The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections(40)

Two booths over and still tingling, she saw a familiar face.

Dressed like a history professor who had been on a two-day bender, Don Lake grabbed Liesl into a hug when he saw her. The bookseller had been operating D. E. Lake Books in the city since Liesl was a student. He was on the periphery of the show; business wasn’t booming, but he looked nothing but pleased to see her.

Liesl looked at his table, second editions and minor works, until she caught sight of something that made her bite the inside of her cheek so hard it bled.

“What is that doing here?” she asked.

“It’s been in my collection for years.”

Don Lake put his hands on it. Don Lake wasn’t a thief, but he would have to be if her eyes weren’t deceiving her. She ran her hands over the familiar black binding of the Peshawar manuscript on his table.

“It’s a facsimile, of course,” he added.

She hadn’t wet herself in decades. It would have been a terrible day to break the streak.

“Can’t imagine it’s of any interest for your collections; you already have one.”

“Of course,” she said. “It’s so convincing.”

She wanted to go collect herself, but now Don Lake wanted to talk about the facsimile. The early-twentieth-century printer had thought himself clever and printed onto birch bark, same as the original, and the effect was that the facsimiles had been darkening at more or less the same rate as the original. Liesl flexed her toes in her wet shoes as a way to offload her discomfort. It was like meeting her twin sister for the first time. The card stock that held the birch leaves in place was the same ridged beige, the album cover the same weathered black. Only the frontispiece, which gave the identity of the creator and indicated that 165 of these reproductions had been made, gave away that it was a facsimile.

The library held many of these facsimiles. They could be collector’s items. But it was the first time that Liesl had stood in front of a facsimile of a book when she knew the original so well. It changed the shape of what she understood. It was an impostor, and she didn’t like that it was allowed to exist.

She squeezed Don Lake’s forearm and, legs stiff, limped toward the next booth. He called back to her, tried to draw her attention to a map that he thought would be a nice complement to the library’s collection on the settlement of the American West, but she declined, promising to send her map expert to the bookshop to take a look if the item remained unsold by the close of the show. She crossed into the next aisle to get away from him, the time and the proximity to the center of the show meaning that the crowds were thickening now, and she could get lost in them.

This close to the heart, the treasures were in glass display cases rather than on plastic folding tables, and they had printed labels rather than hand-drawn pricing signs.

It went faster now. The sellers were busy; the materials couldn’t be picked up and inspected. Liesl wanted to ask about a mid-century Anne of Green Gables in a dust jacket she hadn’t ever seen before. But it would have to come later. At the appointed time, she was back at the front of the show, waiting.

It was uncharitable to think that Max had been lurking in a corner so that he and his sweater vest could stride out just as the second hand was striking, but his ability to arrive neither a second early nor late left little alternate explanation. At Max’s suggestion, he and his sweater vest and Liesl and her wet feet started down the middle aisle.

The place was lousy with bibles. Printers loved printing bibles, and Max loved acquiring them, studying them, talking about them. The New Testaments were coming at her from every direction. Max would fall in love with a binding, a frontispiece, a printing error and would sing in her ear about the need to invest, the need to win the rare-books-library bible arms race. To Liesl, Max was the right choice over Francis to accompany her to the fair. There were never, wouldn’t ever be rumors about her and Max. So she had to keep her mouth shut, nod in the right places, and wait for raised eyebrows to make their ways south.

There was a twelfth-century illuminated leaf from the book of Joshua that Max insisted she had to see. Her mind wandered back to the gold calligraphy on blue vellum and to her wish to hold that piece in her hands. She could see that the book of Joshua leaf was special; she was skeptical but not blind to the winged creature inked in blue dividing the columns of text. She let Max haggle, knowing that with a starting cost of $5,900, there was no amount of bargaining that would reduce the fee to something reasonable for a single sheet.

“Well,” she said when they walked off empty-handed. “There will be others.”

“What a thing to think. You don’t believe that?”

“Won’t there?” she said. “Hundreds of exhibitors here would disagree.”

“That piece is singular,” he said.

“Of course I understand that,” Liesl said.

He let it hang there. She knew he didn’t think she understood at all.

“Somewhere in France, eight hundred years ago, a Dominican monk labored over that piece,” Max said. To avoid a lecture about Dominican monks, she was willing to write him a check for the $5,900 from her own bank account.

“We’re responsible for the pieces that are singular,” he said, his hand back at his collar, always at that collar.

“Like the Plantin?” she asked. A lecture about the Plantin would still be a lecture, but it might be of use to her.