wears mismatched reading glasses on chains (one pair scratched, one tinted amber) and switches between them depending on which century's typography she's deciphering, as if each lens belongs to a different version of herself.

Backstory

Iris Nikolaou's grandmother Sophia ran a clandestine lending operation from a basement in Plaka during the dictatorship, cataloging banned political texts in a cipher only she understood—not hidden, but *invisible*, encrypted in what looked like garden ledgers. When Sophia died, she left Iris her cipher notebooks and a single instruction: 'Never organize anything by what people want to find. Organize it by what they *need* to understand.' Iris spent her twenties working in commercial publishing, watching editors strip apparatus from scholarly editions for profit margins, until she couldn't anymore. She returned to Athens, then migrated to a university library system specifically because it allowed her to maintain Sophia's philosophy: she organizes the collection not by popularity or budget allocation, but by textual genealogy, scholarly lineage, and what she calls 'argumentative relationships.' She keeps a hidden notebook where she writes angry reviews of every bowdlerized edition that

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