"What time do you call this?" I shouted down. The figure on the walk glanced up.
"Seven o'clock!" he called back. "Come on, Dusk, out of bed! I've already milked the cows and goats and got the eggs! Brought you some!" He held up a small wire basket.
"Be down in a minute," I said, and shut the window again. I put on enough clothing to be decent and clattered down the stairs, just as he walked into the shop and flicked the lights on.
"Breakfast," he said, setting the basket on the counter.
"No croissants?" I asked. "Classless, Jacob."
"Wondering if you'd do me a favor," he replied, hitching a hip against the counter in a farmer's lean. He made a spare gesture, flicking his fingers at the worktable against the back wall. "You got all those...book tools."
"Binding equipment, yes," I said, ducking under the counter. "Need something bound?"
"Well, I got my dad's Farmer's Guide," he said, laying a dusty, crack-spined book on the table. I whistled and picked it up.
"Rural Bible. This looks like a first printing," I said.
"Couldn't speak to that, but it's got some family things in the front, see," he said, pointing to the inner flyleaf when I opened it. The cheap binding creaked ominously. Inside the frontispiece was a series of names in various hands and shades of ink, a family tree in list form.
"This wasn't just your father's."
"Nah. Grandfather's before him."
"Definitely a first printing. Family treasure?" I asked.
"Sorta. He'll be sixty next week."
"If you don't look after this – "
"Yeah, well, s'kinda why I came in," he said, rubbing the back of his sunburnt head. "Thought you might put a new cover on it, maybe fix some of the loose pages."
I let the book fall open to a random page. Most books will open to the page that's looked at the most. In this case, it was a chapter on diseases common to children.
"How many brothers you got, Jacob?" I asked absently, studying the stitching.
"Three brothers," he said, perplexed. "Two sisters too."
"Mmhm. Well, I can do one of two things."
"Yeah?"
"I could take out the frontispiece," I said, flipping back to the first page. "Coat it in acid-free sealant. There's a new edition of the Farmer's Guide out last year, if you bought a new one I could sew it in..."
"I don't think Dad'd much go for that," Jacob said.
"Probably not. Otherwise..." I closed the book and tapped my fingers against the spine, "...I can take the cover off, take out the damaged sections, paste them and restitch them if they're durable enough, put a new cover on. Paula's got some nice leather for embossing. But that's repair rather than conservation, Jacob. It'll decrease the value of the book."
"Leather cover? You could do that?" he asked.
"Sure. It's not difficult."
"I think that wouldn't make it worth any less," he said. "Not to my dad, anyhow. Leather cover, that'd be something else. You do all that by next week?"
"I don't see why not. Longest wait is for the glue to dry."
"How much you charge for something like that?"
I studied the cover, already thinking about the work. Slice with a scalpel there, and there. Fresh white waxed twine for the new stitching, not too tight or it'd rip the paper. Maybe some reinforcement on the brittle pages.
"Tell you what, run down to Paula's when she opens up, get some of that leather she sells – here, these dimensions," I said, scribbling out rough measurements on a scrap of paper. "You pay for that and bring me some of that cheese you make in spring and we'll call it even."
"You sure about that?"
"It's really good cheese, Jacob."
He laughed. "When's Paula get in?"
"About an hour. Come on upstairs, I'll make you some of these eggs."
"Nah, I got to make some deliveries. Bring you the leather this afternoon."
"Suit yourself," I said, putting the book in a desk drawer, behind the one functional lock in the entire building. "I'll be here all day."
He let himself out while I collected the basket of eggs and made my way upstairs. There was a small jar in the basket as well, packed with salted butter. I put a pan of water on to boil and cracked two eggs into a bowl, leaving the rest in the fridge. Fresh poached eggs and buttered toast are worth a wake-up call at seven in the morning any day of the week "but Sunday", as they say in Low Ferry.
After breakfast I opened the shop, not that there was anyone waiting, and settled down with the Farmer's Guide. I spent the better part of the day getting the cover off and delicately dissecting the segments of the text block, looking through each portion for ripped pages. Most of the twine used to stitch it together with was rotting. A really thorough job would mean picking out the stitches and re-sewing all of it, which took time and care. And there was no time like the present to start.
I was stitching merrily away, a pot of wheat paste at my elbow, when my silent customer slipped in again, right past me as I was working on a fiddly part of the book. I didn't dare look up until I'd finished, and by then he'd was nothing but a shadow behind a shelf.
I set the paper down carefully and checked the clock. Nearly three, which meant –
Even as I thought it, a crowd of students crashed into the shop, fresh from school and still carrying their backpacks.
"Hey!" I called, and most of them looked up. My customer did too, a sharp sudden movement. "Backpacks by the counter, you guys know the drill."
They rolled their eyes and piled their bags in an untidy heap, flocking around the magazines and comics. Among them was the boy who had questioned me the day before, rubbing his dark-haired head in consternation as he studied the newest arrivals. The children weren't interested readers, except for a few exiles who had more books than friends, but all of them lived for the day the comic books came in.
The little demons were learning economics, at least. I didn't know who had come up with the idea, but the children had discovered that if each of them bought a different comic, they only needed to buy one each – they could share them around at school or in the play-yard afterwards and read all the comics they pleased for a small price. The weekly negotiations over who would buy what were always very much in earnest.