The Book Stops Here (6 page)

Limitation page indicates limited edition of fifty copies, of which this book is number 6.

Original author signature on limitation page.

Shaking off the dry bookseller’s tone, I gazed at the book from my own perspective.

“You are a pretty thing,” I murmured as I reached for another chocolate mint kiss and tossed it into my mouth. After lobbing the thin foil wrap into the trash can, I checked my hands to make sure they were chocolate-free. Then I picked up my magnifying glass and proceeded to study every inch of the leather cover, making more notes as I went along.

As I’d mentioned to Vera on the show, there were several faded spots on the back cover and I noted their locations. I was certain they wouldn’t take too much time to repair, just a cautious application of the leather cleaner I used.

The spine needed more attention than I’d noticed at first. The gilding had all but disappeared along four of the raised bands, so I decided it would be best if I regilded them all so the intensity of the gold would match exactly. The decorative designs in each panel were still quite vivid so I wouldn’t have to touch them.

I mentally patted myself on the back, knowing that that little decision would save Vera a few hundred dollars. Gilding could be time-consuming work and occasionally had to be repeated once or twice before it was perfect.

Moving on to the front cover, I noted that the unique beveled edge around the painting was rough in one spot. It was almost undetectable, but a good dealer would take money off the price if I didn’t fix it.

I had friends who weren’t this obsessive about their work, but I’d been trained by a bookbinder’s version of a boot-camp
instructor. During my apprentice years, Abraham would have gleefully ripped the book apart and made me start over if I’d missed the smallest detail. Consequently, I rarely skipped a step.

Besides that, I was halfway in love with this book. I was excited to get started and determined to give it the best treatment possible.

Once I finished examining the cover, I held the book in my hands and stared at it for a long moment. My throat tightened as my excitement was replaced with a wistful yearning for my dear old mentor, Abraham Karastovsky.

It wasn’t something I ever would have shared with Vera or the viewing audience of
This Old Attic
, but my own childhood copy of
The Secret Garden
had been the very catalyst that led me to seek a career in bookbinding and restoration. My own book hadn’t been nearly as grand as Vera’s, of course, but I had cherished it all the same.

I could still picture the sturdy, pale pink cloth binding with its green cloth spine. The front cover had featured an illustration drawn by Tasha Tudor, a sepia-toned version of the little girl standing by the garden wall. She wore a plaid coat and hat and carried a jump rope in her hand. She appeared to be emerging from the secret walled garden through a heavy wooden door.

My clever parents had bought the book for me the summer they moved our family from San Francisco to the new commune in Sonoma County. They knew us kids well, had known we weren’t happy about the move. Their solution was to surprise us with goodies to keep our minds off this major disruption. My gift was
The Secret Garden
.

I had adored that book and read it over and over again that summer. Then one day, I went to find the book and it was gone. Puzzled, I searched all over the house but couldn’t find it anywhere.

I walked outside and saw my big brothers, Austin and Jackson,
and a couple of their friends tossing something back and forth. It was my book! I screamed at them and they dropped it in the dirt and ran away, laughing.

I gingerly picked up my beloved
Secret Garden
. The cover had been ripped from the text block and dangled precariously, held on by a mere thread or two. I began to cry and tore into the house to find my mother, hoping she would agree to help me beat the boys with clubs.

Though she wasn’t happy with what they’d done, she refused to punish them in the manner I’d suggested. I was inconsolable and ran to my room, sobbing. A few minutes later, Mom walked in and sat on my bed. As she rubbed my back, she suggested that I take the book over to the commune’s bookbinder. Perhaps he could fix it for me.

The bookbinder was Abraham, my teacher and friend, who died last year.

He had taken one look at the tattered book and had called my brothers into his studio to put the fear of God into them.

“I am not happy about this,” he’d said in his soft baritone.

I’d watched my brothers’ eyes widen in apprehension, because when Abraham wasn’t happy, people tended to run for the hills. The man was tall and husky, with a big head of wiry hair and really large hands. His voice grew softer the madder he became. All the kids agreed he would make a great bad guy in a science-fiction movie like
The Thing
.

He wasn’t a monster at all, of course, but a big softy and a darling man. I loved him for counseling my brothers—after he had first frightened them thoroughly—that part of their job on this earth was to respect and treasure their family and to take care of the little ones, like me.

He’d added gruffly that anyone who didn’t take care of books was downright stupid.

“You don’t want to be thought of as stupid, do you?” Abraham
murmured. “Wouldn’t you rather have us believe that you’re intelligent young men?”

Jackson and Austin looked like bobblehead dolls as they nodded in agreement.

After listening to Abraham, I felt a little sheepish about having asked my mother to beat up my brothers and their friends. But I kept that to myself.

Abraham fixed my book and returned it to me in better-than-original condition. After countless readings by my little eight-year-old self, it had been admittedly a bit shabby, but Abraham had made it look beautiful again.

As he’d worked on my book, I had hounded him, showing up at his workshop hourly to check on his progress. His bookbinding skills fascinated me, and once my book was restored I continued to visit him almost daily to beg him to teach me how to do what he did.

Finally, he reluctantly agreed, and I began the journey that eventually made me the bibliophile expert I was today.

I sat back in my chair and checked the time. I still had another hour before I had to stop, so I opened the book and found the pages that contained the minor foxing I’d pointed out to Vera. I wrote down each page number that contained even the slightest discoloration. There was foxing on only twelve pages. That wasn’t so awful.

I still wasn’t sure if I would bother eliminating the spots or not, because the procedure could be destructive to the book. But the sad fact was that while some buyers accepted that foxing was inevitable, others were likely to downgrade the book’s worth with each instance.

Happily, the paper was a thick, creamy vellum, so if I decided to go ahead with the bleaching procedure, the pages would be able to withstand my gentle attempts to clean them.

Foxing was caused by various types of mold spores or mildew
that reacted to elements, mainly iron, within the paper itself. The problem with trying to clean or bleach the brown spots was that an individual spore could react completely differently, depending on the paper. You never knew exactly what you were dealing with until you saw the results.

It was frustrating. Spores, fibers, paper thickness, age of the paper, amount of iron—each of these factors could cause a completely unique reaction. So a bookbinder was taking a chance with every book. I never knew which formula of bleach or cleaner to use when trying to get rid of foxing. I could make an educated guess because I’d done it thousands of times, but I still couldn’t say for sure what would happen in any given situation.

And even when the results looked good, the fact was that I would have broken down the microscopic cellulose fibers and this would eventually lead to the disintegration of the paper. And if there was one thing I didn’t care to do, it was destroy the paper itself.

I’d had moderate success with a weak mixture of water and hydrogen peroxide, but I didn’t dare use a chemical bleaching agent on a book as valuable as this one. I went ahead and added two hours of time to Vera’s estimate, just in case I decided to try some of the nontoxic plant extracts I’d used in the past. The good news was that they wouldn’t destroy the paper, but the bad news was that they also wouldn’t entirely eliminate the spots.

I thought about the time I’d experimented by using a loaf of white bread as a bleaching tool. It hadn’t been very effective, but it also hadn’t damaged the paper. And it was fun to squish the pieces of bread into a ball, rub it against the brown spots, and watch the ball turn darker as it pulled bits of the stain away from the page.

I had a few minutes left so I picked up my magnifying glass again and studied the extra signature inside the front cover. I assumed the book’s owner had written her own name in the book,
because it was clearly not the author’s signature. It also didn’t look like a child’s scrawl, although it did appear a bit immature and shaky, almost as if some young person had been practicing a more grown-up or flamboyant way to sign his or her name.

The first name began with a big, sweeping loop, followed by letters crammed up against one another. I started with the loops, determined to unravel the mystery of the bad handwriting.

The first name began with what looked like an
M
.

“Mary?” I whispered. “Martha? Marilyn?” I moved on to the second name and realized it wasn’t a middle name so much as an adjunct to the first name. So . . . Mary Jo? Mary Sue? Martha Lou? Mary Tom?

Mary
Tom
? Probably not.

After a few minutes, I had to blink and look away to ease the tension in my eyes. It wasn’t easy, staring at the crammed letters through the magnifying glass.

I stood and stretched. I didn’t want to get a headache before I had to go off to work, so I gave up for the day. And, frankly, it didn’t really matter if I couldn’t figure out the name since I wasn’t going to delete it or rebind the book because of it.

Leaving my tools where they were, I covered the book with a clean cloth.

I finished Vera’s estimate and printed it. Before I jumped into the shower, I called the number on her business card. She answered on the first ring and we exchanged brief pleasantries. I quoted her my price and she was agreeable, thank goodness.

“Would you mind terribly bringing the invoice to me at the flower shop?” she asked. “I work every day except Sunday, from early morning until six each evening.”

“I’ll be happy to.” We agreed to meet at her shop Thursday morning on my way to the studio. Her shop was far away from my usual route, but she was so excited that I didn’t mind. She promised to have the check ready so I could get started on the work.

I grabbed my computer and shoved a few more reference books into my bag, then left my apartment, checking that the locks were secure before heading for the elevator. Even though I could do most of my research on the computer, I still liked to refer to the books written by the experts I most admired. Their unique views and experience couldn’t always be found online.

The Peapod Studio complex was located at the base of Potrero Hill, just a few miles from my place. It was almost one o’clock and the sun was high as I drove into the studio parking lot. I stopped at the small booth and greeted Benny the security guard. He was a sweet, older man, and calling him a guard was probably a stretch since he was portly and a bit timid. But he took pride in his work and was friendly and attentive. And he already knew my name after only one day.

“Good morning, Miss Wainwright,” Benny said, checking my name off his clipboard list.

“Hi, Benny. I have a guest coming to see me today.” I watched him reach for a pen and added, “I’m not sure when he’ll be here, but can you put his name on your visitors list?”

“For you, absolutely,” he said.

He wrote down Derek’s name and waved me through the gate.

I drove in and parked in my designated spot. As I walked toward Studio 6, I thought about Derek’s prediction the night before and wondered if more people would show up today with their rare books. I hoped so. I was always happy to talk about books. The more, the merrier.

I smiled inwardly at the possibility of Tom and Walter agreeing to devote the entire show to just books.
Why not?
I chuckled and figured I would have to be satisfied with my two measly book segments each day.
Ah, well.

“Hey!”

The angry shout startled me out of my reverie. I whipped
around and saw a tall, burly man stalking across the parking lot toward me. I glanced to either side and over my shoulder, wondering who he was shouting at.

“Yeah, I’m talking to you!”

I looked behind me again, thinking he had to be yelling at someone else. But I was the only one in the area and he was looking right at me. And getting closer. He wore a baggy pair of blue jeans and a stretched-out, dirty white T-shirt that barely covered his big stomach. A torn and faded flannel shirt completed the look.

At first I thought he was bald, but as he approached I realized that his head was shaved and he was actually pretty young. In his twenties, maybe.

The closer he got, the meaner he looked, and I was growing more alarmed by the nanosecond. I headed quickly toward the stage door and relative safety.

I noticed Benny watching from the shelter of his little booth by the parking lot entrance. I waved my hand frantically until he finally stepped out, but he didn’t come any closer.

“Hold it right there.”

Again I looked around. “Are you talking to me?”

“Don’t play dumb with me,” he said, jabbing his finger toward me. “I saw you on TV. That book is mine and so’s the money.”

“I’m not playing dumb,” I said, irritated now. Was I going to be harassed by any big jerk who happened to see me on television? “I don’t know why you’re yelling at me, but I think you’d better leave.”