The Bookman's Tale (11 page)

“You’re not the first person to come poking around the manor, you know,” said Miss O’Hara.

Peter’s avoidance of conversation with the housekeeper had been more out of habit than a particular feeling of nervousness. Being shot at earlier in the day had made public conversation less intimidating. Now it suddenly occurred to him that Miss O’Hara might be an excellent source of inside information on the Alderson family. He turned and looked her in the eye.

“And who’s come before me?” he asked.

“Old man come up from Cornwall and wanted to look at paintings. Miss Julia was none too happy about that, I can tell you.”

Peter tried to conceal his amazement. The old man must have been Liz Sutcliffe’s secret scholar, and therefore the paintings must be by the mysterious B.B. The connections between the Amanda painting, Evenlode Manor, and the
Pandosto
seemed to be multiplying.

“So Julia’s not married,” he said.

“Never has been,” said Miss O’Hara. “Disappointed in love, she is. Always falling for the wrong person, Mr. John says.”

“When the old man was visiting from Cornwall,” said Peter, “did Miss Julia show him anything in the library?”

Miss O’Hara did not seem to think this question unduly prying for an idle conversation in a shop queue. “Couldn’t have done without me knowing. I was dusting books that week. Take every one off the shelf and dust it twice a year. I was in the library the whole day.”

“So you’d know if any books went missing.”

“Miss Julia took a shelfful up to her room a few weeks back. Probably trying to impress some man. She doesn’t let me in her room, but I suppose she’s still got them in there. Mr. John never lays a finger on the downstairs books.”

“Next,” said the shopkeeper from behind the counter. Peter tried not to grin as he stepped forward. He was beginning to feel like a genuine detective. He didn’t know if any crime had been committed, but the mousy Miss Julia was certainly shaping up as a prime suspect. He was more certain than ever that he had to return to Hay. He only hoped that the book in the familiar blue binding was still there.

P
eter wanted Amanda’s birthday to be perfect.

“It’s a weird day to have a birthday,” she had told him. “I mean, everyone is always celebrating on Halloween, but it doesn’t have anything to do with me.” She had already planned the evening; that left him to find a present, and he wanted to give her something that would reflect her passions and his and thus be unique to their relationship. Jewelry did not fit the bill. Amanda happily wore the same pair of diamond stud earrings every day, and that seemed to be the extent of her interest in adornment. Scarves, handbags, chocolate, and flowers—all of which Francis Leland suggested—seemed equally inappropriate.

In a box in the dusty back room of a local antique shop, Peter discovered an early edition of George MacDonald’s 1870 fantasy novel,
At the Back of the North Wind
. The book was illustrated by the Pre-Raphaelite follower Arthur Hughes. Amanda, he knew, considered Hughes on a par with her idol Edward Burne-Jones. This would be the first book Peter would give Amanda. The front cover and about half the spine were missing. Several signatures were loose, one such gathering of pages literally hanging by a thread from the middle of the book. Many pages were torn at the margins. To any serious collector it was worthless. Peter bought it for a dollar.

When he showed the book to Hank Christiansen, Hank agreed it was a perfect candidate for rebinding.

“It’ll be a great project,” said Hank. “And if you screw it up, it’s no big deal since the book belongs to you.”

“I’d rather not screw it up,” said Peter.

“Don’t worry,” said Hank. “By the time you’re through with this book, it will be elegant. When is Amanda’s birthday?”

“Halloween,” said Peter.

“That gives you a month,” said Hank. “We’d better get to work.”

Peter had become something between a student and an assistant in Hank’s workshop, often working alone with Hank after the rest of the staff had left. They seldom spoke about anything other than book repair, frequently working side by side for hours in companionable quiet. It was usually Hank who broke the silence, with a gentle instruction for Peter or sometimes a witty remark he seemed to have spent an hour thinking up. On these occasions his eyes twinkled behind his glasses as he waited for Peter to laugh. Peter always did. He found Hank wise and funny and, because of the long periods of silence, easy to be around. If pressed, he might have even called Hank a friend.

Though he had assisted Hank in several binding jobs the previous spring, Peter had never done a full binding by himself. As he lay the
North Wind
on the counter to plan an attack, he hoped a month would be enough time.

The first task was to remove what was left of the original cover. Peter clamped the text block of the book in the job backer, the same upright vice he had first seen Hank leaning over a year earlier. Using a lifting knife, Peter sliced away the remnants of the spine and rear cover. He placed a few dollops of gloppy paste on the spine and allowed the moisture to loosen the glue on the backs of the pages. Within thirty minutes the glue was soft, and Peter peeled it away with his lifting knife. Taking the now disbound book from the job backer, Peter began the process of pulling the text—separating the signatures from one another and from the thread that had bound them together. By the end of the afternoon the book lay scattered on the counter in unsewn signatures.

Peter spent the next week mending the tears in
North Wind
’s pages. There were more than he had at first realized, but few of them affected the text and none extended into the illustrations. Peter was happy about this because the
kozo
, the thin but fibrous Japanese paper that he pasted across the tears to repair the paper, dried an opaque white. An expert could use tiny enough pieces of
kozo
, even individual fibers, that a torn illustration could be repaired without the repair being visible, but Peter was no expert. Though some would have found the process of fixing one margin tear after another with a tiny brush, a special paste, and a slender piece of
kozo
tedious, Peter achieved an almost Zen-like state during these hours of careful repetitive work. He worked for seven hours one day, missing his English seminar and having no idea of the time until Hank turned the lights out and announced it was closing time.

Before he began resewing the sections of the
North Wind
, Peter picked out material for the new endpapers. Because he planned to do an elegant full leather binding, Peter chose a hand-marbled paper with swirls of blue, gold, and white. Then he arranged the sections of the book in order and began sewing them onto three strips of linen tape, stretched tautly into a sewing frame. The linen strips would form the inside of the book’s spine. After a long day of work, Peter had a tightly sewn text block. The pages turned easily but did not pull loose when he tugged gently on them. Peter began to feel that the resurrection of the
North Wind
had truly begun.

—

“C
ome on,” said Amanda, “at least give me a hint.” They were sitting on a bench behind the library enjoying the cool air of an autumn evening during a study break.

“No hints,” said Peter, turning his back to her in mock indignation.

“I’ll bet I can make you talk,” said Amanda, tickling him around his sides, but though Peter laughed and squirmed, he didn’t tell her a thing.

“It’s no fair,” said Amanda in a pouty voice, as she slipped her arms around him from behind and rested her head on his shoulders. “I don’t want to have secrets from each other.”

“We don’t,” said Peter, suddenly much more serious. “Not real secrets. But this is your birthday present. You’ve got to let me have a little fun.”

“Oh, all right,” said Amanda, kissing his cheek and then disentangling her arms and standing up. “But you have to let me get a little work done.”

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

—

“T
his 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.”