Letter, B. Vey, declining to give a date

Dear Madame —

You ask me for a date and you are entitled to a plain answer, so here it is: I cannot give you one, and no one who has handled the volume honestly will give you one either.

I can tell you the paper is flax, well beaten, sized with gelatine, and that such paper was made for three hundred years. I can tell you the ink is iron gall, which was in use for longer than that. I can tell you the reback is later than the book and earlier than my grandfather. A range of three centuries is not a date. It is a shrug with numbers in it.

You will meet people who will give you a year. Ask them what they measured. If the answer is the style of the tooling, they have told you when the fashion was, not when the book was.

As to the other matter in your letter: yes, I counted six, and yes, the book is sewn on five. I have written what I am able to support and nothing beyond it, and I would ask you not to put my name to any statement that goes further, however reasonable it may seem to you. It is not that I think you wrong. It is that I did not measure what you are asking me to confirm.

The samples are gone. This is not concealment; it is what testing is. If the question is to be settled it must be settled on the volume, by someone who has it, and I do not know who that is.

With my regards, and with regret that I cannot be more useful,

— B. L. Vey