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from the rest of the room by a folding screen of laquered wood and decoupaged paper. Interesting: she lived alone but had rigged a privacy screen. Spoke to sexual activity.
    He was about to take a peek behind this screen when Rolly called out testily. He found the six-pack of paper towels and rejoined her. Between every ten pages in the damp volumes a pair of paper towels had to be interleaved, and these towels had to be changed every hour. While they dried, the wet volumes were laid flat on the worktable and weighted down with cloth-covered steel plates to prevent swelling.
    “What I don’t get,” said Crosetti when the books were all interleaved and weighted, “is why you’re drying the whole of the set if you’re just going to break them for the maps and illustrations. Why not just pull the good stuff and junk the rest?”
    “Because it’s the right way to do it,” said Rolly after a brief hesitation. “The plates would curl if you pulled them wet.”
    “I see,” he said, not seeing at all, seeing the young woman in an entirely new and not very attractive light. He sat on a stool and studied her profile. “So…this is kind of interesting,” he said. “Watching books dry. I don’t think I ever did it before. Maybe you could point out the highlights, so I don’t miss anything.”
    He grinned at her and was rewarded with a tiny azure spark in her eyes, while her mouth assumed the set of one trying not to smile. “You’re welcome to read a book while you wait,” she said. “I have a good many of them.”
    “Alternatively, we could converse. I could tell you all my hopes and dreams and you could tell me yours, and the hours would fly past, and we could get to know each other.”
    “Go ahead,” she replied after a brief pause, uninvitingly.
    “No, ladies first. You look like you’ve had a lot more interesting life than I have.”
    A shocked expression appeared on her face. She gaped, then snorted, then blushed. “Sorry,” she said. “Oh, God! That is so opposite from the case. Why would you imagine that? That I have an interesting life?”
    “Oh, this place, for one thing. You live in a warehouse in Red Hook…”
    “It’s a loft. Thousands of people in the city live in lofts.”
    “No, they live in apartments in loft buildings. And usually they have furniture they bought in stores, not made out of pallets. Are you even legal here?”
    “The landlord doesn’t mind.”
    “Assuming he knows. Also you’re a bookbinder. Unusual, wouldn’t you say? How did you get into it?”
    “And how about
your
hopes and dreams?”
    “And, see? You’re secretive too. There’s nothing more interesting than that. Okay. Here’s the whole deal. I’m twenty-eight and I live with my mom in Queens, Ozone Park. I’m saving money so I can go to film school, which at the rate I put it away will be a month after my fifty-second birthday. I should take out a loan, but I’m scared of getting into debt.”
    “How much do you have saved?”
    “About three and a half grand.”
    “I have more than that.”
    “I bet. Glaser probably pays you more than he pays me, you get commissions on sales, you live in Red Hook, and you own two outfits, what you’re wearing now and the one with the collar. What are you saving for?”
    “I want to go to Gelsenkirchen in Germany and take an apprenticeship at the Buchbinderei Klein.” When he didn’t react, she added, “Obviously, you’ve never heard of it.”
    “Of course I have. Buch-whatever Klein. It’s like the Harvard of the bookbinding world. But I thought you already knew all about it. You have all the gear…” He gestured to the racks of tools laid out on the worktable, the cutting press and plow, whetstones, knives, leather pillows, and paste pots. It all looked very eighteenth century; Crosetti imagined that the Churchill
Voyages
had been bound with tools quite like these.
    “I barely know anything,” she protested.
    “Really.”
    “I mean compared with what