Free Grantville Gazette, Volume 59 by Paula Goodlett Page A

you offer us the right to copy them? We will pay the expenses and provide you with your thirty free copies. Fortunately, we have the Greek and Latin portions to work on while the new type is made to match the script."
    It was Al's turn to stare silently at him for a couple of seconds. "New type? What on earth are you talking about? What for? Yakov has some of the best Hebrew type there is."
    "The manuscripts are not written in our modern style of letters. They are in an older script, used before there was printing. The Tetragrammaton, the Name of Our Lord, is in a script older yet." Yakov got a startled look on his face. Leon went on, "To publish them properly, and show how they looked, we will need to have the correct type made up. We can use the modern type for the words inserted from our own Torah, so that the complete text can be read, but that would not be suitable for the words from the manuscripts."
    "Rabbi Leon, I think you're misunderstanding the whole purpose of this project. It's not to copy the appearance of the documents. It's to get the text out there verbatim in enough places to make sure it survives, before something bad happens and we lose it all. It'd take at least a month to make a whole new font." He shifted his gaze to Yakov. "Wouldn't it?"
    Yakov scratched his nose. "Could be. I'd have to ask Joseph. And he might be busy with something else."
    "Yeah. Leon, there's no way I'm going to agree to waste a month, just to make it look like a style of letters nobody today can even read without a struggle. Every day until the copies are printed and shipped out is one more day when we could lose the whole thing. I want typesetting to start today . William, can you do that?"
    "Yes, Brother Green, within the hour. John and I have nearly finished setting in order the Greek font cases and the other tools of the trade. Rabbi Yakov has chosen certain pages as the first of the Greek portions that should be set in type, and as we do Melisa will proofread on the type itself, before we impress the stereotypes."
    "Good. She's been wanting to do something useful, and that's a safe enough job for her while she's still recovering from surgery. And very much against my own preferences, I agreed Friday night that you could set scribes to editing the Torah material so the missing parts are filled in before the typesetting. Yakov, you and William assured me that typesetting on the edited notes could begin at your shop the morning after the editing begins up here. Two days have passed with no editing done, for reasons that I understand. Well, we did our planning. Now we execute. I want to see that editing get under way this afternoon , and set in type tomorrow."
    Leon's hands had become occupied in folding the empty sandwich wrapper into precise squares. He put on a look that might have been intended to communicate patience. "But the script is the best way of saying how old it is."
    "The preface is a perfectly adequate way to say it, and we can write that in ten minutes. You want to show a sample of what it looks like? Fine, somebody can make a copper plate engraving of a fragment, as long as it's done by the time the last pages come off the press."
    William interjected, "Brother Green, even that would not be needed. I saw a light table at Schmucker & Schwentzel. It's used to trace illustration sketches onto thin paper, so they can be inked and then put under the plate-making camera. We could reproduce one of your photocopies by that method."
    "Fine, William, that's even better."
    Leon was looking back and forth between them. "Doctor Green, it is not that hard if you know Hebrew well! And this will not cause much of a delay, if the other Hebrew material goes to typesetting first. The Jewish community will appreciate the provenance of the documents better in the old script!"
    Al felt his neck going stiff. Something about the Venetian's attitude was already wearing out his carefully cultivated mild manner. It felt as if the man was