The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell, Dustin Thomason Read Free Book Online

man with elephant ears and small teeth who owed all of his success in the world to an effervescent personality and a canny sense of what made history worthwhile. Though he wasn’t much to look at, the little man stood tall in the world of the academy. Every year his closing lecture on the death of Michelangelo filled the largest auditorium on campus with spectators and left college men wiping their eyes and reaching for their handkerchiefs. Above all, McBee was a champion of the book that everyone else in his field ignored. He believed there was something peculiar about the
Hypnerotomachia,
possibly something great, and he convinced his students to search for the old book’s true meaning.
    One of them searched even more avidly than McBee could have hoped. My father was an Ohio bookseller’s son, and he arrived on campus the day after his eighteenth birthday, almost fifty years after F. Scott Fitzgerald made it fashionable to be a midwestern boy at Princeton. Much had changed since then. The university was shedding its country club past, and in the spirit of the times, it was falling out of love with tradition. The freshmen of my father’s year were the last class required to attend chapel service on Sundays. The year after he left, women arrived on campus for the first time as students. WPRB, the college radio station, ushered them in to the sound of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.” My father liked to say that the spirit of his youth was best captured in Immanuel Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?” Kant, in his mind, was like the Bob Dylan of the 1790s.
    That was my father’s way: to erase the line in history beyond which everything seems stuffy and arcane. Instead of timelines and great men, history to him was ideas and books. He followed McBee’s advice for two more years at Princeton, and after graduating he followed it all the way back west to the University of Chicago for a Ph.D. on Renaissance Italy. A year of fellowship work in New York ensued, until Ohio State offered him a tenure-track position teaching quattrocento history, and he leapt at the chance to go home. My mother, an accountant whose tastes ran to Shelley and Blake, took up the bookselling business in Columbus after my grandfather retired, and between the two of them I was raised in the fold of bibliophiles, the way some children are raised in religion.
    At the age of four I was traveling to book conferences with my mother. By six I knew the difference between parchment and vellum better than I knew a Fleer from a Topps. Before my tenth birthday I had handled some half-dozen copies of the printing world’s masterpiece, the Gutenberg Bible. But I can’t even remember a time in my life when I didn’t know which book was the Bible of our own little faith: the
Hypnerotomachia.
    “It’s the last great Renaissance mystery, Thomas,” my father would lecture me, the same way McBee must have lectured him. “But no one has come even close to solving it.”
    He was right: no one had. Of course, it wasn’t until decades after the book was published that anyone realized it
needed
solving. That was when a scholar made a strange discovery. When the first letters of every chapter in the
Hypnerotomachia
are strung together, they form an acrostic in Latin:
Poliam Frater Franciscus Columna Peramavit,
which means “Brother Francesco Colonna loved Polia tremendously.” Since Polia was the name of the woman Poliphilo searches for, other scholars finally started to ask who the author of the
Hypnerotomachia
really was. The book itself doesn’t say, and even Aldus, the printer, never knew. But from that point on, it became common to suppose that the author was an Italian friar named Francesco Colonna. In a small group of professional researchers, particularly those inspired by McBee, it also became common to suppose that the acrostic was only a hint of the secrets that lay within the book. That group’s quest was to discover the rest.
    My father’s