Endpaper

The girl ran a finger along the inside of the cover, where a clean sheet lay pasted flat against the board. “What is this page for?” she asked. “It carries no words and no number.” Nyra set aside the book she was mending and came to look.

“That is the endpaper,” said Nyra. “One half of it is pasted to the board, and the other half is the first free leaf of the book. It is the hinge made of paper, the quiet place where the cover and the pages are joined.”

“Why make a whole page and then hide it against the wood?” the girl asked. Nyra smiled. “Because the join must be covered, or the raw edges would show, and the book would gape at its shoulders. The endpaper gives the eye a clean field to rest on before the reading starts.”

“Does the book remember who pasted it?” the girl asked. “It does not,” Nyra answered. “A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. The endpaper will say nothing of the paste, or the folder of bone, or the hours the cover was left under a weight to dry flat.”

The girl pressed her palm flat to the endpaper, as if to feel the board beneath. “So it is the strongest page, and the one no one reads,” she said. Nyra nodded. “It holds everything else in place. The book keeps the join, and you keep the pasting of it.”