The Bookman's Tale

by Charlie Lovett

  “Hey,” called Peter at her back, as she skipped back toward the library, “this study break was your idea!”

  —

  “This is nice work,” said Hank the next day, fanning through the pages of the North Wind and nodding in approval. “You can tell when work like this is done with real love.”

  Peter blushed deeply, never considering that Hank may have been referring to Peter’s love for books rather than his love for Amanda. “Thanks,” he managed to mumble.

  “Have you thought about what sort of leather you want to use?” asked Hank.

  “I thought maybe the blue calf if we have enough left,” said Peter. “I mean, I wasn’t sure how much that would cost but . . .” Peter let his words hang in the air. He had been trying to decide how to approach Hank about the costs of the materials he was using in this job. The leather would be the most expensive single item, but everything from the kozo to the banding tapes cost money. Most of Peter’s hours of work in the library were classified as work-study time. He had started to do a little book dealing and had made some modest profits in these fledgling efforts, but almost all of that he had spent buying up more books from various charity and antique shops. His parents grudgingly sent him twenty or thirty dollars a month as an allowance, though the only thing it allowed him to do was pay for coffee with Amanda some evenings. He wasn’t sure how he was going to pay for the materials for the North Wind rebind, but he at least needed to know how much he was going to owe.

  “Well,” said Hank, “I figure a piece of blue calf big enough for this job should run about four hours.”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Peter.

  “You give me an extra four hours’ work this semester and I’ll give you a piece of calf.”

  “What about the rest of the supplies? Boards, endpapers, gold leaf?” Peter saw a familiar twinkle in Hank’s eye—a twinkle he had first seen when Hank mentioned the girlfriend pile.

  “I figure by the time you screw up cutting your binder’s board a couple of times, you’ll owe me about three hours, plus the four for the leather. Of course you’ve already put in about thirty or forty hours of extra time since August, so it seems to me I owe you.”

  “Thanks,” said Peter, smiling. He could think of nothing more to say, so he turned to his work.

  He did not, in the end, screw up cutting the binder’s boards, the dense cardboard that would form the covers of the book. Once these had been attached to the linen tapes onto which the text block was sewn, Peter left the book in a book press for the rest of the week. “A book needs to get used to its new cover,” Hank had told him.

  It was October 20 and Peter had reached the most delicate and nerve-racking stage of the rebinding—covering the book with the expensive blue leather he had picked out. While the book was under the press, he had carefully cut the leather to the proper size and shaved the edges thin with a bookbinder’s paring knife. Pasting the leather onto the covers was the work of a single afternoon, and Peter had to work quickly and carefully. The paste wet the leather, making it easier to stretch across the boards and wrap around the edges, but also easy to mark or tear. Peter could feel Hank watching from across the room as he pulled and stretched and wrapped and smoothed the leather onto the book. He knew Hank must have been dying to say, Would you like a hand with that? especially as Peter reached critical points when he did wish for an extra hand to hold one corner while he folded another, but Hank resisted the temptation to offer assistance, and Peter, stubborn in his wish to be the sole craftsman of the North Wind, resisted the temptation to ask. By the end of the afternoon, the leather-covered book was back in the press, drying out.

  With trepidation, Peter removed the book from the press the next day. Despite his nearly sleepless night spent fretting about puckers in the leather or creases marring the cover, the binding was smooth and clean. He finished the process of attaching the marbled endpapers and put the book in the finishing press, a vice that gently held the felt-wrapped volume in place so that Peter could tool the spine. With heated brass tools, he stamped the title and author on the spine in gilt lettering, with a decorative fleur-de-lis separating AT THE BACK OF THE NORTH WIND from GEORGE MACDONALD.

  It was still nearly a week before Amanda’s birthday when Peter put the finishing touch on the book, stamping a gold A.R. on the front cover. Intensely proud of his work, he presented it to Hank the next day.

  “This is an excellent job, Peter,” said Hank, opening the covers and admiring how smoothly they moved on the new hinges, how the pages turned effortlessly. “A lot of first timers end up with a book that’s too tightly bound, but this is a real pleasure to handle.” Peter felt a surge of satisfaction as Hank handed the book back to him.

  For the next few days Peter left the North Wind on a shelf in the conservation lab, but pulled it down to feel the cool, supple leather every time he came in to work. On the thirty-first, just before he left the lab, Peter took out a calligraphy pen and a pot of deep black ink. He had been practicing his lettering for several months. On the half title of the North Wind he wrote, in his best simulation of a nineteenth-century script, “To Amanda, with love, from the binder, Peter, October 31, 1985.”

  Kingham, Saturday, February 18, 1995

  Peter opened the delicate binding of the Pandosto and began an examination that would take most of the night. He started with the provenance. The line of ownership, from the author himself to the mysterious B.B., could be one of the strongest pieces of evidence in favor of authenticity. Peter knew enough of the history of English book collecting to recognize several of the names on the list, but he would need to research the connections between the owners and try to identify names such as Em Ball, Bartholomew Harbottle, and William H. Smith. The list read:

  R. Greene to Em Ball

  Bart. Harbottle

  Wm. Shakspere, Stratford

  R. Cotton, Augustus B IV

  Matthew Harbottle, Red Bull Theatre

  John Bagford

  John Warburton

  R. Harley, Oxford

  B. Mayhew for William H. Smith

  B.B. / E.H.

  Ten entries. Ten clues that might tell the story of how a priceless volume survived undetected for over four centuries.

  From his frequent nocturnal visits to the Devereaux Room with Amanda, Peter knew that Francis never came in after hours, but he always worked in his office from two until five on Saturdays. Special Collections was not officially opened during these hours, and Francis said it was often the only uninterrupted time in his work week. After Peter finished his dinner and confirmed, in his copy of De Ricci’s English Collectors of Books and Manuscripts, his memory about the identities of Bagford, Warburton, and Harley, he phoned Francis Leland’s private number.

  He did this without thinking that he had not spoken to Francis since leaving Ridgefield. As the phone rang four thousand miles away, Peter also did not think about the eighth item on Dr. Strayer’s list, “Get in Touch with Old Friends,” even though Francis’s phone number was written on the list next to this entry. When Peter had gone to the kitchen to look up the number, he hadn’t even noticed the list, only the scrawled digits in the margin.

  Since arriving in Kingham, Peter had not called or written any friends in the United States—not Hank or Amanda’s parents or her best friend, Cynthia, though all had begged him to keep in touch when they had last seen him at the funeral, and all had left repeated messages on his machine. In his effort to escape every reminder of Amanda, Peter had severed all contact with his life in America, and he had given little thought to how those left behind might interpret his long silence. Thus Peter, who was focused wholly on identifying the names on the Pandosto’s endpaper, did not comprehend the mixture of excitement and relief in Francis Leland’s voice.

  “Peter, thank God. We’ve been so worried about you. Are yo
u well?”

  It seemed to Peter a completely irrelevant question, as if Francis had asked what shoes he was wearing. “I’m trying to track down some people,” said Peter.

  “Is it the Ridgefields?” asked Francis. “They’re in New York, but they left numbers with me in case you called. I know they’ll be so relieved to hear from you. You can’t imagine what we’ve all been thinking, Peter.”

  Frustration crept into Peter’s voice. He and Francis had always understood each other before. Why were they now talking at such cross-purposes? “No,” said Peter, “you don’t understand. I need to track down some people.” Single-minded as he was, he could think of no other way to phrase his request, but without waiting for Francis to respond, he plowed on. “The first three I suspect are Elizabethan or Jacobean. One of them had some connection to Robert Greene. Her name was Em Ball. Then there are two named Harbottle—Bartholomew and Matthew. Matthew had something to do with the Red Bull Theatre. And then there are two much later names, eighteenth or nineteenth century—Benjamin Mayhew and William H. Smith. I know the last one’s pretty common, but he was probably a book collector.”

  “Peter, are you all right?”

  Had he stopped to consider Francis’s question, Peter would have recognized the tone of parental condescension that used to creep into Dr. Strayer’s voice when Peter was being obstinate. He chose, instead, to ignore Francis. “Oh, and I have some good news. I found a copy of the fourth edition of Johnson’s Dictionary. I know you would have bought it, but I’ve decided to give it to the Devereaux collection in memory of Amanda.” Peter paused for a moment and thought of the portrait of Amanda Devereaux. “My Amanda,” he added.

  “That’s wonderful. Listen, Peter, are you seeing anyone over there. I mean a doctor?”

  “Why would I see a doctor?” said Peter, completely missing Francis’s point. “I’m in perfectly good health. I mean other than getting shot at.”

  “Getting shot at?” said Francis. “Really, Peter, I think you ought to—”

  “So do you think you can help me with those names?” Peter interrupted.

  There was silence on the line and then Francis spoke again, this time in a quieter, calmer voice. The old Francis, Peter thought. “Well, Em Ball was Robert Greene’s mistress,” he said. “A prostitute and sister of a gangster. Rumor was that she showed up when he was on his deathbed and tried to make him admit to fathering her illegitimate son, which he refused to do. Bartholomew Harbottle I’m surprised you don’t know. His name is in one of your favorite books. He was a bookseller, died around 1610 or 1620. His ownership signature is in our bad quarto of Hamlet. The other two I’ll have to look up for you, but I do know the Red Bull Theatre was in Clerkenwell. Burned down in the great fire, I believe.”

  “Listen,” said Peter, “can you leave a message on the machine if you track down Matthew Harbottle or William H. Smith? I may be out.”

  “Peter, what’s this all about?” asked Francis.

  “I think I may have found the Holy Grail,” said Peter and hung up.

  So Robert Greene had given this copy of Pandosto to his mistress. It was easy to imagine that she would have sold it to Harbottle and he would have sold it to Shakespeare as the source material for A Winter’s Tale. There had never been any proven connection between Shakespeare and Robert Cotton, but most scholars agreed that it made sense that the playwright might have consulted Cotton’s library. Perhaps the Pandosto had been a gift? And Cotton was a notorious lender of his books. Perhaps the Red Bull Theatre had mounted a production of A Winter’s Tale and this Matthew Harbottle borrowed the book and never returned it. This bit of conjecture seemed less likely to Peter. After all, seventeenth-century theatrical troupes didn’t hire dramaturges, and this scenario wouldn’t explain the coincidence of the name Harbottle.

  Peter spent the night making a careful transcription of the Pandosto’s marginalia, stopping only for a nap before breakfast. The rear endpaper was crowded with a hodgepodge of scribbles surrounding a preliminary version of the song performed by Autolycus in Act IV of A Winter’s Tale. It took Peter hours to sort out the mess, and even then he wasn’t sure of the meaning of many of the markings and abbreviations. Peter detected a short phrase, almost obscured by other writing across it, just above the words to the song. With the help of a strong light and a magnifying glass, he finally managed to decipher it. “B. Harbottle = Autolycus.”

  If Bartholomew Harbottle had been the model for the merchant and knave Autolycus, a number of possibilities for how the Pandosto moved from Robert Cotton’s hands back into the Harbottle family now presented themselves. Bartholomew Harbottle might have borrowed it with no intention of returning it or simply stolen it. A Winter’s Tale was written late in Shakespeare’s career, when he was an established playwright. If Harbottle suspected the volume might be valuable someday, he might have passed it on to a relative.

  As Peter fell asleep on the sofa in the sitting room, he felt he had a reasonable handle on the journey of Pandosto from Robert Greene to his mistress, to an unscrupulous bookseller, to William Shakespeare, to Robert Cotton, and finally to the unknown Matthew Harbottle. But if Matthew had been alive when Bartholomew died—not later than 1620, Francis had said—it was unlikely he lived much past the great fire of 1666, and the book would almost certainly have been out of London by then. Yet the next name on the list was John Bagford, a collector and dealer who was at his peak of activity around 1710. So where had Pandosto hidden for forty-five years? And if the book had belonged to Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, why hadn’t it ended up in the British Museum with the rest of his collection?

  Wakefield, Yorkshire, Northern England, 1720

  John Warburton took a long drink of whiskey and set down his glass. While it was true that whiskey had lost him his job, if tonight’s meeting went well, he should have enough money to keep him in drink and under roof a while longer.

  On the large table in the center of his library he had created two piles of manuscripts from his ever-growing collection. On the left were those he anticipated would bring him five hundred guineas by night’s end. They were medieval works, including some fine examples of Anglo-Saxon and Early English writing—just the sort of thing to tempt his dinner guest. On the right were manuscripts he did not wish to sell—his collection of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Several of these he had bought from his old friend, now departed, the bookseller and great collector of printing samples John Bagford. He remembered well the day that Bagford had arrived on his doorstep with a cache of Elizabethan materials he had found languishing in a manor house near Exeter.

  Warburton spent the afternoon compiling a list of the plays represented in his collection. This he would keep in his desk, while the plays he would hide elsewhere, to protect them from the prying eyes of his guest. The list ran to fifty-five titles, including works by Robert Greene, Thomas Dekker, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare. All but a few of the plays were unpublished, and most of Warburton’s copies were unique.

  After completing the catalog, he picked up the pile of manuscripts and carried them into the kitchen where he would store them in the highest cupboard—an unlikely place for even the most persistent bibliophile to go hunting for treasures. He did not realize that one item from his theatrical collection—a printed volume with marginalia by William Shakespeare—remained on the table next to the medieval manuscripts.

  —

  Humfrey Wanley, keeper of the library for Robert Harley and his son, Edward, arrived at the home of John Warburton at eight o’clock.

  “Mr. Warburton,” said Wanley, extending his
hand. “A pleasure to meet such a distinguished collector.”

  As the two men entered the library after dinner, Wanley did his best to hide his enthusiasm, for although many of the manuscripts laid out on the library table were quite ordinary, several were exquisite.

  “This, I think, must be the finest example of ninth-century English in any collection,” said Warburton, opening a codex of extracts from the Gospels.

  “Fine, to be sure,” said Wanley, “though certainly not the finest.”

  “Still, that alone should be worth a hundred guineas,” said Warburton.

  “Let’s not talk of price just yet, my dear man. How about some more of that excellent port?” Wanley saw to it that the wine continued to flow as the hour passed midnight. He took only a sip for every glassful downed by his companion, so that by the time the two men had begun to pack the manuscripts into an empty chest, Warburton was weaving on his feet. The host finally collapsed into a chair, letting Wanley finish the job.

  Wanley saw that now was the moment, and though there were a few items on the table he had not yet examined, he swept everything into the chest and shut the top firmly.

  “I can give you cash,” said Wanley.

  “Five hundred guineas,” said Warburton, slurring his speech.

  “Not quite that,” said Wanley crisply. “You’ll need to sign the bill of sale here.” He laid a piece of paper on the desk and placed a pen in Warburton’s hand.

  “How much then?” said Warburton, squinting at the paper. “Three hundred?”

  “A hundred guineas,” said Wanley. “It’s a fair price, as you well know.” It wasn’t an unfair price, thought Wanley, though it was certainly a bargain.

  “A hundred?” said Warburton. “But I can’t—”

  “It’s that or nothing,” said Wanley. “Shall I leave them here?”

  “No, no!” cried Warburton, for he was not too drunk to realize that his arm lay across a pile of bills that a hundred guineas would more than settle. He picked up the pen and dipped it into the inkwell, scrawling his name on the bill of sale. The next morning he awoke with his head on his desk and a hundred guineas clasped in his hand.