The Club Dumas

“That’s just like you, Mr. Corso. A good question.” The bookbinder licked his lips as if trying to warm them. He listened carefully to the sound of the pages as he flicked them, just as Corso had done at Varo Borja’s. “Excellent paper. Nothing like the cellulose they use nowadays. Do you know the average lifespan of a book printed today? Tell him, Pablo.”

“Sixty years,” said the brother bitterly, as if it were Corso’s fault. “Sixty miserable years.”

Pedro was searching among the tools on the table. At last he found a special high-magnification lens and held it up to the book.

“A century from now,” he murmured as he lifted a page and examined it against the light, closing one eye, “almost all the contents of today’s libraries will have disappeared. But these books, printed two hundred or even five hundred years ago, will remain intact. We have the books, and the world, that we deserve.... Isn’t that so, Pablo?”

“Lousy books printed on lousy paper.”

Pedro Ceniza nodded in agreement. He was examining the book now through the lens. “That’s right. Cellulose paper turns yellow and brittle as a wafer, and cracks irreparably. It ages and dies.”

“Not the case here,” said Corso, pointing at the book.

The bookbinder held a page against the light.

“Rag-content paper, which is as it should be. Good paper handmade from rags, it’ll withstand both the passage of time and human stupidity.... No, I tell a lie. It’s linen. Authentic linen paper.” He put down the lens and looked at his brother. “How strange, it’s not Venetian paper. It’s thick, spongy, fibrous. Could it be Spanish?”

“From Valencia,” said his brother. “Jativa linen.”

“That’s right. One of the best in Europe at the time. The printer could have got hold of an imported batch.... He really did things properly.”

“He was very conscientious,” said Corso, “and it cost him his life.”

“Risks of the trade.” Pedro accepted the crushed cigarette Corso offered him. He lit it immediately, coughing. “As you know yourself, it’s difficult to fool anyone about paper. The ream used would have had to be blank, from the same time, and even then there would be differences: the sheets go brown, the inks fade and change over time.... Of course, the added pages can be stained, or darkened by being washed in tea. Any restoration work, or addition of missing pages, should leave the book all of a piece. It’s these small details that count. Don’t they, Pablo? Always the damned details.” “What’s your diagnosis?”

“So far, we have established that the binding is seventeenth century. That doesn’t mean that the pages match this binding and not another. But let’s assume they do. As for the paper, it seems similar to other batches whose origin has been authen­ticated.”

“Right. The binding and paper are authentic. Let’s look at the text and illustrations.”

“Now, that’s more complicated. We can approach the typog­raphy from two different angles. One: we can assume that the book is authentic. The owner, however, denies this, and ac­cording to you he has ways of knowing. So authenticity is pos­sible but not very probable. Let’s assume that it’s a forgery and work out the possibilities. On the one hand, the entire text might be a forgery, a fabrication, printed on paper dating from the time and bound using boards from the time. This is un­likely. Or, to be more precise, not very convincing. The cost of such a book would be enormous.... On the other hand, and this is reasonable, the forgery might have been made shortly after the first edition of the book. I mean that it was reprinted with alterations, disguised to resemble the first edition, some ten or twenty years after this date of 1666 that appears in the frontispiece. But to what end?”

“It was a banned book,” Pablo Ceniza pointed out.

“It’s possible,” agreed Corso. “Somebody who had access to the equipment—the plates and types—used by Aristide Torchia might have been able to print the book again.”

The elder brother had picked up a pencil and was scribbling on the back of a printed sheet. “That would be one explana­tion,” he said. “But there are other alternatives that seem more plausible. Imagine, for instance, that most of the book’s pages are authentic but that some were missing, either torn out or lost, and that somebody replaced those missing pages using pa­per that dates from the time, good printing techniques, and a lot of patience. In that case, there are two further possibilities: one is that the added pages are reproductions of those from a complete copy. Another is that, in the absence of the original to reproduce or copy, the contents of the pages were in­vented.” The bookbinder showed Corso what he had been writ­ing. “It would be a true case of forgery, as illustrated by this diagram.”

While Corso and Pablo were looking at the paper, Pedro again leafed through The Nine Doors.