‘Found it,’ he said. ‘It was in the attic.’
After dithering between me and Seawoll, he handed the bag to me and I removed the book. It was much smaller than I was expecting, smaller than a modern hardback, but it did have a cover made from scuffed brown leather. If there was a title on the front it, and the lettering on the spine, had worn away. I briefly closed my eyes but there were no vestigia. I opened it to the title page: Principia Prima Formarum: lux et impello by Victor Casterbrook.
By now my Latin was getting quite good, proof positive that if you bang your head on a copy of Pliny the Elder eventually the Romans will seep in. In any case I recognised the title – First Principles in Formae: Lux and Impello – a magical textbook published in limited edition by Ambrose House Press. Halfway down the page was their compass and pyramid logo, and below that the publication date of 1924.
‘Inside,’ said Sam.
I opened the book to a middle page and found, as advertised, the hollowed-out space. Cylindrical and quite small – just large enough for seven or eight rings, if packed in neatly.
Written in pencil at the top of the title page were words – Portico Library, Manchester, followed by a nine-digit alphanumeric sequence. When I showed this to Seawoll, he said he knew where the library was.
‘Thank you, Mr Carmichael,’ he said, getting ponderously to his feet. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’
The Portico Library was on the top floor of a grandiose Regency building built in what I was beginning to recognise as the solid monumental Manchester style. Obviously the city had been feeling its oats at the end of the eighteenth century and, between all those displaced agricultural workers in the mills and the slaves on the plantations in the Caribbean, it had money to burn.
Danni did the googling on her phone as DC Monkfish drove us back from Fallowfield.
I’d have liked to do a vestigium assessment at the old church hall, but that had gone the way of all gentrification in the teens and was now a featureless faux Edwardian terrace of affordable housing. Whatever had happened there would probably have been bulldozed along with the hall.
Danni continued her report from the back of the car.
‘It was set up by some local bigwigs in 1802 because Manchester didn’t have a private lending library,’ she said. ‘It’s a Grade II listed building and has a loggia, whatever that is, and four Ionic columns. What’s an Ionic column, Peter?’
‘Like you get in Greek or Roman temples,’ I said.
And originally it had been a temple of learning, but unfortunately the library had fallen on hard times and had to lease the ground floor to a pub chain. Now the grand façade with its three-bay pedimented loggia leads to a selection of real ales, and speciality pies, fish and chips or burgers served on a slate.
Or possibly a plank of wood – we never did get to find out, despite Seawoll calling up the menu and eyeing it speculatively.
The Portico Library proper was reached via a modest side door which led to a staircase with sandy-coloured walls and brown carpet that wound up to the top floor. Each landing had a folding chair and a leaflet rack – presumably so visitors could pause and take a rest on the long slog up.
It was worth the walk. The main reading room took up almost the whole of the top floor, with a beautiful flattened dome ceiling with an oculus, and radiating skylights in subtly coloured stained glass depicting coats of arms and the red rose of Lancaster.
Black varnished bookcases lined the walls from floor to ceiling, and there was a counter island right in front of the entrance. Seawoll, after pausing to catch his breath, threw himself into one of a pair of chairs to the left of the counter and grabbed an FT from the nearby newspaper and magazine rack.
‘You do the Falcon stuff,’ he said. ‘And I’ll supervise from over here.’
We showed the nice librarian behind the counter our book and asked if it was theirs.
‘You need to talk to Bob,’ she said, and called him over.
Bob the librarian was a short round white man in a navy V-neck jumper, with big black-framed Malcolm X glasses and greying brown hair that, while thinning at the top, was long enough to pull into a respectable ponytail at the back.
He took the book and examined it with the same careful briskness with which vets handle pets. When he found the hollow cut out of the pages, he frowned and looked back up at me.
‘This wouldn’t have been on the shelves,’ he said. ‘It would have been in the store in the gods.’
Bob went over to his computer terminal and typed in the number pencilled onto the title page.
‘According to our records it belongs in a box upstairs,’ he said.
Seawoll waved pleasantly at me and Danni as we followed Bob into the back room, where an extendable ladder took us up through the ceiling and into the attic. It was, I decided, exactly what you’d expect from a library attic – clean, untidy and filled with random paper. The walls were lined with wooden and metal-framed bookcases. Some held box files, some piles of stationery or random piles of books. I was reminded of Robin Goodfellow’s van full of ledgers – this was where the Portico Library kept its memories.
And quite a lot in the way of random bric-a-brac. Some rather tasty oak library ladders, old picture frames with curlicue edges leaning against a bookshelf filled with old doorknobs, coat hangers and modern metal bookends. The air was close and filled with the woodsmoke smell of old books. I was getting continuous flashes of vestigia – sunlight, rain, the scratching of pens – all as faint and delicate as spiderweb. We followed Bob around a U-turn, ducking to get under the slope of the roof, and into another corridor filled with the same mixture of shelves and junk. Bob reached up and pulled down a white cardboard storage box, cleared a space on the top of a chest of map drawers, and plonked it down. He lifted a cover to reveal that it was full of books.
I recognised the titles The Principia, Cuthbertson’s A Modern Commentary on the Great Work, and the bloody unavoidable Charles Kingsley – both his magical work On Fairies and Their Abodes and an 1863 edition of The Water Babies that looked like it had gone for a swim itself at some point.
This was obviously the box for Folly-related books. Postmartin would want to know, so he could pop up north and deprive Manchester of its cultural heritage.
‘This was the box where your book was supposed to be,’ said Bob.
He pulled out a manila folder that contained two sheets of A4. The first held a list of titles printed by a dot matrix printer that was probably coming to the end of its ribbon. Despite the fading, Bob could easily point out the listing for First Principles in Formae: Lux and Impello.
‘According to this,’ said Bob, ‘it was inventoried twenty seven years ago – February 1989.’
The same month that Preston Carmichael had discovered them. We’d have to follow up and see if Preston had either worked at, or been a member of, the library – he must have gained access somehow.
‘Does it give the provenance of the books?’ said Danni, winning double librarian score for use of the word provenance.
The second sheet of paper was thin and almost transparent, like tissue. I recognised it as a carbon duplicate from the time I had dug bombing reports out of the London Metropolitan Archive. The faded type-written note identified them as books handed in by dependents for return to SOW ARCHIVE, Volcrepe, Milltown, Glossop, Derbys. It didn’t say whose dependents they might have been, or why they had handed them in. But I had a good idea of why they had to go to the Sons of Wayland Archive.