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picked it up, handling it with involuntary tenderness. The cover was blank, with only a faint thread of gilt tracery around the edges. The word
Travels
was printed on the spine in golden letters. The book gave off a faint breath of dampness in the chilly air.
    Â 
He laid it flat on the paper and opened it to the title page:
 
V OLUME II
Of the Author’s
WORKS
    Â 
containing
    Â 
TRAVELS
INTO SEVERAL
REMOTE NATIONS OF THE WORLD,
    Â 
 
by Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon,

and then a Captain of several
Ships.
    Â 
    Some of the
s
’s looked like
f
’s; others were printed long and curving, like integral signs. The date underneath was MDCCXXXV —he tried to work it out in his head, then gave up—and the city was Dublin. On the facing page was an engraved portrait of the author. The paper was speckled like an egg, and a faint brown stain had spread like a billowing cumulus cloud over the bottom third of the title page.
    Edward set the book aside, keeping it on the wrapping paper so it wouldn’t get dusty, and opened the other package. It turned out to be Volume I. He flipped through the pages, idly glancing at occasional passages. He’d been assigned this book once in college but never read it. Hadn’t there been a cartoon of it? The two books were in improbably pristine condition, though the pages were brittle and the corners were a little crushed.
    Returning to the crate, Edward now saw that the books in the top layer were just the smaller ones, and that there were larger, more substantial volumes farther down. He checked his watch: It was already four-thirty. He should at least make it look like he’d gotten something done before he took off.
    He started quickly transferring the rest of the smaller packages to the table and shucking off the wrapping paper. He uncovered triple-decker novels, chunky dictionaries, vast, sprawling atlases, nineteenth-century textbooks scribbled on by schoolboys who had long since grown up and died, crumbling religious tracts, a miniature set of Shakespeare’s tragedies, three inches high and equipped with its own magnifying glass. He arranged them carefully in tall stacks along the back of the work table. Some books were crisp and solid, others fell apart in his hands. One or two of the older ones had foot-long leather thongs and straps dangling from them. He got sidetracked and wasted twenty minutes leafing through an ancient brown leather
Gray’s Anatomy,
with many incredibly detailed and occasionally disturbing illustrations of creatively vivisected corpses.
    After a while he stopped to take a break. By this time the floor around him was covered with a heaving ocean of wrapping paper. The room was still lit by the warm, brown light of the floor lamp, but the sunlight coming through the heavy curtains was soft and orange.
    Edward looked at his watch again. It was almost six—he’d lost track of time. His hands were covered with brown and red dust from the leather covers. He rubbed off as much of it as he could and slipped on his jacket. He’d send Laura Crowlyk the dry-cleaning bill.
    On his way out he walked over to the crate again. A few of the largest, most massive volumes were still left down at the bottom, buried in the straw like dinosaur bones half-submerged in the earth. He bent down to pick one up. It was much heavier than he’d expected, and he had to lean his gut into the edge of the crate and use both hands to get it out. He cleared a space and set it down on the table with a solid
whump.
Fine dust flew out from underneath it. When he got it unwrapped, instead of a book he found a finished wooden case with a simple metal catch on one edge. He undid it, and the case swung open on small, finely made metal hinges.
    Inside was a thick black board about one foot wide by two feet long, covered with leather that had turned black with age. Its surface was overgrown with a dark mass of stamps and filigreed metal studs