“Can you hear me now? I’m afraid you arrived just a bit too early. I should have warned you against that. Can you believe that clock used to go off every quarter of an hour before I got them to adjust it? Now at least it only chimes on the hour.” The reverberations had ceased but he was still talking very loudly. “This tower used to be part of the official residence of the Lord Provost of the City till it was bombed in the last war. The bell was cast in Hungary back in 1850. Did you know the Hungarians used to be the great bell makers of Europe?”
I backed away from him just a little. Perhaps the constant ringing of the bell over time had damaged his ears, for he had the loud voice of someone hard of hearing.
I looked around. If this was the Rare Book Room, where was the collection? All I could see were filing cabinets and study tables.
“Ah, we don’t keep the actual books here — they’re in Special Collections at the university, a few miles away,” he said. “If you’re around tomorrow, I’ll take you there and you can have a look at our collection. It’s extremely interesting.”
I told him that wouldn’t be possible, since later that day I intended to drive through the hills to Duncairn — strictly for nostalgic reasons. I might stay in the Uplands for a day or two, then I’d have to return to Canada and get back to work.
“I understand perfectly why you’d like to visit Duncairn again,” he said. “Well, perhaps on your next visit you’ll have more time. You see, this location is just a research facility. No other department was keen on using it because of the noise, so I volunteered for the sake of getting the extra space for our files. As you can tell, it’s not ideal, but it serves as a useful office for me, too. Visitors who come to see me are usually scheduled for a few minutes after the hour. I warn them to leave a few minutes before the next hour strikes. One advantage is, it helps keep meetings to the point.”
I couldn’t tell whether that was meant to be amusing.
“So, don’t worry. I’ll make sure I get you out at five to noon,”
he said. His voice was becoming more bearable now.
HE LED ME OVER to a cluttered desk half hidden amongst the filing cabinets.
“This is what passes for my private office,” he said apologetically. He sat behind the desk and I sat in front. I could see, lying beside a sheaf of papers, my copy of The Obsidian Cloud. He caressed it with his fingers from time to time throughout our entire interview.
“I’m very glad you were able to come and see me,” he said. “As I communicated to you, I consider this book a fascinating find. Isn’t it incredible that you actually lived in Duncairn when you were a young man — and then to discover this book in the middle of Mexico? And, as you said, but for the name ‘Duncairn’ on it, you probably wouldn’t have taken any interest in it. Believe me, the really exciting discoveries in our business are often made in just that fortuitous way — as though some god of books was at work.” His smile displayed rows of uneven and yellowish teeth. “There’s probably nothing to the entire Mexican connection, but we’ll check it out thoroughly. Perhaps some identifiable traveller brought it to Mexico, or some book collector acquired it long ago. In the trade, we call that part a book’s ‘provenance.’”
He then looked down at the pile of papers on his desk and began to sort through them, putting them in order.
“Now, let me tell you what I’ve been up to,” he said. “My assistant and I have already managed to do quite a bit of the preliminary research on when and how The Obsidian Cloud came to be published, who its author might be, and so on. Here’s what we’ve found out so far.
“As I said in my letter, even the physical dimensions of the book are quite uncommon.”
3
The irregular size of The Obsidian Cloud was what had caught the attention of Soulis when he first saw my copy. He’d taken a ruler to it — it was fifteen inches long by eleven inches wide. This was an unusual format known as an “imperial quarto,” which had gone out of style by the end of the nineteenth century. That was partly because these quartos were so large they didn’t fit into regular bookcases. But they were also unwieldy, as though they’d been designed more for lying on a sloped reading table or a lectern than being held.
And even in their heyday, imperial quartos tended to appear in limited editions, for they were very expensive to produce. The printing presses had to be adjusted to suit them, and that resulted in extra labour costs.
Some collectors of rare books called them “Scottish quartos,” because, for the most part, only printers based in Scotland would agree to produce them. With the Scots’ reputation for thriftiness, they believed they could make an acceptable profit out of these quartos by using up the remnants of quires of paper that would otherwise be discarded.
SOULIS HAD MANAGED to find some facts on The Old Ayr Press — the printer of The Obsidian Cloud—in a comprehensive history of Scottish printing. The firm, which was very small, had operated in the Ayrshire town of Kilcorran for a hundred and fifty years but had gone out of business during the Great War. The building where it was once situated had been demolished and the land was now part of a public housing development. The firm’s records had probably been consigned to the rubbish dump, too, so the exact publication date of The Obsidian Cloud might always remain a mystery. The title page gave the year of printing only as 18-something. The last two numbers had been so obscured by mould that the date could have been any time in the 1800s.
SO MUCH FOR THE PRINTER. But what Soulis would have preferred by far was information on who published the book. The publisher, in consultation with the author, would get a book ready for print and make sure the finished book was distributed and read. So knowing the publisher always opened a fruitful channel of inquiry for later researchers.
Sadly, in the case of The Obsidian Cloud, no publisher was listed in the front matter of the book. Possibly the Rev. K. Macbane had preferred to have the book printed privately — a lot of clergymen authors used to do that so they couldn’t be accused of seeking either fame or commercial success. In that case, The Old Ayr Press, having receiving payment from Macbane for the printing of The Obsidian Cloud, would simply have sent the entire print run to him to dispose of as he wished. It would be up to Macbane to send copies to his friends, or to magazines and newspapers. If he was ambitious enough, he might try to place them with various booksellers around Ayrshire, or even Scotland at large.
But no record of any such efforts had so far been found. Soulis had been methodically searching all the usual places: nineteenth-century book catalogues, literary journals, national and local newspapers, even registries of Scottish clergy. As yet, he hadn’t come across any mention of a Rev. K. Macbane, or of The Obsidian Cloud.
All of this made Soulis a little suspicious. Surely a book and an author dealing with such a sensational incident were bound to have attracted at least some attention, somewhere?
“In our business, it’s unusual to come across a rare book that presents so many interesting challenges,” he said. “I’m determined to get to the bottom of this one.”
I wondered: was it perhaps it a fake? Might someone have put it together to look like an old book, when it actually wasn’t?
Soulis assured me that he’d considered that possibility right from the start. He did that, as a matter of course, with any rare book.