Free Codex by Lev Grossman

touch of a spark. That made them worth something, didn’t it, just by itself? Though most of them would have bored him rigid the second he cracked them open, which there wasn’t much chance of. Maybe that was what he found so appealing: the sight of so many books that he’d never have to read, so much work he’d never have to do. When was the last time he’d actually finished a book? A real, non-detective book?
    A moist and pungent smell billowed softly out from each volume as he opened it. The catalog in the computer lengthened, entry by entry, and he lost track of time. Most of the books were from England, but there were a fair number from America and the Continent, and a few from even farther away. Some of the German books were printed in spidery Gothic black letter which took him twice as long to decipher; books in Cyrillic or Arabic he just set aside as lost causes. A printed card slipped out of a book of Bengali poetry. He retrieved it from off the floor: It said “With the Compliments of the Author,” above a florid, illegible signature.
    When the thin thread of light from the window reached the tabletop, he checked his watch and saw that it was almost six. He stood up and stretched, his spine popping deliciously. The long table was two-thirds covered with even, orderly stacks of old books, and the floor was littered with huge rafts of wrapping paper. He felt gloriously virtuous, like a medieval monk who had finished his daily penance and could retire to the abbey for a beer and some artisanal cheese.
    There was still that book that Laura mentioned, by somebody from somewhere. He had it written down: Gervase of Langford. Just for extra credit he ran a search of the entries he’d already created, but it wasn’t there. He looked over at the dark shapes of all the other crates still waiting to be opened and wondered if he’d even get that far before he went to England.
    There were some reference books in the shelves along the wall, and he walked over for a look. They ranged from xeroxed chapbooks to cheap paperbacks to sturdy volumes to massive ten- and twenty-book catalogs, each volume so fat the binding sagged under its own weight. It was highly technical stuff:
Reper
torium Bibliographicum, Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, Incunabula in American Libraries, Eighteenth Century Short-Title Catalogue, English Restoration Bookbindings.
Well, he’d never been scared of a little research. He took down a single large, authoritative-looking book entitled
A Catalogue of English Books Before 1501.
    It turned out to be nothing more than a collection of cardcatalog cards from different libraries, all painstakingly photographed in black and white and laid out in alphabetical order, row upon row, page after tissue-thin page, tens of thousands of them. He cleared a space on the table under the lamp and opened it up. It took a minute to find him, but there he was, right in between Gervase of Canterbury (d. 1205) and Gervase of Tilbury (ca. 1160–ca. 1211): Gervase of Langford (ca. 1338–ca. 1374). There were three cards under his name, two of them for different versions of what looked like the same book,
Chronicum Anglicanum
(London, 1363 and 1366). The third was called
Les contes merveilleux
(London, 1359).
    Down at the bottom of each of the cards was a string of two-and three-letter abbreviations indicating the libraries that held copies of the books. The key to the abbreviations was in a long appendix at the back; a little flipping back and forth told him that the
Chronicum Anglicanum
was in libraries in New York, Texas, and England. The New York copy was in something called the Chenoweth Rare Book and Manuscript Repository. He wrote down the name, shut down the computer, and picked up his things. Checking around to make sure everything looked shipshape, he snapped off the desk lamp on his way to the stairs.
    Downstairs, the hallway was flooded with an early evening light that turned