It was his life's ambition to become a Librarian. Dexter loved collecting things. He was a gifted child. He'd discovered how to become immortal and travel through time during a Differential Calculus class. It was difficult to say when exactly the discovery had happened, as the temporal after-spill meant 2nd period before lunch lasted 114 years. He failed Mathematics, but he was very good at differential calculus.

During his darker teenage years he'd had a brief flirtation with Necromancy and also considered becoming an Estate Agent - but he found working with the Dead too depressing. After amassing a small collection of souls he discovered he wasn't particularly interested in people's souls. He was interested in their stories. 

Stories need minds to exist. And The Librarians devoted themselves to stories. Every story. Everywhere. Everywhen.

An invention, however great, does not need a great mind to bring it to life. It has a life of it's own. The antibiotic, the atom bomb, the easy-pour orange carton - would all have slunk up from the sludge of the great unconscious eventually. This is because there is no such thing as a scientific discovery - it would be more accurate to label it a scientific re-discovery.

Stories are not science.

A story can only be written once, by one person, at one time. When no living being remembers it, the story dies, and can never be born again.

The Librarians travelled to worlds new and old, learnt ancient languages, dug up corpses, and braved terrible dangers - relying only on their love of stories (and their god-like magical powers).

Dexter had cut his teeth searching for long-lost tales written in the dust of an extinct planet, but once he reached the Fourth Line he decided to follow an even harder path. An Esoteric Librarian left no envelope unturned in search of scribbles. They listened for a heartbeat in the wind - the breath of a story, like an unwanted love-child conceived in passion and carelessly aborted. The unpublished and unproofed. The raw-meat, the unchewed, undigested idea of a story.

This is what Dexter collected.