A glance told me the book in his hand was not mine, for I make it a point to know every one of my volumes on sight. “Not one of my collection, but I thank you nonetheless.”
“I have this book”—the red-haired fellow said more slowly, revealing a wide gap between his front teeth on both the bottom and top, then held it close to me with both his hands—“for you, Mr. Fergins.”
With that, he let the book drop spine-first to the sidewalk, where it tumbled into the street. I hurried to pick it up before it could be trampled or knocked into the gutter. By the time I stood again, he was gone. I could not help but wonder if this stranger had known that I would never under any circumstances leave a book—even the ugliest, most neglected tome—abandoned in the street. I cleaned off the cover with my handkerchief. Inscribed on it in small lettering was the title Develin’s Leister.
Sometimes a customer would inquire whether I might sell a book on consignment, and I agreed whenever I could. I would subtract a small commission from a sale, and the whole transaction contributed to the reputation of the bookstall. But if this really was a request for a consignment account, never had I received a proposition so vague. After deliberation, I decided to add the book to my shelves and see what happened. When the stall opened the next day, there was a businessman whom I had never seen before, unmemorable in every way except for a small purple flower over his buttonhole, who browsed quietly for a few minutes before he purchased three books—including the one dropped by the flame-haired stranger, which I had placed on a low shelf beside two other volumes of similar color. I was somehow unsurprised by this strange turn in the strange circumstance. When I went to put the money handed over by the businessman in my strongbox, there was a five-pound note folded in my hand. I trembled with . . . confusion, amazement, excitement. My fingers, my hands, my entire body, were electrified.
You want to know more about the book that caused all of this disturbance. I’d put my palm to Gutenberg’s Bible that I never opened it. Right away I recognized that odd title: Develin’s Leister. The old farmers of England, trading tall tales, would often tease each other, “You picked that story up in Develin’s Leister!” The legend goes that Develin had been some poor farmer who was always promising to write a book but, like most people who talk too much of writing one, never wrote a word of it. Nobody ever determined where the title of the book came from or exactly what it meant, but the book itself never existed—it was pure myth, an emblem of all the books in the world that would never be written, which is a great deal.
I could see that the volume given to me by the stranger was not an old one. There was a metal clasp, attached to a strong strip of leather, as was customary in bygone eras for large volumes of devotion. But the grain of the leather was recent. The book, in all ways, was a chimera. More than that, there was an implicit threat in the tone of the stranger’s words to me, at least in my ears, forbidding me to open it.
Not long after all this transpired, my former employer Stemmes was forced by ill health to close his shop on the Strand and retire to the seaside. When a bookshop in a city of culture such as London stops its operations, it is viewed by the wider community as a failure of mankind—a sign that books are no longer being read, or only the wrong sort of books, that literature’s finally dead, or in a temporary state of decay, that bookshops will one day disappear altogether and be replaced by mail order, that eventually books themselves would be finally and fully buried by that awful foe, so much cheaper and easier to carry: newspapers. But for those of us in the trade, it was about saying farewell to a friend.
A celebration for Stemmes was held at a lively, somewhat seedy tavern. In addition to the honoree’s good friends, fellow collectors, and booksellers, there were some newspaper and magazine men as well as representatives of the less respectable publishing classes using the occasion as a stage for debauchery. A rotund young man, hardly sixteen, whose face was pocked and freckled, squeezed himself into a seat next to me. He already smelled strongly of alcohol and his manners betrayed a general vulgarity.
“Pardon my thick legs, sirs, pardon!”
Trapped by this creature, I looked to the other side of me, but the nearest person, an Irish illustrator of my acquaintance, was engaged in a rant with another man against the newest school of painters in London. I whistled a song to suggest I was content to be by myself with my pint, but hints were not this young man’s forte. He told me he was a printer’s devil—a fact I also might have guessed by the inky smears up and down his fingers, knuckles, and hands. The freckles I had noticed on his face were actually splatters of ink, maybe from that day, maybe from a year’s worth of toil.
I moved again to change my orientation, but the devil nudged my ribs hard with his elbow. “Any great men here, fellow? I’d give a shilling to see Tennyson or Browning in person before they die.”
“I shall let you know if I see them.”
“Literary men must drink to write. Believe me, I know. Oh, I’d never write a word myself if I can help it. But I watch. Do I. You meet all kinds in the black arts—I mean printing. All kinds! From the meanest machine men who run the press, to the great bookaneers. The authors rarely venture down into the bowels of the presses, but I’m sent to them oftenly enough when I’m asked to collect proofs—you’d think I was the tax collector, you would, to see their faces fall when I show up at their doorsteps asking if they’ve finished their chapters—”
I stopped him. “You have actually met a bookaneer before?”
“Why, man, nearly the whole class of them have passed before my eyes one time or another since I started in this line as a mere boy of twelve. Even Belial, one time.”