Signature

The girl had taken an old ledger from the low shelf, and she held it open at the spine, where the leaves gathered into neat folded bundles. “Is this many little books, sewn into one?” she asked. Nyra set the kettle down and came to look. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there.

“Each bundle is a signature,” Nyra said. “You take a wide sheet, fold it until the pages lie in their order, and that folded gathering is one signature. A book is many of them, nested and stitched along the fold.”

The girl ran a finger down the sewn valley at the center of a bundle, where the thread showed. She said the stitches were hidden, that from the outside you would never know the book was made of folded parts. Nyra nodded. “That is the way of it. The reader holds a whole thing, and never counts the folds that made it whole.”

Nyra turned back a single signature so the girl could see how one folded sheet carried several pages at once, some upright and some reversed until the fold set them right. “The maker had to think backward,” she said. “To fold the sheet so the pages would fall in order, you set them down out of order first, and trust the fold to gather them.”

The girl closed the book and held it, feeling the small ridges of the folded bundles along the spine. The book keeps the count of its signatures, she thought, the number of folds a careful hand had set. But the turning of the wide sheet, the crease pressed flat with a smooth bone, the trust that order would rise from a thing folded out of order, those stay in the hands that did them. The book keeps the signature, and you keep the folding of it.