The Trindles

On the shelf above the press lay a little row of thin brass leaves, each no bigger than a willow leaf, worn smooth and dull at the edges from years of handling. The girl picked one up and turned it in the light, puzzled, for it had no edge to cut with and no point to mark with, and seemed to do nothing a tool ought to do. She asked what they were, these small bright nothings that someone had kept so carefully.

“Those are the trindles,” Nyra said. “When a finished book goes into the press to have its edges cut true, the back has already been rounded into a gentle curve. Lay the book flat and that curve would be crushed. So you slip a trindle to each side, under the backed part, and they hold the shape while the plough does its work. They protect the very thing you cannot see from the one thing that would ruin it.”

The girl set two of them against her palm and felt how slight they were, how little they asked for themselves. It seemed strange that something so small should stand between a whole book and its spoiling, and stranger still that no reader would ever know they had been there at all. “They do all that, and then they just go back on the shelf,” she said.

“They do,” Nyra answered, “and that is the honest part of the work, the part that leaves no mark and takes no credit.” She said that a life was full of such small protections, kept by people who stepped in at the pressing moments and then quietly withdrew, and that the shape of a thing often owed itself to hands it would never name. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there.

They laid the trindles back in their worn row, two bright leaves among the rest, ready for the next book and the next careful cut. The girl looked at them a last time before the light moved on. The book keeps the true edge, and you keep the trindles of it.