“Let’s get you squared then,” Nicole said, slipping on an apron and standing close beside me at the press. Nor did it take long for my collaborator to weigh in. “That ink’s all wrong, you know,” holding up a trial sheet of the first signature of the book.
“Of that I’m aware.”
“Let me look at the original again.”
I had her put on a pair of the nitrile gloves—she thought in order to protect the slim volume; I knew it was to avoid fingerprints—and gave her the combination of the fireproof safe.
“That’s new,” she said. “Granting me access to your sanctum sanctorum? Feels like my sixteenth birthday all over again, when you gave me Sir Arthur’s fountain pen.”
“Nothing’s in there I can’t trust you with,” I said, knowing that my earliest forgery, a purported 1897 missive from Doyle to his brother, Innes, confessing he had fallen in love, despite being married, with an impossibly desirable woman named Jean, was the only conceivable exception. Nicole and Maisie would one day inherit the more licit, truly authentic treasures in the safe, including (to name but an eclectic few) my first-edition set of Lolita, in which Nabokov had used colored pencils to draw two butterflies; my 1742 A Journey to the World Under-Ground by Nicholas Klimius, an imaginary voyage into the hollow Earth, which Mary Shelley read when writing Frankenstein and Roderick Usher kept in his own library; my rare The Tale of Peter Rabbit, privately issued in 1901 by Beatrix Potter herself after a succession of blind-minded publishers rejected her illustrated manuscript. Granting Nicole access to my rare-book repository somehow seemed a lesser extravagance now that the Tamerlane was housed there.
She carried it over to the window and, putting on the pair of tortoiseshell glasses she’d started wearing this past year, studied it page by page, quipping, “This Calvin Thomas was no Hans Mardersteig.”
My daughter and I both believed Mardersteig was the best letterpress printer who ever lived—not just in the twentieth, but in any century. I even owned a handful of masterworks produced at his press, the Officina Bodoni, and I sometimes studied these for inspiration.
“His inking is light in places,” Nicole continued, “pale, then too heavy, smudgy in fact, elsewhere. I’m going to make notes for each page, then break them out into which rectos and versos are inked differently for all the signatures.”
Hearing this, I couldn’t help being proud Nicole had learned to notice such details by working at my side. Even problematic solace was solace. As I test-printed plates, she mostly sat with Tamerlane by the window overlooking the long meadow, observing details that distinguished each of the forty pages in the book. Though she paused briefly to take a walk with Meg and Maisie, I myself spent the full day snarled in layout computations, plate adjustments, the algebra of counterfeiting. Sunday was gone in a trice with nothing usable printed, all prep.
The next morning, after apple and buckwheat griddle cakes from a recipe Maisie found in one of Meg’s antique cookbooks, Nicole and I went through her detailed census of how certain pages were variously inked. The bottom third of several were so spotty they were a bit difficult to decipher, she said, then gave me a list of worn or broken letters, like the one on page fourteen that read,
so that I’d make sure not to fill in that first imperfect O in the second line to match the complete letter at the beginning of the fourth. On the interior half title for “Fugitive Pieces,” the first three letters were so over-inked that anyone giving the words a hasty glance might make out the title as “Ficitive Pieces,” a prophetic misreading of sorts. Meantime, if Edgar’s poetry was, as he himself admitted in his preface, hobbled by “many faults,” callow Calvin’s inexperience was more palpable yet. Nor did his printing show any signs of the promising genius scattered here and there in Poe’s verse.
“Let’s have a look at the binding and imposition,” I said. “Seems to be a simple three-hole pamphlet stitch, if I’m not mistaken—as elementary as the printing.”
“There’s more than one signature, and they’re side sewn,” she observed, squinting at where the thread was visible beneath the wrapper.
“Without taking it apart, which we’re not about to do, I think it was printed in three signatures—no, four—and maybe a half-leaf signature interleaved between the others. We’ll need to sort that out and replicate this deckling on the same fore edges as the original here.”
Nicole nodded and added to her notes.
By late Monday, having run off three partial copies on different proof papers, I was ready to get down to the nitty-gritty of mixing, and aging, the ink. I had never shared my process with Nicole, even though we had spent years doing calligraphy and copying together, skills at which she all but equaled me by the time she was a few years older than Maisie. Not wanting my daughter, who could have worked miracles in the art of fakery, to be tempted to travel the road down which her father had gone—though look at her now, I marveled with shame—I hadn’t let her in on my youthful experiments with oxidizing ink with ammonia, or else adding gum arabic to my mixing pot, then further adding sodium hydroxide, one fussy drop at a time, with a pipette. Granted, these were old-fashioned techniques. Back-in-the-day ruses. Not unlike tricks I’d read about in accounts of the Hofmann forgeries trial in Salt Lake in the 1980s, where it was proved that iron gallotannate ink works marvelously well when used to forge documents on antique paper. Indeed, paper from the very period in which Tamerlane was printed.
I explained all this to Nicole, who soaked it in like one of those flat Japanese origami toys that, when dropped into a dish of water, explode into three-dimensional swans or steamships or swimmers. As a student at Cooper Union, she’d already had plenty of exposure to the way dyes, paints, and inks were prepared throughout the history of Western art. And her internships for the past couple of summers as an artist’s assistant had taught her plenty about the relative merits of sturgeon versus rabbit-skin glue, for instance, or—more to the point—manganese black versus iron oxide black versus bone black. She’d regaled us with such arcana over many a dinner after work in the city, and once again she took her turn at sharing her newly gained expertise with me.
“People don’t realize how many different kinds of black there are,” she said.
“You know, Poe himself called it the ‘no-color.’”
“That’s one way of looking at it, black being the absence of all color.”
“He was referring to purity and impurity, as I recall, good and evil.”
“Interesting idea, but it doesn’t get the ink mixed.” Together we laughed, then she went on, “I just mean in the spectrum, every other color is contained in black. For me, it’s the richest, most dynamic color of all. In terms of wavelength, black takes them all in, doesn’t let any of them go.”