The Book of Air and Shadows

by Michael Gruber

  The work surfaces in the kitchen (which consisted of a double hot plate, a tiny microwave oven, and a small, chipped porcelain sink) were made of the same edge-on, tightly laminated planking as the big worktable, but coated thickly with amber-colored resin. Along the east wall he found a pallet of pallets, with a futon neatly rolled up on it and a table made from a cable spool and two of the sort of chairs one finds on trash heaps, all competently restored and painted cream. A chair for her and one for a visitor? Spoke to a social life and he wondered who. In the southeast corner an enclosure had been built, also out of pallet wood, within which he assumed was her toilet. Against this leaned a large battered wardrobe, hidden from the rest of the room by a folding screen of laquered wood and decoupaged paper. Interesting: she lived alone but had rigged a privacy screen. Spoke to sexual activity.

  He was about to take a peek behind this screen when Rolly called out testily. He found the six-pack of paper towels and rejoined her. Between every ten pages in the damp volumes a pair of paper towels had to be interleaved, and these towels had to be changed every hour. While they dried, the wet volumes were laid flat on the worktable and weighted down with cloth-covered steel plates to prevent swelling.

  “What I don’t get,” said Crosetti when the books were all interleaved and weighted, “is why you’re drying the whole of the set if you’re just going to break them for the maps and illustrations. Why not just pull the good stuff and junk the rest?”

  “Because it’s the right way to do it,” said Rolly after a brief hesitation. “The plates would curl if you pulled them wet.”

  “I see,” he said, not seeing at all, seeing the young woman in an entirely new and not very attractive light. He sat on a stool and studied her profile. “So…this is kind of interesting,” he said. “Watching books dry. I don’t think I ever did it before. Maybe you could point out the highlights, so I don’t miss anything.”

  He grinned at her and was rewarded with a tiny azure spark in her eyes, while her mouth assumed the set of one trying not to smile. “You’re welcome to read a book while you wait,” she said. “I have a good many of them.”

  “Alternatively, we could converse. I could tell you all my hopes and dreams and you could tell me yours, and the hours would fly past, and we could get to know each other.”

  “Go ahead,” she replied after a brief pause, uninvitingly.

  “No, ladies first. You look like you’ve had a lot more interesting life than I have.”

  A shocked expression appeared on her face. She gaped, then snorted, then blushed. “Sorry,” she said. “Oh, God! That is so opposite from the case. Why would you imagine that? That I have an interesting life?”

  “Oh, this place, for one thing. You live in a warehouse in Red Hook…”

  “It’s a loft. Thousands of people in the city live in lofts.”

  “No, they live in apartments in loft buildings. And usually they have furniture they bought in stores, not made out of pallets. Are you even legal here?”

  “The landlord doesn’t mind.”

  “Assuming he knows. Also you’re a bookbinder. Unusual, wouldn’t you say? How did you get into it?”

  “And how about your hopes and dreams?”

  “And, see? You’re secretive too. There’s nothing more interesting than that. Okay. Here’s the whole deal. I’m twenty-eight and I live with my mom in Queens, Ozone Park. I’m saving money so I can go to film school, which at the rate I put it away will be a month after my fifty-second birthday. I should take out a loan, but I’m scared of getting into debt.”

  “How much do you have saved?”

  “About three and a half grand.”

  “I have more than that.”

  “I bet. Glaser probably pays you more than he pays me, you get commissions on sales, you live in Red Hook, and you own two outfits, what you’re wearing now and the one with the collar. What are you saving for?”

  “I want to go to Gelsenkirchen in Germany and take an apprenticeship at the Buchbinderei Klein.” When he didn’t react, she added, “Obviously, you’ve never heard of it.”

  “Of course I have. Buch-whatever Klein. It’s like the Harvard of the bookbinding world. But I thought you already knew all about it. You have all the gear…” He gestured to the racks of tools laid out on the worktable, the cutting press and plow, whetstones, knives, leather pillows, and paste pots. It all looked very eighteenth century; Crosetti imagined that the Churchill Voyages had been bound with tools quite like these.

  “I barely know anything,” she protested.

  “Really.”

  “I mean compared with what you have to know to make a book from scratch. I can do repairs. It’s like…it’s like the difference between being able to repair a cracked Ming porcelain vase and making one out of clay and glazes.”

  “Uh-huh. And while we’re sharing confidences like this, getting cozy and all, why don’t you tell me what you’re going to do with the Churchill when you’ve got it doctored?”

  “What? I’m not doctoring them. I’m going to break them.”

  Red splotches appeared on her cheeks and her eyes darted-picture: girl caught in lie.

  “No,” he said confidently. “If you were going to break them you would have just airfreighted them to Andover and had them vacuum dried. No muss, no fuss. You get them back dry and clean and snip snip. You look surprised. I’m not what you’d call a book guy but I’m not stupid either. So what are you going to do with the doctored books?”

  “Sell them,” she said, looking down at the sodden volumes.

  “As doctored?”

  “No. Everyone knows we own an extremely fine set. There are private clients who like discretion. They have funny money they want to stash in collectibles. Glaser does it all the time. Look, he’s going to declare these a total loss to the insurance company, and show them the invoices for the broken-out items. They’ll come to, I don’t know, not more than twenty-five hundred, and the insurance company will pay him the difference between that and what he paid for the set, figure around twenty thousand dollars.”

  “Which is approximately the amount you’re planning to divert to your own pocket when you sell to your shady character. Isn’t there a word for that? Begins with an…?”

  “It’s not…it’s nothing like stealing. He told me to break the books. As far as Glaser’s concerned, the set no longer exists. He’s made whole by the insurance company and I’m profiting from my own skill. It’s no different from making things out of pallets that’re being thrown away.”

  “Um, no, actually it’s not the same thing at all, but that’s my Jesuit high school education talking. See, you are an interesting person. Devious is interesting. How are you going to produce the invoices for the illustrations, since you’re not really breaking the books?”

  She shrugged. “Sidney never bothers with broken items. It depresses him. He calls it vulture food.”

  “Not answering the question. But I figure you’re going to sell the set for twenty-two K, give Sidney a couple of grand, let him collect from the insurance, meanwhile phonying up the accounting system with fake invoices. You’re simultaneously screwing the insurance company, Glaser, your shady client, and the tax people. That’s quite a plan.”

  “You’re going to rat me out!” Crosetti had heard of blazing eyes but had never actually seen any outside a movie screen until now. Little blue sparks were whizzing around in there.

  “No,” he said, smiling. “That would be boring. So…how’re you going to fix the broken covers?”

  He saw the relief on her face as she turned away from ethical issues to the moral neutrality of technique.

  “Well, I think I can save the leather cover on volume one. The boards are cracked and the spine, but I can strip the leather off of it and replace the boards.”

  With that she pulled a thin spatulate tool from a can and started to peel back the marbleized paper that held the leather cover to the boards. She worked carefully, and Crosetti was content to
watch her small skillful hands at their task until the kitchen timer she had set previously rang out and he had to change the towels between the drying pages. When he had finished with this, he saw that she had the leather cover loose. Underneath it, between the leather and the cracked pasteboard were damp sheets of paper with closely set lines of handwriting on them. She put these aside and held the leather up to the light from the window, examining it closely.

  “What’re these papers?” he asked, idly separating the damp sheets. They were covered with writing in rusty black ink on both sides.

  “Just padding. They used wastepaper to plump out the covers, and protect the leather from internal abrasion from the boards.”

  “What language is this in?”

  “English probably. Just some old wastepaper they used.”

  “It doesn’t look like English. I can read English-unless the guy had really terrible handwriting…”

  She took the paper from him carefully and peered at it. “That’s funny. It looks like Jacobean secretary hand.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I mean I’m not a paleographer, but that hand doesn’t look contemporary with the publication of this book. It looks a lot earlier than 1732. Funny.”

  “What, someone hid an old manuscript in the binding?”

  “No, of course not. Bookbinders used scrap paper to back boards, any kind of scrap, but you’d expect, oh, contemporary proofs or old handbills, not an antique manuscript.”

  “Why would they have done that? I mean an old manuscript would’ve been valuable in its own right, no?”

  “Not at all. No one gave a hoot about old paper until much later. Original manuscripts got recycled when they were set in type, pulped, or used to start fires or line baking pans. Only a handful of antiquaries had any idea that preserving artifacts from the past was important, and most people thought they were nut cases. That’s why practically the only handwriting that survives from the early modern period is in legal or financial records. Literary stuff had no value at all.”

  “So it could be valuable now. This document.”

  “I don’t know. It depends on what it is. And who wrote it, of course.” She held it up to the light. “Oh, I get it now. This sheet was printer’s copy. It’s got corrections on it in lead pencil. Interesting-so it became a book, probably printed by whoever did the Churchill books for John Walthoe.” She unweighted and opened the first volume and examined the imprint. “Peter Deane. We might as well change the blotters now.”

  After this was done, Crosetti asked, “Aren’t you curious to know what book it was the manuscript for? What if the rest of the backing is from the same book? What if it’s someone famous, like, I don’t know, Donne or Milton or Defoe? A holographic manuscript from someone like that’d be worth a pile, no?”

  “It’s probably the musings of an obscure clergyman. Commentaries on the Epistles.”

  “But we don’t know that. Why don’t you open the other covers and see?”

  “Because it’s more work. I’d have to make them right again. And I don’t have a lot of time.”

  “We have time now,” he said, “watching the books dry. Come on, I’d consider it a favor. I’m doing you one.”

  She gave him a flat blue stare, acknowledging the manipulation, he thought. “If it’ll make you happy,” she said and picked up her little spatula.

  An hour later, Crosetti regarded with pleasure what looked like a line of washing hanging from strings he had rigged between the support columns that held up the roof of the loft. They were the damp folio pages that had served as backing in the six volumes, four sheets from each cover, forty-eight pages in all. For reasons that were not entirely clear to him, the discovery of manuscript pages that had not seen the light for over two and a half centuries made him less uneasy about what he knew in his heart was participation in an act of fraud. He had rather shocked himself by how brazenly he had manipulated her into opening the covers to yield this manuscript, and he consequently desired that the papers hold some historical or literary importance. It was with great impatience that he waited for the sheets to be dry enough to handle.

  In the meantime, the interleaving had to be changed on the hour. Rolly seemed content to let him do it unsupervised after she determined during the first few changes that he could manage it correctly. The main thing was to make sure not to rush the process by shoving in too many towels or interspersing the blotting medium between groups of fewer than ten leaves. If they did that, she’d explained, the book would swell out of shape and burst its bindings. Around six, Crosetti announced that he was hungry and learned that ramen noodles and take-out containers of varying ages constituted virtually all of her available foodstuffs. He could see why she went so often to lunch with Glaser. Crosetti ran out and braved the mean streets of Red Hook, returning with a couple of bottles of Mondavi red and a large pizza.

  “You bought wine,” she said when he came in and placed the bag on the table. “I never buy wine.”

  “But you drink it.”

  “Oh, yes. This is very nice of you. Thank you.” Again that little wolf’s smile; number two.

  Their employer made up the main subject of their table talk, as they otherwise had little in common. Crosetti’s interest in books as physical objects was as slender as hers in current films. Besides, he was curious about the old man, and Rolly was willing to supply information when pressed, the more so as the wine took effect. He liked watching her eat: she was ravenous, she ate as if the slices were about to be snatched away, she ate the crusts to the last crumb and licked her fingers while she spun out what she knew. The story was that Glaser had entered the trade from his life as a collector, a common progression. His family made its pile two generations ago in department stores, and he had been raised in the upper bourgeoisie of Manhattan. The Glasers had intellectual pretensions-opera boxes, concert tickets, European tours à la mode, and the rest of it; a large apartment near Central Park had held a substantial library. In the course of time the ancestral emporiums had been absorbed by larger firms, the money not well invested, the inheritance scattered thinly among a too-numerous family. By the late 1970s Sidney Glaser had converted his hobby into his livelihood.

  According to Rolly, he was not much of a businessman. Crosetti objected that the shop seemed to be a going concern, with many choice items.

  “That’s just the problem. He’s got no business buying stuff like that McKenney and Hall for a hundred and fifty thousand. That’s for Baumann or Sotheby’s and the other big boys, and Glaser’s not a big boy. He’s got the clothes and the air but not the resources. Or the eye. Someone on his level should be picking up thousand-dollar books for two hundred, not hundred-thousand-dollar books for eighty-nine five. And they’re going to raise the rent-it already takes nearly half the average monthly profit-I mean paper profit-I doubt he’s made a real profit in years. It’s an old story in the book business. A rich collector thinks, I buy lots of books, why shouldn’t I pay for my hobby out of the profits?”

  “Doesn’t it work?”

  “On occasion. But like I said, you have to know your level, and work up. You can’t expect to start selling at the level you operated on as a rich collector, unless you’re willing to pour your own money into the business. And then it’s not really a business, is it? It’s a more expensive hobby, with pretensions. Speaking of which, the little New York East Side antiquarian dealer with the paneled shop-it’s a complete anachronism. There’s no way he can pay that rent and compete with both the Internet mail-order dealers and the big-name houses. Glaser’s going down. That fire was the best thing that could’ve happened to him. He’ll diddle the insurance companies on a couple of dozen select items, declare total losses, and sell them as fair to good. It’ll give him some operating capital again, but it won’t last long…”

  “You think he started the fire?”

  “No, he’s a book man. He’d never knowingly destroy a book. He was practically crying-you saw it-over that Churchill
. But since there was a fire, he’s not above taking as much advantage of it as he can.”

  “Just like you.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Yes, just like me. But at least I have an excuse, since I don’t live in an eighteen-room apartment on Park Avenue. I need money.” She poured herself more wine, drank a swallow, added, “And how about you, Crosetti? If those sheets you’ve got drying turn out to be the holograph of John Locke’s preface to Churchill, what’ll you do? Take them to Glaser and say, Oh, look what I found, Mr. G., something you can sell to the Widener for ten grand, and can I have a pat on the head?”

  “It’s not Locke, if you’re right about it being a Jacobean hand.”

  “Oh, now he’s literate, is he? I thought you were a computer nerd movie guy.”

  “I read book catalogs.”

  “Oh, right. But not books. You don’t even like books, do you?”

  “I like them fine.” He examined her in the waning light and found a belligerent thrust to her jaw he hadn’t noticed before this, and a blurred, aggrieved look to her face.

  “You’re not going to be a nasty drunk, are you, Carolyn?”

  “I will if I want to. It’s my place.”

  “Uh-huh. But I don’t have to stay here. My sheets look pretty dry. I could just take them and leave you to change the diapers on your baby every hour all night long.”

  And he would have too, except that no sooner were these words out than she burst into tears, horrible, hopeless wails, and, like the decent guy he was, Al Crosetti went around and knelt by her chair and held Rolly while she shook and soaked his shoulder with her tears.

  THE BRACEGIRDLE LETTER (2)

  So to begin, asking always the favour of almighty God to keep me stricktlie on the path of truthfullnesse as I have muche of the olde Adam in me as thou knowest & mayhap I have told you som of it before nowe, yet you may forget and, which God foirbid, die before oure lad hath reached the age of understanding, soe it is better wrote down.