The bindery looked halfway between an apothecary shop and Gutenberg’s workroom, and it was stacked high with books to be washed, books to be bound, books to be boxed, books to be repaired. The conservator never looked up at Liesl. Of her, too, Liesl was envious. For years she had slipped on her own smock and stood over books in this very room, looking over the conservator’s shoulder, apportioning resources to the preservation of some objects and giving up on others, deciding how the lives of the most vital of the books could be saved, how they could be kept intact for the next generation of readers and scholars. On that day she wasn’t moved to put on her smock. She could only watch.
She tiptoed out into the church-quiet workroom. There were mostly empty desks or desks that were only occupied by books. The room had an electric hum, reminding Liesl that things would be discovered here. Dan was the only one who was seated, and he didn’t look up to acknowledge Liesl. He was used to her recent lurking. And he was immersed in the project that kept his hands busy in the in-between minutes.
Headphones plugged into his Discman, Dan was lovingly cataloging a leaflet from the library of the country’s foremost Communist. There were 25,000 items that had come to the library in moldy boxes, and Dan wanted to touch every single one, wanted to preserve it, wanted to make sure that the socialists of the future could find it.
She came behind him and watched him work. He had a clear plastic ruler, like something Hannah might have used in primary school, and he measured the leaflet and noted the results on a scrap of paper by his side. Satisfied, he moved to counting pages, and again like a schoolchild, confident that he was all alone, he muttered the numbers under his breath as he counted. The next part was best. He knew it, and she did. He leaned back in his chair, and she caught the edge of his grin as he considered what he should title the thing that had come into their collection with no title. The pamphlet hadn’t been printed so it could be an artifact in a library. It was made to provide union information for seamstresses. And here Dan was, deciding what it would be called in their shared history.
Liesl left the sanctuary of the workroom. If Dan had seen her come, or saw her go, he didn’t indicate. The large reading room, stripped for the day of cocktail glasses and canapés, was hosting a group of undergraduates.
Max and his full suit were leading them through a collection of sacred texts. The fifteen or so undergraduates had all adopted the same posture: hands clasped behind their backs, leaning forward at the waist but not too far, afraid to breathe too heavily in the direction of the precious things laid out on low tables.
The objects on display consisted of a handful of Max’s favorite volumes: bibles, hymnals, a thousand-year-old copy of the Gospels in Greek that Liesl recognized immediately. It made her smile, that book, its cover pockmarked where rats had gnawed at the leather over the centuries. It was no secret why Max chose that book for teaching.
He invited one of the students, a shy-looking one with brown hair falling into his eyes, to touch the book, to pick it up. The whole room held its breath as the lucky boy lifted the book by the tips of his fingers. One of the students asked about gloves—they always asked about gloves—and Max dispelled the myth, telling the boy, the class, that the book was safer when the holder had full use of his senses. Max invited the boy to lift the book, to feel it, to run his fingers over it and get to know it. When the boy lifted the book to his nose, and they always did—it was human nature to smell it—Max told him the thing about the rats.
He shot his arms forward, disgusted by the idea of centuries-old rats, and then he almost dropped the book and was horrified that he almost dropped the book, so he grasped it tighter, inviting bubonic plague, and then the whole group of undergraduates laughed and unclasped their hands from behind their backs and began to really see the treasures that Max had selected so lovingly.
It was already becoming dark outside; there were long shadows out the library window as she waited for the elevator. The elevator, the basement, her proximity to the work she was meant to be doing was getting colder, colder. She pressed the button for B2. In the holding cages, right outside the elevator, a new donation had been unpacked by an army of graduate-student assistants earlier in the week. They were all editions of the works of Thomas Hardy. Thousands of them. First editions and foreign-language editions and illustrated editions. Editions that had been owned by other writers and editions that had been owned by heads of state and editions that had been owned by Hardy himself. They were bound with wood and cloth and leather and paper.
The man who sat cross-legged on the floor inspecting one of the volumes was the proprietor of a local rare-books shop who was often called in to do appraisal work for the library. His khaki trousers were covered in dust from perching on the floor. He held up an autograph on the title page of an edition of Jude the Obscure for Liesl to see.
“Look at this,” he said. “Is this a convincing Emile Zola, or is my imagination running away with me? Do you have a Zola autograph on file?”
Liesl left him to his work with promises to send someone down with research about Zola’s penmanship. He pulled another volume off the shelf as she stepped into the elevator.
When she returned to her table, the reading room supervisor asked if she’d like to have the catalogs tidied up and put away until the morning. Liesl shook her head. The room was quieter and dimmer now that the readers had left and the desk lamps had been switched off. It was exactly the way that she wanted to work. The supervisor wavered for a moment, unsure if she was meant to stay and supervise her boss or if she should leave as scheduled. Liesl assured her that she would lock up the room before leaving.
Once alone, she shrugged out of her cardigan and returned to her creaky wooden chair. She found it difficult to focus. There was a major collection going up through Christie’s, and she had to decide whether she wanted anything for the library, and if so, how much she might be willing to spend. Turning the catalog pages, she saw only smears. There was a mechanical click as elsewhere in the building someone turned the main lights off. The rest of the staff, save for maybe Francis, had left. Liesl stood to stretch and wandered over to the book truck full of materials that were currently in use by readers. A first edition of the score of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. John Nash’s doctoral thesis. They were so small, most of them. Slender enough to fit into a laptop sleeve. She didn’t especially want any of them; what would Liesl do with the score to Don Giovanni? But she could take it; that was the point. There was no one who could stop her.
She looked at those books for a long time. They looked so ordinary. After a while she turned back to her work and reopened the abandoned Christie’s catalog. There was a fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript of Christine de Pizan’s Livre de paix that would be coming up. A fifteenth-century woman who made her living as a writer. Liesl wanted it.
After she had scratched out some figures in the margins of the auction catalog, Liesl closed all her volumes. She ran her fingers along the spines of the lonely books in the reading room, and then she turned off the light and closed the door. Francis surprised her as she was putting her things away on Christopher’s desk.
“I was certain I was the last one here,” Francis said.
She set the auction catalogs and her notepad on the desk at a neat right angle. She could return to them in the morning.
Francis had his coat in his arms, a red knit cap already on his head. The red made him look more grandfatherly than she had ever seen him. He cocked his head at her, waiting for a reply.
“You weren’t planning to rob the place, were you?” she asked.
“Not tonight,” he said.
She tapped the neat pile of catalogs. She thought of the Pizan manuscript and its half-million-dollar price tag.
Francis still stood, waiting to be paid attention to.
“Fancy a drink somewhere before you head home?” he asked.
“I’ve been here since eight, Francis. I don’t fancy anything except the idea of a cup of tea and my bed tonight.”