My dream job has been announced on Instagram.

The Charles Dickens Museum is hiring!
We’re delighted to announce this rare opportunity to join our museum as a curator. Working to maintain the museum as a high-profile heritage site, you’ll develop visitor-facing programs including displays and exhibitions, as well as undertaking key aspects of collections management and collections care tasks.

We’ve already metaphorically packed our bags and are ready to rush to London for the interview. On the way up the narrow scuffed stairs to the office, we will pause to admire Dickens’s beautiful reading desk, a velvet-flounced podium-style desk built to his specifications for book tours.

I love Dickens, though of course am not an applicant for this job. My Dickens fandom is symbolized by a prop for the interview, a Ziplock bag containing the Dickens novel I’ve not yet read. Years ago John Irving, whose favorite author is Dickens, said in an interview that he had read all of Dickens’s books except one, and was saving it for old age. In the TV show Lost, the scriptwriters borrowed this trope: the character Desmond, a survivor of a plane crash on an unknown island, saves a Ziplock bag with the Dickens book he has not yet read.

Hence my Ziplock Dickens would be a homage to Dickens. Did Desmond on Lost finally read his bDickens?

Are you saving a last volume of Dickens in a “Ziplock”?