Bookbinding

My daughter, the finicky book designer,refuses to examine any proof that I hand herbefore it has passed her own high muster:eccentric serifs lodging in foundry & font,the hammertoe grip of spine,the truancies of ill-gotten rivers—Those who say you can't tell a bookby its cover have not looked!

She maintains there is revelation enoughin the typographical doctrines of Tyger! Tyger!to build a New Jerusalem. Creation, she says,like the Argument from Design,emerges on the hard edge of knowledge.

Once, in the stalls of an ailing barn in Virginia,we discovered where an old bibliophilehad rustled the unlikeliest strays in the county.We found imprisoned there in the darkan exquisitely bound Agonistes.And close by in the dust of a mangerFroissart chronicled the longest of wars"In the Blessed Name of the Savior."

When the daughter of design found Paradiso,felt the fore-edge of gold, the endpapers marbled,musk rusting in palpable leathers,like a prophet of Brailleimparting truth to the blind,she transfused to my hand an imprimatur,lingering, incisive as legend,as the poem entered our fingers.