Dictated note, B. Vey

Bernard Vey, the ninth of November, at the bench, the volume open under weights at leaf sixty-one.

I dictate this because I do not want to write it in the report, and I want it kept somewhere.

The spine lining carries six impressions. The book is sewn on five stations. I have measured the impressions eleven times, on three days, with two rules, and once with a colleague who did not know what I was asking him to count. He counted six.

There are ordinary explanations. A book may be sewn twice in its life. The first sewing leaves its marks and the second does not follow them. This is common. This is, in fact, the explanation, and I will put it in the letter if anyone asks me for one.

But the spacing is wrong for it. When a book is resewn, the new stations avoid the old, because the binder is avoiding the old holes; he does not want to sew into weakness. Here the six are evenly spaced and the five are evenly spaced and neither set avoids the other. The five sit between the six as though both had been laid out by the same person on the same afternoon with the same divider.

I say this and I hear how it sounds. So let me be exact about what I am claiming, which is very little. I am claiming that the spacing is regular. I am not claiming that the sixth station ever held thread. There is no thread. There is no hole. There is a pressure mark in a leather lining, and leather takes a mark from many things.

What I would need is the lining itself, lifted and looked at from the other side, and I will not lift it, because lifting it destroys it, and a man who destroys the evidence in order to read it has not read anything. He has only made a story that no one can check.

So the note ends here. The volume goes back on the twentieth. I have consolidated the tail and left everything else exactly as I found it, including the question.

End of the note.