The Paring Knife

On the bench lay a short blade with a wide, flat edge, and the girl picked it up with both hands. “What is this one for?” she asked. “It looks too blunt to cut bread and too wide to cut thread.”

Nyra said that it was a paring knife, and that its work was to make leather thin. “A cover comes to us too thick to fold,” she told the girl. “Where the corners turn, the hide must be pared until it is as thin as a leaf, or the book will never close.”

She set a scrap of leather on the stone and drew the blade along it in long, slow passes. Each pass lifted a curl no thicker than a breath, and the edge of the hide grew pale and soft where it had been stout and dark. The girl watched the pile of parings gather like shavings of shade.

“You take so little each time,” the girl said. Nyra answered that this was the whole of it, that a cover is spoiled by haste and never by patience. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there.

When the corner was pared and folded, it lay flat and true, and the seam of it all but vanished. The girl ran her thumb over the join and could not feel where the leather had been thinned. The book keeps the fold, and you keep the paring of it.