The Book of Air and Shadows

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