A week later, days before the lockdown was declared, I met Gryffin for lunch at the Gramercy Tavern. He’d arranged a sale with another private buyer, including a codicil stating that, after sixteen months, The Book of Lamps and Banners would be made available to researchers through a deal with the Getty Library. I didn’t ask how much money he’d gotten. The fact that the Getty was involved suggested he wouldn’t have much to complain about.
He sank into the banquette across from me, his messenger bag beside him. It was raining outside, that heartless rain you get in New York in early March. At the bar, people sat watching the latest dispatches from the West Coast. Based on the numbers scrolling across the bottom of the screen, the news wasn’t good.
Gryffin took off his wet raincoat, folded it, and set it on the banquette. “Where is it?”
I patted my bag. “Relax. It’s right here.”
A waiter appeared and gestured at the raincoat. “Do you want to check that?”
Gryffin shook his head. “I won’t be staying long,” he said, and gave me the stink eye.
I ordered a bottle of Dom Pérignon. When the waiter left, I opened my bag, removed a new clamshell slipcase, and handed it to Gryffin. He looked at the title embossed on the front:
Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
“Very funny,” he said.
He set the clamshell on the table, opened it, and tenderly picked up the volume inside. He stroked the cover as though it were a woman’s face, opened the book, and gazed at a page, entranced. Only when the waiter reappeared with our champagne did he replace the volume in its slipcase. With great care, he placed it in his messenger bag, zipping the compartment.
“Well, that’s that,” he said.
We watched as the waiter opened the bottle and filled our glasses. Gryffin picked up his flute. I did the same. We clinked glasses. He drank from his. I set mine down, and Gryffin looked at me as though I’d started to brush my teeth at the table.
“You’re not drinking?”
“I quit.”
“You what?”
“I quit.” I pushed my glass toward him. “The champagne’s for you. Congratulations.”
“You quit?” He took another sip, eyeing me warily. “What about that guy Quinn? What’s he think?”
“His idea.”
For a few minutes, neither of us spoke. I watched the light slide across Gryffin’s eyeglasses, the way that strange green pigmentation in one iris glowed like an emerald flame. He stared at me thoughtfully, refilled his flute. Finally he said, “Well. Good for you. For getting sober.”
I made a face but said nothing. Gryffin sipped his champagne.
“What’re you going to do with the money? If you’re not drinking. And, you know, shooting up or whatever you do. Did.”
I leaned back against the banquette and glanced out the window at people dodging the rain. A large black bird flew down to perch atop a parked Tesla. It cocked its head, staring at me with one beady eye, then flapped off. “I’m looking to buy a place. Not here—New York, it’s the fucking suburbs now. Nothing but rich assholes.”
“Yeah, but now we’re rich assholes.”
“Speak for yourself. I’m taking a month or two to get clean. Then I’m going to Greece with Quinn. Find a house and build a darkroom. Maybe I’ll rent a place out west. Or, I dunno, Maine.”
I rested my hand on top of my bag, feeling the camera’s familiar weight inside. “Now that I can afford to work with film again. We’ll see what happens.”
I stared at the table, feeling that black line of static crackling between me and the bottle just a few inches away. I turned, grabbed my leather jacket, picked up my bag, and slid out of the booth. “Look, I gotta go. Enjoy that champagne.”
Gryffin watched me as I stood, his expression almost wistful. He raised his glass to me and nodded. “Stay out of trouble.”
“I wouldn’t count on that,” I said, and headed for the door.
Author’s Note
Some years ago, while researching an earlier novel, I came across a single mention of The Book of Lamps and Banners in the ancient Arabic magical text Picatrix. Immediately I decided to use it in a future story of my own. To my knowledge, no copy of the actual Book of Lamps and Banners has ever been found, and while I consulted various incunabula and existing works of magic, astrology, alchemy, and the like, the mysterious volume described in this novel is fictional and of my own devising. Any errors of fact or fancy are mine.
Acknowledgments
As ever, numerous people helped me in the writing of this book: if I have inadvertently forgotten anyone, I apologize profusely and will rectify that in any future edition.
Huge thanks to my agent, Nell Pierce, of Sterling Lord Literistic.
Thanks as well to my editorial team at Mulholland Books: Josh Kendall, Emily Giglierano, Helen O’Hare; my publicist, Alyssa Persons, and marketing director Pamela Brown. I am incredibly fortunate to have worked twice now with an amazing copyeditor, Susan Bradanini Betz, as well as Betsy Uhrig.
To Martha Millard, with love and gratitude for her continued support and guidance.
Dr. Elma Brenner, specialist in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine at London’s Wellcome Library, generously shared her expertise and permitted me to examine a number of incunabula as well as the Wellcome’s sole example of a book with anthropodermic binding.
I have a number of dear friends who are serious book collectors. Over the decades, they’ve shared their passion, knowledge, and secret lore with me, at used bookshops, antique stores, flea markets, conventions, yard sales, and in dark back alleys in the United States and abroad. Here’s to Joe Berlant, John Clute, Paul Di Filippo, Mike Dirda, Peter Halasz, Pamela Lifton-Zoline, the late Bob Morales, Brad Morrow, Peter Straub, David Streitfeld, Henry Wessells, and Jack Womack. I promise never to fold down the corner of a dust jacket again.
Many people read various versions of this book in manuscript and offered suggestions to improve it, including Jim Kelly, Jeff Ford, Ellen Datlow, Robert Levy, Cara Hoffman, Kirsten Holt, Nightwing Whitehead, Bill Sheehan, and Jeff Ford. Special thanks to my punk brothers in arms David Baillie and John Auber Armstrong, and a shout-out to Anthony Vincent Dominello, who caught a number of errors that no one else did, including me. Kristabelle Munson offered moral support by way of the Criterion Collection. Judith Clute again showed me parts of London I had never seen, including a peculiar boat in Rotherhithe.
Huge thanks to all my Swedish friends, who helped and encouraged me in more ways than I can name: Jan and Isabella Smedh and everyone at the English Bookshop in Uppsala; Sarah Bergmark Elfgren, Johan Theorin, Linda Skugge, Johan Anglemark, and of course Mats Strandberg and Johan Ehn, with whom I had a revelatory late-night conversation about how “It’s all code.”
Most of all, I want to thank Lotta Ekwall-Erickson and her husband, Per, who so kindly allowed me to stay with them on Gotland, the inspiration for Kalkö. Lotta read several drafts of this book, offered suggestions for place names, corrected my Swedish, and served as a guide to not just the real islands of Gotland and Fårö but their fictional counterpart.
Finally, all my love to my partner, John Clute, who has shared his life and library with me for the past twenty-six years and never tires of my questions about books.
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About the Author
ELIZABETH HAND is the bestselling author of fifteen genre-spanning novels, most recently Curious Toys, and five collections of short fiction and essays. Her work has received multiple Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy, and Nebula Awards, among other honors, and several of her books have been New York Times and Washington Post Notable Books. Her critically acclaimed novels featuring Cass Neary, “one of literature’s great noir anti-heroes” (Katherine Dunn)—Generation Loss, Available Dark, Hard Light, and now The Book of Lamps and B
anners—have been compared to those of Patricia Highsmith and have been optioned for television. Much of her fiction focuses on artists, particularly those outside the mainstream, as well as on the world-altering effects of climate change. She is a longtime reviewer, critic, and essayist for the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, among many outlets, and for twenty years has written a book review column for the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She is on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and divides her time between the coast of Maine and North London.
Other Books by Elizabeth Hand
Curious Toys
Books Featuring Cass Neary
Generation Loss
Available Dark
Hard Light
The Book of Lamps and Banners Page 31