He shifted in his chair and pursed his lips.
“I’ll share something with you, Mr. Berger, something that I’ve never shared with anyone before,” he said. “Some years ago we had a leak in the roof. It wasn’t a big one, but they don’t need to be big, do they? A little water dripping for hours and hours can do a great deal of damage, and it wasn’t until I got back from the picture house in Moreham that I saw what had happened. You see, before I left I’d set aside our manuscript copies of Alice in Wonderland and Moby Dick.”
“Moby Dick?” said Mr. Berger. “I wasn’t aware that there were any extant manuscripts of Moby Dick.”
“It’s an unusual one, I’ll admit,” said Mr. Gedeon. “Somehow it’s all tied up with confusion between the American and British first editions. The American edition, by Harper & Brothers, was set from the manuscript, and the British edition, by Bentley’s, was in turn set from the American proofs, but there are some six hundred differences in wording between the two editions. But in 1851, while Melville was working on the British edition based on proofs that he himself had paid to be set and plated before an American publisher had signed an agreement, he was also still writing some of the later parts of the book, and in addition he took the opportunity to rewrite sections that had already been set for America. So which is the edition that the library should store? The American, based on the original manuscript, or the British, based not on the manuscript but on a subsequent rewrite? The decision made by the Trust was to acquire the British edition and, just to be on the safe side, the manuscript. When Captain Ahab arrived at the library, both editions arrived with him.”
“And the manuscript of Alice in Wonderland? I understood that to be in the collection of the British Museum.”
“Some sleight of hand there, I believe,” said Mr. Gedeon. “You may recall that the Reverend Dodgson gave the original ninety-page manuscript to Alice Liddell, but she was forced to sell it in order to pay death duties following her husband’s death in 1928. Sotheby’s sold it on her behalf, suggesting a reserve of four thousand pounds. It went, of course, for almost four times that amount, to an American bidder. At that point the Trust stepped in, and a similar manuscript copy was substituted and sent to the United States.”
“So the British Museum now holds a fake?”
“Not a fake but a later copy made by Dodgson’s hand at the Trust’s instigation. In those days the Trust was always thinking ahead, and I’ve tried to keep up that tradition. I’ve always got an eye out for a book or character that may be taking off.
“So the Trust was very keen to have Dodgson’s original Alice. So many iconic characters, you see, and then there were the illustrations too. It’s an extremely powerful manuscript.
“But all of this is beside the point. Both of the manuscripts needed a bit of attention — just a careful clean to remove any dust or other media with a little polyester film. Well, I almost cried when I returned to the library. Some of the water from the ceiling had fallen on the manuscripts — just drops, nothing more, but enough to send some of the ink from Moby Dick onto a page of the Alice manuscript.”
“And what happened?” asked Mr. Berger.
“For one day, in all extant copies of Alice in Wonderland, there was a whale at the Mad Hatter’s tea party,” said Mr. Gedeon solemnly.
“What? I don’t remember that.”
“Nobody does; nobody but I. I worked all day to clean the relevant section and gradually removed all traces of Melville’s ink. Alice in Wonderland went back to the way it was before, but for that day every copy of the book, and all critical commentaries on it, noted the presence of a white whale at the tea party.”
“Good grief! So the books can be changed?”
“Only the copies contained in the library’s collection, and they in turn affect all others. This is not just a library, Mr. Berger; it’s the ur-library. It has to do with the rarity of the books in its collection and their links to the characters. That’s why we’re so careful with them. We have to be. No book is really a fixed object. Every reader reads a book differently, and each book works in a different way on each reader. But the books here are special. They’re the books from which all later copies came. I tell you, Mr. Berger, not a day goes by in this place that doesn’t bring me one surprise or another, and that’s the truth.”
But Mr. Berger was no longer listening. He was thinking again of Anna and the awfulness of those final moments as the train approached, of her fear and her pain, and how she seemed doomed to repeat them because of the power of the book to which she had given her name.
But the contents of the books were not fixed. They were open not just to differing interpretations but to actual change.
Fates could be altered.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
Mr. Berger did not act instantly. He had never considered himself a duplicitous individual, and he tried to tell himself that his actions in gaining Mr. Gedeon’s confidence were as much to do with his enjoyment of that gentleman’s company and his fascination with the Caxton’s contents as with any desire he might have harbored to save Anna Karenina from further fatal encounters with locomotives.
There was more than a grain of truth to this. Mr. Berger did enjoy spending time with Mr. Gedeon, for the librarian was a vast repository of information about the library and the history of his predecessors in the role. Similarly, no bibliophile could fail to be entranced by the library’s inventory, and each day among its stacks brought new treasures to light, some of which had been acquired purely for their rarity value rather than because of any particular character link: annotated manuscripts dating back to the birth of the printed word, including poetical works by Donne, Marvell, and Spenser; not one but two copies of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works, one of them belonging to Edward Knight himself — the book-holder of the King’s Men and the presumed proofreader of the manuscript sources for the Folio — containing his handwritten corrections to the errors that had crept into his particular edition, for the Folio was still being proofread during the printing of the book, and there were variances between individual copies; and what Mr. Berger suspected might well be notes in Dickens’s own hand for the later, uncompleted chapters of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
This latter artifact was discovered by Mr. Berger in an uncataloged file that also contained an abandoned version of the final chapters of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, in which Gatsby, not Daisy, is behind the wheel when Myrtle is killed. Mr. Berger had glimpsed Gatsby briefly on his way to visit Anna Karenina. By one of the miracles of the library, Gatsby’s quarters appeared to consist of a pool house and a swimming pool, although the pool was made marginally less welcoming by the presence in it of a deflated, bloodstained mattress.
The sight of Gatsby, who was pleasant but haunted, and the discovery of an alternate ending to the book to which Gatsby, like Anna, had given his name, caused Mr. Berger to wonder what might have happened had Fitzgerald published the version held by the Caxton instead of the book that eventually appeared, in which Daisy is driving the car on that fateful night. Would it have altered Gatsby’s eventual fate? Probably not, he decided: there would still have been a bloodstained mattress in the swimming pool, but Gatsby’s end would have been rendered less tragic, and less noble.