An exhibitor who knew how the game worked displayed some materials of regional interest on a folding card table. Turn-of-the-century ephemera advertising the railway, a Polish translation in a handsome dust jacket from a local author. The collection was a smattering with no melody tying it all together, but Liesl didn’t mind. She liked the hunt. She didn’t want arrows telling her where the pearls would be.
She left the quiet outer edge. The next aisle over had mostly wood shelving, not plastic, but the exhibitors were in rumpled Oxford shirts, not Italian suits. A memorial pamphlet for a Chinese female revolutionary published in Shanghai in 1907. She paused. The bookseller explained that Qiu Jin had been an advocate of female education and women’s rights before she was beheaded in 1907. The bookseller had failed to fasten one of the buttons on the collar of his button-down shirt. Liesl was hungry. She thought an $18,000 acquisition might satisfy her appetite. She asked the exhibitor to hold the pamphlet pending a call back to the university.
Two booths over and still tingling, she saw a familiar face.
Dressed like a history professor who had been on a two-day bender, Don Lake grabbed Liesl into a hug when he saw her. The bookseller had been operating D. E. Lake Books in the city since Liesl was a student. He was on the periphery of the show; business wasn’t booming, but he looked nothing but pleased to see her.
Liesl looked at his table, second editions and minor works, until she caught sight of something that made her bite the inside of her cheek so hard it bled.
“What is that doing here?” she asked.
“It’s been in my collection for years.”
Don Lake put his hands on it. Don Lake wasn’t a thief, but he would have to be if her eyes weren’t deceiving her. She ran her hands over the familiar black binding of the Peshawar manuscript on his table.
“It’s a facsimile, of course,” he added.
She hadn’t wet herself in decades. It would have been a terrible day to break the streak.
“Can’t imagine it’s of any interest for your collections; you already have one.”
“Of course,” she said. “It’s so convincing.”
She wanted to go collect herself, but now Don Lake wanted to talk about the facsimile. The early-twentieth-century printer had thought himself clever and printed onto birch bark, same as the original, and the effect was that the facsimiles had been darkening at more or less the same rate as the original. Liesl flexed her toes in her wet shoes as a way to offload her discomfort. It was like meeting her twin sister for the first time. The card stock that held the birch leaves in place was the same ridged beige, the album cover the same weathered black. Only the frontispiece, which gave the identity of the creator and indicated that 165 of these reproductions had been made, gave away that it was a facsimile.
The library held many of these facsimiles. They could be collector’s items. But it was the first time that Liesl had stood in front of a facsimile of a book when she knew the original so well. It changed the shape of what she understood. It was an impostor, and she didn’t like that it was allowed to exist.
She squeezed Don Lake’s forearm and, legs stiff, limped toward the next booth. He called back to her, tried to draw her attention to a map that he thought would be a nice complement to the library’s collection on the settlement of the American West, but she declined, promising to send her map expert to the bookshop to take a look if the item remained unsold by the close of the show. She crossed into the next aisle to get away from him, the time and the proximity to the center of the show meaning that the crowds were thickening now, and she could get lost in them.
This close to the heart, the treasures were in glass display cases rather than on plastic folding tables, and they had printed labels rather than hand-drawn pricing signs.
It went faster now. The sellers were busy; the materials couldn’t be picked up and inspected. Liesl wanted to ask about a mid-century Anne of Green Gables in a dust jacket she hadn’t ever seen before. But it would have to come later. At the appointed time, she was back at the front of the show, waiting.
It was uncharitable to think that Max had been lurking in a corner so that he and his sweater vest could stride out just as the second hand was striking, but his ability to arrive neither a second early nor late left little alternate explanation. At Max’s suggestion, he and his sweater vest and Liesl and her wet feet started down the middle aisle.
The place was lousy with bibles. Printers loved printing bibles, and Max loved acquiring them, studying them, talking about them. The New Testaments were coming at her from every direction. Max would fall in love with a binding, a frontispiece, a printing error and would sing in her ear about the need to invest, the need to win the rare-books-library bible arms race. To Liesl, Max was the right choice over Francis to accompany her to the fair. There were never, wouldn’t ever be rumors about her and Max. So she had to keep her mouth shut, nod in the right places, and wait for raised eyebrows to make their ways south.