From Publishers Weekly
The discovery of an extremely rare, 15th-century book leads to murder and international intrigue in Kaewert's (Unprintable) latest contemporary mystery featuring publisher and rare-book collector Alex Plumtree. The medieval book, which details the lives of the knights who protected King Richard the Lion-Heart and which was believed to have been destroyed by Edward IV, is immediatetly stolen after Alex finds it hidden in his family library. Meanwhile, the Foxburghe Club in Cornwall, an exclusive society of book collectors whose membership primarily consists of nobility, surprises Alex by inviting him to join. Curious, he agrees, but the honor quickly fades; Alex's initiation weekend at a medieval castle in Cornwall turns sour with the death of a club member, compounded by his mounting suspicion that one of the elite book collectors stole the ancient tome. Alex is determined to ferret out the thief (and in the process discovers that the book has a deadly secret). No one, including the prime minister and the archbishop of Canterbury, is above suspicion. Alex is an engaging and often comic hero, and he is supported by wonderful secondary characters. The plot is complicated and occasionally confusing, but in the end, the charming characters and the suspenseful race to find the book hold readers' attention. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"A treat for booklovers."
--Tales from a Red Herring
"As always, absorbing and enlightening."
--Rendezvous
--Tales from a Red Herring
"As always, absorbing and enlightening."
--Rendezvous
Book Description
The perfume of old books and the smell of danger...
Publisher Alex Plumtree is in for the most astounding week of his life. First he comes into possession of a rare, centuries-old book, rumored destroyed on orders of King Edward IV. Then he receives an undreamed-of honor: an invitation to join a select society of book collectors...who are also some of the most powerful men and women in England.
But Alex's triumph quickly turns sour. The book vanishes from Alex's office. His initiation weekend with the Dibdin Club is rife with bizarre behavior, appalling accidents--and a death that sends Alex reeling. He quickly begins to suspect that his valuable find is even more than it seemed on first glance. For hidden in its pages is a shocking secret that could change the history of books forever...as well as the face of the modern world. And there are people--and foreign powers--who would do anything to keep this secret from coming to light.
All Alex has to do is figure out what that secret is. If he can stay alive long enough.
Publisher Alex Plumtree is in for the most astounding week of his life. First he comes into possession of a rare, centuries-old book, rumored destroyed on orders of King Edward IV. Then he receives an undreamed-of honor: an invitation to join a select society of book collectors...who are also some of the most powerful men and women in England.
But Alex's triumph quickly turns sour. The book vanishes from Alex's office. His initiation weekend with the Dibdin Club is rife with bizarre behavior, appalling accidents--and a death that sends Alex reeling. He quickly begins to suspect that his valuable find is even more than it seemed on first glance. For hidden in its pages is a shocking secret that could change the history of books forever...as well as the face of the modern world. And there are people--and foreign powers--who would do anything to keep this secret from coming to light.
All Alex has to do is figure out what that secret is. If he can stay alive long enough.
From the Back Cover
"A treat for booklovers."
--Tales from a Red Herring
"As always, absorbing and enlightening."
--Rendezvous
--Tales from a Red Herring
"As always, absorbing and enlightening."
--Rendezvous
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
--Cicero
Finding the world's rarest book in my library that Sunday afternoon was a bibliophile's dream. But now I'd give anything if I hadn't caught a glimpse of its hiding place behind my bookshelves. For while that outwardly charming volume fascinated and delighted the bibliomaniac world, it held dangerous secrets--secrets that not only ignited hostilities that had simmered for a millennium, but took from me everything I held most precious.
On that unforgettable afternoon I sat at my desk in the library, scrawling American addresses on ivory wedding invitation envelopes--hundreds of them. Sarah Townsend, my intended, had insisted my handwriting was infinitely preferable to that of the commercial calligraphers she knew. I wasn't sure I agreed, but anything for Sarah. A few hundred envelopes? Delighted, my love.
It was also infinitely preferable to the nasty task of home maintenance that awaited me outside. One of our ancient oaks, which had been ailing for several years, had keeled over against the house in a violent gale the previous week. It was still perched there, waiting to cause a new disaster. I'd intended to get to it that weekend, but . . .
The doorbell rang. I checked my watch as I rose and went to the door, stretching luxuriously. Four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. The Sunday Times was still strewn about the sofa in pleasant disarray, its rumours of deepening hostilities between America and Iraq as remote as those faraway deserts. Even the lesser evil of a flu epidemic in London seemed remote, with the roses blooming and the birds singing outside the open French doors. Ah, but life was good here at the Orchard, long the family home of the Plumtree clan. The oak could wait. And it was time for tea.
I swung open the door, enjoying its characteristic creak on the old hinge.
"Max!" I exclaimed. "What a pleasant surprise. I was just going to put the kettle--"
"Sorry, Alex." My brother pushed past me, all business, into the hallway. "I need to borrow a book, if you don't mind. Sorry to disturb."
"Not at all," I murmured. I closed the front door and followed him into the library. I was used to Max's brief enthusiasms, his frequent small emergencies. I understood him well: He was simply a more concentrated version of myself. Emotionally, Max was more mercurial; physically, he was smaller and darker. He went straight to the shelf of reference books.
I watched him, as I leaned against my desk. "I've just been addressing the invitations for the Nantucket ceremony," I began to explain.
"Ah," he said distractedly, clearly not hearing a word I'd said. The vows I would take in little more than two months were not uppermost in his mind.
"I read in the paper this morning that aliens contacted the Queen. They spoke through her corgis at a polo match in Windsor Great Park."
"That's nice," he muttered, continuing to search through the richly stocked shelves--a bit wildly, it seemed to me. He was certainly in a flap about something.
"Not there," he said. "Damn! A client of mine--an anonymous one, funnily enough--said he'd already tried Maggs. They couldn't help him. So if I could, it'd be a coup. And I know we had that volume here . . . that heraldry volume Dad was forever showing us. I won't sell ours, of course, but at least my client could see it. And," Max said with exaggerated emphasis, quite pleased with himself, "if I have to meet with him, I can find out who he is. The book was a private issue, you know, a Dibdin Club edition. I have the impression he's after a more modern volume than the one we have, but I can't exactly remember the date of ours."
"Yes, I know the one you mean. It must be here somewhere." I went to a different wall of shelves to help him look; we had a very relaxed system of ordering our books, which allowed us the thrill of a treasure hunt each time we looked for an uncommon volume. And a Dibdin edition was a treasure . . . the Dibdin Club was the most prestigious group of bibliophiles in all England. Each year, one member chose an exceedingly rare volume from his or her own library and reissued it for the other members. It was a bit like a printing society, only less bourgeois and far more private. The Dibdin stopped just short of royalty, and its members held the loftiest titles--and books--in the land.
"Ah-ha!" Max cried, triumphantly snatching a large volume off the shelf.
"What's that?" I asked, squinting at the bookshelves. I went across to my brother, suddenly intrigued.
"Really, Alex!" Max rolled his eyes in exasperation. "I know you're busy with the wedding, my boy, but the world does carry on. I just told you it was the
Dibdin edition on heraldry, which I'd--"
"No, no, sorry. I mean what"--I bent down to reach to the back of the shelf--"is this?"
I knelt and lifted out several other books, placing them on the floor. Then I studied the wall behind the bookshelf more carefully. At this hour and season the sun was on the shelf directly; normally, I would have drawn the curtains by now to shield the spines from excessive light. "I do believe," I said, following a rectangular outline cut into the wood with my fingertips, "that there's something here."
I pushed on the rectangle, and it sprang outward toward me, opening on a hinge at its left edge. "I don't believe this," Max said incredulously, kneeling next to me and breathing down my neck. "Dad had another safe in the shelves?"
I wanted a torch; it was dark in the space, and I didn't fancy sticking my hand inside without knowing what was there. But I couldn't wait. I reached in and found that the area was quite small, perhaps twelve inches wide by eight deep. My fingers met with a hard object that felt very much like--why was I surprised?--a book. I pulled it out. Max and I found ourselves staring at a smallish volume, perhaps eight by six inches and half an inch thick.
"What are you doing here, then?" I said under my breath to the book.
Having something just short of an obsession with antiquarian books, I knew instantly that this was not any old volume. Its covers were upholstered with wine-red-velvet fabric. The covers and book itself were bound together with leather thongs; the binding of a very old book indeed--an incunable, in fact, a book from the cradle period of printing in the late fifteenth century. Book collectors positively salivated over such books, and often paid a great deal of money for them. Most were carefully preserved in museums.
Max and I exchanged a glance.
There was no title in the velvet on the front cover. I turned the book over and saw that the back cover was blank as well. The spine, too, was utterly devoid of print or decoration. Carefully, I lifted the cover to discover pristine, creamy-white rag paper. Rag, unlike modern woody stuff, held up miraculously well over the centuries without so much as discolouring.
"Good Lord," Max murmured as we stared down at the words on the page. "This is incredible. Look at that black letter--and you can see that they dampened the paper, which made a very deep impression. Alex, this is unquestionably an incunable."
"You're right. And look at the binding--definitely English. They've put the straps and clasps from the bottom up instead of the continental bottom down."
On the fine page before us, set in thick Gothic black-letter type, were the words:
DOMINUS SERVET VERITATEM ET VIRUM QUI EAM SCRIBIT
The remnants of my school Latin struggled to organise themselves into a translation. "God preserve the truth, and the man who writes--or prints?--it. . . . most unusual," I said.
"Mmm," Max replied. I knew he'd noticed, too, that there was no forematter, no early pages listing author, printer, or binder. Nor was there any date, though the heavy black-letter print and primitive printing process told us the book was likely to be fifteenth century. Just the rather dire Latin verse, followed by several blank pages.
Eagerly, I turned another page and found more black ink. The dark Gothic words opposed a breathtaking woodcut print of a knight in armour. A coat of arms ornamented the cloth covering his chain mail. He stood facing the reader, sword and shield in hand, features hidden by the metal helmet, and I noticed that a tiny four-poster was one of the symbols in the design on his chest. As best I could translate from Middle English the print opposite the woodcut of the knight, it said:
This is the story of the Royal Order of the Bedchamber, the loyal group of men who have pledged their lives to protect the King over the last three hundred years. We wish to tell the Order's history, and important historical facts known for centuries only to members of the Royal Order of the Bedchamber. These facts have never before been revealed, and were preserved by word of mouth within the Order until Giovanni Boccaccio became acquainted with a member of the Order, was captivated by the story, and wrote it down in 1371. We have printed it now thanks to the miracle of the printing press. We pray that no offence will be taken by His Majesty, King Edward IV, from our effort to record this magnificent truth.
So the book I held in my hands was an account of the daily activities of the knights of the Royal Order of the Bedchamber, evidently the king's closest and most loyal protectors. I'd never heard of them, but that didn't mean they couldn't have existed. I looked at Max. "Late fifteenth century, then, if the reigning monarch was Edward IV. But why would he take offence? It almost sounds as if the author expected the king to be displeased."
Max shrugged impatiently. "Let's have a look through the rest."
I turned...
--Cicero
Finding the world's rarest book in my library that Sunday afternoon was a bibliophile's dream. But now I'd give anything if I hadn't caught a glimpse of its hiding place behind my bookshelves. For while that outwardly charming volume fascinated and delighted the bibliomaniac world, it held dangerous secrets--secrets that not only ignited hostilities that had simmered for a millennium, but took from me everything I held most precious.
On that unforgettable afternoon I sat at my desk in the library, scrawling American addresses on ivory wedding invitation envelopes--hundreds of them. Sarah Townsend, my intended, had insisted my handwriting was infinitely preferable to that of the commercial calligraphers she knew. I wasn't sure I agreed, but anything for Sarah. A few hundred envelopes? Delighted, my love.
It was also infinitely preferable to the nasty task of home maintenance that awaited me outside. One of our ancient oaks, which had been ailing for several years, had keeled over against the house in a violent gale the previous week. It was still perched there, waiting to cause a new disaster. I'd intended to get to it that weekend, but . . .
The doorbell rang. I checked my watch as I rose and went to the door, stretching luxuriously. Four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. The Sunday Times was still strewn about the sofa in pleasant disarray, its rumours of deepening hostilities between America and Iraq as remote as those faraway deserts. Even the lesser evil of a flu epidemic in London seemed remote, with the roses blooming and the birds singing outside the open French doors. Ah, but life was good here at the Orchard, long the family home of the Plumtree clan. The oak could wait. And it was time for tea.
I swung open the door, enjoying its characteristic creak on the old hinge.
"Max!" I exclaimed. "What a pleasant surprise. I was just going to put the kettle--"
"Sorry, Alex." My brother pushed past me, all business, into the hallway. "I need to borrow a book, if you don't mind. Sorry to disturb."
"Not at all," I murmured. I closed the front door and followed him into the library. I was used to Max's brief enthusiasms, his frequent small emergencies. I understood him well: He was simply a more concentrated version of myself. Emotionally, Max was more mercurial; physically, he was smaller and darker. He went straight to the shelf of reference books.
I watched him, as I leaned against my desk. "I've just been addressing the invitations for the Nantucket ceremony," I began to explain.
"Ah," he said distractedly, clearly not hearing a word I'd said. The vows I would take in little more than two months were not uppermost in his mind.
"I read in the paper this morning that aliens contacted the Queen. They spoke through her corgis at a polo match in Windsor Great Park."
"That's nice," he muttered, continuing to search through the richly stocked shelves--a bit wildly, it seemed to me. He was certainly in a flap about something.
"Not there," he said. "Damn! A client of mine--an anonymous one, funnily enough--said he'd already tried Maggs. They couldn't help him. So if I could, it'd be a coup. And I know we had that volume here . . . that heraldry volume Dad was forever showing us. I won't sell ours, of course, but at least my client could see it. And," Max said with exaggerated emphasis, quite pleased with himself, "if I have to meet with him, I can find out who he is. The book was a private issue, you know, a Dibdin Club edition. I have the impression he's after a more modern volume than the one we have, but I can't exactly remember the date of ours."
"Yes, I know the one you mean. It must be here somewhere." I went to a different wall of shelves to help him look; we had a very relaxed system of ordering our books, which allowed us the thrill of a treasure hunt each time we looked for an uncommon volume. And a Dibdin edition was a treasure . . . the Dibdin Club was the most prestigious group of bibliophiles in all England. Each year, one member chose an exceedingly rare volume from his or her own library and reissued it for the other members. It was a bit like a printing society, only less bourgeois and far more private. The Dibdin stopped just short of royalty, and its members held the loftiest titles--and books--in the land.
"Ah-ha!" Max cried, triumphantly snatching a large volume off the shelf.
"What's that?" I asked, squinting at the bookshelves. I went across to my brother, suddenly intrigued.
"Really, Alex!" Max rolled his eyes in exasperation. "I know you're busy with the wedding, my boy, but the world does carry on. I just told you it was the
Dibdin edition on heraldry, which I'd--"
"No, no, sorry. I mean what"--I bent down to reach to the back of the shelf--"is this?"
I knelt and lifted out several other books, placing them on the floor. Then I studied the wall behind the bookshelf more carefully. At this hour and season the sun was on the shelf directly; normally, I would have drawn the curtains by now to shield the spines from excessive light. "I do believe," I said, following a rectangular outline cut into the wood with my fingertips, "that there's something here."
I pushed on the rectangle, and it sprang outward toward me, opening on a hinge at its left edge. "I don't believe this," Max said incredulously, kneeling next to me and breathing down my neck. "Dad had another safe in the shelves?"
I wanted a torch; it was dark in the space, and I didn't fancy sticking my hand inside without knowing what was there. But I couldn't wait. I reached in and found that the area was quite small, perhaps twelve inches wide by eight deep. My fingers met with a hard object that felt very much like--why was I surprised?--a book. I pulled it out. Max and I found ourselves staring at a smallish volume, perhaps eight by six inches and half an inch thick.
"What are you doing here, then?" I said under my breath to the book.
Having something just short of an obsession with antiquarian books, I knew instantly that this was not any old volume. Its covers were upholstered with wine-red-velvet fabric. The covers and book itself were bound together with leather thongs; the binding of a very old book indeed--an incunable, in fact, a book from the cradle period of printing in the late fifteenth century. Book collectors positively salivated over such books, and often paid a great deal of money for them. Most were carefully preserved in museums.
Max and I exchanged a glance.
There was no title in the velvet on the front cover. I turned the book over and saw that the back cover was blank as well. The spine, too, was utterly devoid of print or decoration. Carefully, I lifted the cover to discover pristine, creamy-white rag paper. Rag, unlike modern woody stuff, held up miraculously well over the centuries without so much as discolouring.
"Good Lord," Max murmured as we stared down at the words on the page. "This is incredible. Look at that black letter--and you can see that they dampened the paper, which made a very deep impression. Alex, this is unquestionably an incunable."
"You're right. And look at the binding--definitely English. They've put the straps and clasps from the bottom up instead of the continental bottom down."
On the fine page before us, set in thick Gothic black-letter type, were the words:
DOMINUS SERVET VERITATEM ET VIRUM QUI EAM SCRIBIT
The remnants of my school Latin struggled to organise themselves into a translation. "God preserve the truth, and the man who writes--or prints?--it. . . . most unusual," I said.
"Mmm," Max replied. I knew he'd noticed, too, that there was no forematter, no early pages listing author, printer, or binder. Nor was there any date, though the heavy black-letter print and primitive printing process told us the book was likely to be fifteenth century. Just the rather dire Latin verse, followed by several blank pages.
Eagerly, I turned another page and found more black ink. The dark Gothic words opposed a breathtaking woodcut print of a knight in armour. A coat of arms ornamented the cloth covering his chain mail. He stood facing the reader, sword and shield in hand, features hidden by the metal helmet, and I noticed that a tiny four-poster was one of the symbols in the design on his chest. As best I could translate from Middle English the print opposite the woodcut of the knight, it said:
This is the story of the Royal Order of the Bedchamber, the loyal group of men who have pledged their lives to protect the King over the last three hundred years. We wish to tell the Order's history, and important historical facts known for centuries only to members of the Royal Order of the Bedchamber. These facts have never before been revealed, and were preserved by word of mouth within the Order until Giovanni Boccaccio became acquainted with a member of the Order, was captivated by the story, and wrote it down in 1371. We have printed it now thanks to the miracle of the printing press. We pray that no offence will be taken by His Majesty, King Edward IV, from our effort to record this magnificent truth.
So the book I held in my hands was an account of the daily activities of the knights of the Royal Order of the Bedchamber, evidently the king's closest and most loyal protectors. I'd never heard of them, but that didn't mean they couldn't have existed. I looked at Max. "Late fifteenth century, then, if the reigning monarch was Edward IV. But why would he take offence? It almost sounds as if the author expected the king to be displeased."
Max shrugged impatiently. "Let's have a look through the rest."
I turned...
