Grantville Gazette, Volume 59 by Paula Goodlett Read Free Book Online Page A

Claudette called a few minutes ago. They think they can let Melisa come home day after tomorrow to finish recuperating here. It's going to be a lot longer before little Providence can leave the incubator, though."
    "Home. What a comfort to hear you speak that word!"
    "Well, that's what it is while you're studying here. And that's one of the things we need to talk about. I want to sit down with each of you today to talk about some study plans, and Melisa when she's up to it. But there's something else I want to go over with you right now.
    "You got my attention when you first wrote and mentioned that you're all printers. The rest of us sure aren't, and we've got a problem that won't wait. I want to show you and John some things. After that I'd like the two of you to visit every shop around here that does any kind of publishing, and find out what they can and can't do. I wouldn't know what I was looking at, and I wouldn't know what questions to ask." He stood up and passed his plate through to the kitchen.

    Two days later
    "It will not do , Brother Green! Look at it!" William Button stopped himself just in time from slamming the flat of his hand down on the work table in Green's study. Albert Green was not some overbearing noble patron, full of obstinacy and ignorance of the craft. He was, in fact, the greatest of benefactors to William and all his family, for without the intervention of the Greens, his wife and their new daughter would not be alive. But this was a matter bearing on William's honest craftsmanship, and for that matter on the reputation of the seminary itself. Yet the up-timer unaccountably failed to see it.
    William tapped his forefinger on the sample of mimeographed work lying before them, a study syllabus for the minor prophets as it happened, and one of the more carefully executed examples of the method. "Forgive my speaking to you in such a sharp manner, but the mimeograph ? Never mind that it would give us copies more quickly than any other method. It would. But see how the letters spread into the paper, and grow irregular at the edges. Look at the rough texture of the paper the mimeograph requires." He took a breath. "You called on me for the opinion of a master printer, and I have given it. The mimeograph will not serve your ends. Not in this."
    Green's lips compressed in a frown. "Huh? You already told me the guys who reprint library books can't do anything with this." His hand flicked at the carton full of photocopied pages that he had taken down from a top shelf—all of them blurred, gray, blotchy copies of copies of copies from a lost world, and all of them made in the dead of night in defiance of academic rule and custom. Even with the full sunshine coming in through the room's two big windows and falling full on the top sheet, the best that could be said was that it was legible.
    "No, they certainly cannot."
    "So what are we supposed to do then, if photo plates won't work, and our mimeograph won't work either? And why won't it work? I don't get it."
    William cast his eyes down for a moment. "It's not that it wouldn't work, Brother Green. It would. But this is not a problem of the craft, this is a matter of how people will perceive it. I know the clients of printers and their moods." His voice softened. "Consider what these pages are! Here before us lie images of what remains of the Dead Sea Scrolls , forsooth, a collection of works penned with ink on parchment sixteen hundred years ago or more, when Christ walked the streets of Jerusalem. For all we know, Christ might have seen those same scrolls, or held some of them in his hands and read from them.
    "You tell me of your hope that by publishing them and sending copies to those who could best use them, you would ensure that these ancient writings will not be lost forever if the worst should happen here—and in the doing, spread the name of the Institute far and wide, and foster our reputation. But the mimeograph? No, Brother Green, they deserve