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restorer v. man
There are books of literal magic in the world: grimoires that house strange spells born from the tracings inside, an art forbidden for most of a century, that cannot be read except by a magus skilled enough to put the spells to sleep. There are books with no magic, but whose mundane words, rhetoric twisted to the service of a cruel cause, have made neighbor murder neighbor and armies form up to slaughter. There are books whose mundane words hold a more benign form of inspiration, stirring tales of adventure that leave the hearts of their readers light and full of joy. There are practical books: manuals of how to build an olive oil press, or mix medicines from commonplace plants, or travel through the Kalakul Mountains without getting lost; books that try to turn their readers into experts.
And there are books, it turns out, that turn their readers into animals. Nanako Wattle is looking at one now. The title page lists it as a history of Makuil-Malinali, but she knows better.
"What do you think we should do?"
"Close the lending library," Nanako says, and tries to catch the edge of the desiccated mass of pancake.
Professor Nuili has to hide her laugh with a cough, but she says, "About the oil stain, dear."
"Oh, that. We should be able to use flour and leave it in a press overnight to take off the worst, then spot-clean with vithrix solution. Then find whoever borrowed this last and box their ears." She holds up the blob. It had come off neatly enough, but left a squashed raisin glued to the map of the Great North Market, obscuring a historically significant lodging-house. "How did someone this stupid learn to read?"
"Scholars can be absentminded," Nuili says, diplomatically. "Why don't you go through the rest of the stack and make sure there's no more damage?"
"I should wash my hands first," Nanako answers, and flees.
She counts her breaths while she scrubs at her fingernails, chasing down the leftover oil, forcing herself back to calm. Maybe someday she'll be able to look at the damage and chuckle, like Professor Nuili does.
--
restorer v. nature
The holes look like flecks of peppercorn embedded in a fried egg. Early Mun bookbinders would brush their paper with turmeric dye to resist mildew and insects, and some of them kept up the practice into the days of woodblock printing. Clearly, it doesn't actually work.
"I don't know how much of this is reparable," Xuatl says, and bites her lip. "Obviously there's a historical interest but it's not like we don't have copies of the Narrative of the Erlan Bay Battles already. People keep reprinting them."
Nanako takes a deep breath. "It's a book," she says. "Someone trusted the Central Library enough to entrust us with it at his death. We can't dishonour his gift by throwing it out on account of a little insect damage." Truth be told, she doesn't think much of the lumber merchant who didn't know enough to keep his books safe in cedarwood cabinets. But she can sympathize. Maybe he spent all the spare money he had getting books away from second-hand dealers who barely kept them dry; there were a few in the crates with water-damaged pages but fresh rebinding. Not to Library standards, but he'd cared that much.
They can fix this. It will take a lot of repair tissue, but they can fix it.
"And it will be good practice," Pipiri chirps. She's sitting cross-legged, and her wings are a bare shimmer in the afternoon light. "Xuatl, your job today is to get the glue ready for Nanako and watch what she thinks has to be repaired and what's small enough to be left alone. It'll be good for you. Go!"
"Aren't you helping?" Xuatl asks, hands waving like the always do when she's nervous. "Er, that is - "
"I'm supervising. You're good students and I trust you. Also, this is a Bulwark folio and I couldn't lift the thing."
"Also, you're sitting on the gluebrush box," Nanako informs her.
She pushes herself into the air with an embarrassed half-laugh. Sometimes Nanako wonders how someone as absent-minded as Pipiri passed the exams, for all her skill with her hands. "Right, right, I'll supervise from over here."
Nanako lifts the first page with her bone folder. Better to touch paper this old as little as possible, but she should go through it first in case there's anything that will need to be refixed to the spine, or in case they'll need lens tissue to completely cover a damaged page. Oh, and more turmeric dye. It may be pointless, but the repairs should match. The Library has more reliable ways of keeping insects out of the collection.
--
restorer v. technology
"What's the point?"
"Expense." Hsio Argent has half-circle glasses, dull grey hair, and a face that never shows expression. Nanako wonders sometimes if she settled into that blankness over forty years in the Judicial Office, or if she'd been assigned there to start because of her imperturbability. "Thread-binders are craftsmen and take craftsmen's wages. Amy bloke off the street could do this with a day's training, ten or twelve times an hour."
"And it won't last a decade. No self-respecting cover-binder would waste leather on this thing." Nanako flips through the book again, in horrified fascination. The spine arches in her hands and the pages make a breathy noise. It's cheap paper, too, yellowish and soft, just a grade above the stuff that Espleo sells by the cartload to newspaper printers.
Argent informs her, "Serious collectors are not their target market."
Obviously not. Nanako scowls. "Look at this. Not even enough of a margin to rebind it properly with a stabbed edge. How are we supposed to keep an archival copy, stuff it in a box?"
"Why not? We do that for newspapers."
"Please tell me you're talking to Restorations because you're going to pull their printing license because this doesn't qualify as a book."
"No, actually. The license is for content, and the content is a tourist guide to Aftzaak, just as was submitted. We're more concerned about unofficial printers getting ideas." Argent's eyes might, possibly, narrow a little in annoyance. Or possibly because the sun is low enough now to get in their eyes.
Nanako squints at the so-called book and thumbs through it again. They stinted on quality for the engraved plates - the edges are smudged - but not quantity. The text is dense. "I think," she says slowly, "the risk is no worse than for magazines. Less, possibly, This - thing - wouldn't be any faster to typeset and print than a book, only bind. Maybe a little faster, if they used newspaper tools ... " She finds herself trailing off. She knows almost nothing about newspapers, she realizes; they're a specialized preservational case and not her specialty. She's spent almost three years now focusing on books proper, honing her speed, learning how to stitch and reset signatures and pick covers for rebinding. Professor Nuili wants to get her clearance to work with grimories. This is barely a book.
Glue. Every single page - every individual sheet - set into the paper spine with nothing but glue.
She can't believe she's about to do this to something that looks like a book, but it has to be done. There's a point to be made. She opens the thing wide at random, two-handed in the air, then jerks her hands together backwards, the kind of motion they make sure students know never to make and for exactly this reason: the paper spine cracks open, just where she stressed it, and the smudged block print of the Library main gate flutters loose, followed by a clot of twenty pages of restaurant recommendations.
"They're using the wrong glue," she says flatly. "Make up a new license classification. Annual magazine, or something. There was a year on the title page."
Hsio Argent still has no expression on her face, but something in the glint of her glasses makes Nanako very aware, with the sudden awful inevitability of a patch of soil giving way under her feet to dump her in a pond, that she is a fifteen-year-old trainee and she just instructed a Judicial Office councillor on how to rearrange a major library policy. Numbly, she gathers the pages back up, sets them in place, closes the tourist guide.
And then Argent says, "We may need to adjust the process, at least. Thank you for your expertise."
"I'm sure Professor Nuili would say the same," Nanako manages.
"Mmm. Send her over to my office when she gets back, then."
And then she's gone, and Nanako is left alone with her slowly congealing gluepot full of the right kind of glue, and her bone folder, and her repair paper, and her soft rubber mark-remover, and her stack of lightly damaged returns from Children's Storybooks, and her slowly settling heartbeat.
--
restorer v. fate
It's hand-written. The writing is squashed and loopy, the comfortable, confident work of a scribe with their own style. The writing is also in a long-disused dialect from a Kadoe city that no longer exists, and she only has the breathless enthusiasm of the kafna who acquired it to prove that it's the fourth known copy of the Herbarium of Sen Kolreb. And it's falling to pieces. It's a folded scroll of historic importance that came to them with the wooden covers dry-rotted to dust and the pages so stiff the first fold cracked when they opened it to check the contents.
"We're going to have to add guard hinges on every single fold, aren't we," Nanako mumbles. She feels a little numb. It was Pipiri who opened it, using her mana-touch to keep the pressure even and slow, and it still cracked.
"Not necessarily," Nuili says. Her eyes are closed; Nanako doesn't blame her for not wanting to look. "We could mark it Delicate and Past Restoration, and store it as loose pages."
"It's a folded scroll." Nanako answers slowly, in case there's some obvious thing she's missing. "Swell is irrelevant. And it's a handwritten manuscript, so someone will want to read it to compare to the other copies. Leave off the covers, maybe, but the rest can't be beyond hope."
It's barely midmorning, and the sun streaming in through the workshop windows makes each drifting dust mote into a spark. So many of them, Nanako can't help but think, used to be part of a book. Covers turn from wood to woodrot, pages crack, insects chew at the bindings. Books go to pieces so delicately. And then there are the rapid disasters - floods that turn a book into a sodden pile of glue with the ink all washed away, fires that transform it into a drifting smear of ash. Every year a book survives is luck. Too many, and even the luckiest will show their age. This has been the tragic truth since stone tablets fell out of fashion.
The Herbarium in front of her is nine hundred years old. She's never brought something this old back to life, but Nanako aches with how badly she wants to try.
From somewhere in the vicinity of her right shoulder Pipiri points out, "We have to break the folds to get it open. We might as well envelop all the pages, and if we go that far hinges won't even touch the old sheets. Procedure Seventy-three." She must be flapping her wings; the dust motes are dancing in the sudden breeze. Nanako makes a faint noise of agreement. Pipiri has good ideas, if only about book repair. Enveloping the pages in lens tissue will expand the text in all directions, be a hideously obvious repair, but it will leave it a readable scroll and not a pile of delicate sheets in a box.
Readable, at least, to someone who knows dead Kadoe languages.
"Wait." Nuili lets out a breath. "It isn't a grimoire. We should get expert advice."
"Aren't we the experts?" Pipiri guilelessly asks, and manifests the eyeglasses she likes to push up her nose for dramatic effect.
It makes Nuili smile, at least. "Not on scrolls quite this old. We want Hyberas d'Maarn. She'll be back from leave in twenty days." She reaches out with her bone folder, hesitating with it still hovering over the loose sheet. "She'll want to look at the old cover, just to make a record ..."
"I'll get a box for now." It won't hurt; the cover is past repair anyway. Nanako brushes the rotted edge with her bare fingertips. It's stiff and soft at once for a moment, like the not-quite-real fur on the hare spirits from the Guidance Office.
Then it crumbles away.
--
restorer v. society
The smell of smoke is still thick in the Cerulean Tower, despite the wide-open windows. Pipiri wrinkles her nose and waves her hand in front of her face. Nanako fights down a sudden wave of nausea. Behind them are gasps, and a strangled half-sob.
"As far as we can tell the fire started in two-twenty-four," Nils Kan'u says. He's keeping one hand buried in his giant cat's fur, comfort for him or restraint for the cat. "There are no oil lamps in this whole building, so we have to assume it was set deliberately."
Two-twenty-four, Rakta contemporary political theory, on the south side of the room right between the windows. Treatises by dedicated scholars, printed in small runs for the benefit of other scholars, bound casually in cheap paperboard cases. The twist in Nanako's stomach twists a little tighter. "How far did it spread?" she asks, around the lump in her throat.
"The flames didn't get past the two-twenties. Arhwa spotted it - she signalled for Sedona right away." Kan'u's voice is tight. It was a good thought. Fire needs oxygen, and Sedona must have taken all the oxygen from the room. It's a shame the whole Protections Office aren't machni hwa kakachpwa. Of course, most of the time they're protecting against people who want to steal books, not destroy them.
Nanako finds herself drifting forward. Not past the two-twenties is still - hundreds. Maybe thousands. It depends on how deep the damage went, what can be saved. The shelves beneath the window are a crumbled mass of soot, not shaped like shelves anymore. The next stack, jagged-topped like a thalassosaur jaw. Piles of sand are scattered here and there - places the fire tried to relight, once Sedona let the air back in, and someone had to smother it. Ashy footprints smeared across the bright cerulean floor tiles. She doesn't want to look at the rest of the shelves; she doesn't want to feel any sicker.
Who would do something like this?
"Probably a militant irredentist," Kan'u offers. Did she say that aloud? "There've been a lot of pamphlets lately saying the Bulwark is in the wrong place, the Rakta have too much voice in government ... You know the type, I'm sure." He sighs, and his cat arches one head up to lick his cheek.
The double handful of Restorations Office kafna who hurried up to get the bad news straight away are drifting in behind Nanako, now. Xuatl is making more little noises in the back of her throat, high-pitched and angry. Hyberas d'Maarn is still standing beside the doorway, clutching her cane like she wants to personally beat the arsonist to shreds. Nanako takes a deep breath, which is a mistake because the lingering smoke catches at her throat and turns it into a coughing fit.
"You'll give them a good walloping, right?" Pipiri, somehow, is hovering by the window, scowling but not even looking green. There must be some benefits to being so flighty.
They'll investigate, certainly, but is punishment their department or will the Aftzaak city government take over? Someone must have said, at some point in her training, and it's gone right out of Nanako's head. Usually the crimes they deal with are illegal printing presses, their jurisdiction because their law, spreading, well - irredentist pamphlets. Fraudulent religious doctrine. Incitements to war.
(There was a seminar series on the morality of it all. Would 'Roar for the Morrow' pass censorship today? Would the Black Text? Who are they to make these decisions?)
(Nanako didn't attend. She was Restorations.)
Whatever Kan'u said must have satisfied Pipiri, because with her usual brisk efficiency and utter disregard for the fact three-quarters of the people here are her seniors, she's directing traffic. "- to the stack past Two-eighteen should be checked for damage! Empty the shelves, the cleaners will need room to work! Come on, people, pass them down to the hallway and someone fetch all the shelving carts! You, Xuatl! Go make Cataloguing pull their weight!" Xuatl, still green and off-balance, stumbles out at high speed.
Somehow Nanako wanders over to the two-twenty-eights and starts brushing the ash off the spines of books, hoping the pages are intact.
--
restorer v. self
Nobody had noticed. It had been sitting, peacefully neglected, sideways behind the seven volumes of The House of the Lords of Everinki and their Lives and Loves, an old-fashioned and unfashionable novel that likely hadn't been read since Nanako passed the exams. Its cover was black. That corner of the library was dark. The books were on a lower shelf.
It had probably been marked lost.
The right thing to do would have been to turn it back in at the desk right away.
Nanako, heart pounding, had tucked it under her arm and walked out. She was a kafna, in kafna's robes. No one challenged her. Kafna taking books away was normal and expected.
In her own room, hands not shaking at all, she lights the oil lamp - kafna were assumed to be responsible, trusted with fire - and lays it down. The tooling on the spine was gold-leaf, angular Rakta letters in a typeface that had been old-fashioned a hundred years ago. A Voyage to Peta-Gan. There had been no Peta-Gan for a hundred years. It was a seaport.
Gently, just as if it were new, Nanako lets the book fall open in the center. The sussurus of paper against paper rings in her ears, louder than it has any right to. Not a book old enough to be truly fragile and precious, but not a book neglected since its printing - it fell open for her so easily, and on one page is a soft crease. There are ever-so-faint smears of oily fingertips. It's not pristine. If she makes it a little less pristine, no one will ever know.
She lifts the book to her face and takes a deep breath. It smells of old paper and wheat glue and the gentle touch of decay. It smells like home. Gently, reverently, she presses it to her cheeks. It will get skin oil all over the pages, and the moisture in her breath will speed up decay, and right now she doesn't care; she can't help wanting to touch. Doing it, in secret, once in a great while. Tomorrow, she'll say she found A Voyage to Peta-Gan by chance, looking for something to read on her day off. It will be the truth. She won't give a time and date. Some future restorer will curse Nanako for what she's doing right now. It might even be her.