Codex Born
Magic Ex Libris 2
by
Jim C. Hines
To Amy, Skylar, and Jamie.
Thank you for putting up with me through another one.
“Gutenberg’s invention, while having given to some national freedom, brought slavery to others. It became the founder and protector of human liberty, and yet it made despotism possible where formerly it was impossible.”
Mark Twain
Acknowledgments
One year ago, I was doing the new-book dance1 and desperately trying not to freak out over the release of my first hardcover with DAW. I failed, but I was trying. I was so excited about the idea of a magic- wielding librarian, about bringing Smudge back, about getting to write a story about the love of books. I was also terrified, because I had absolutely no idea how this book would do.
Thank you all so much. I feel like the cliched TV drunk who keeps hugging everyone and saying, “I love you, man!” but it’s true. Thank you for reading, for your emails and your reviews, for telling your friends about the book and for simply sharing the wonder with me.
Thanks to everyone at DAW, too. For seven years Sheila Gilbert has believed in me and helped me improve each of my books, including this one. Thanks also to Joshua Starr, Katie Hoffman, Jodi Rosoff, and everyone else who worked behind the scenes to help make
Joshua Bilmes at JABberwocky has been the other constant in my career, helping to sell my books here in the U.S. and elsewhere. Joshua has always gone above and beyond to support his clients, and it’s very much appreciated.
Margaret Yang gets a special shout-out here, both for her helpful feedback on
Thank you to author Kelly McCullough, who also read a draft of the story and helped me whip it into shape. (Even if he did limit his feedback to just the English words.)
Finally, a big old hug of gratitude to everyone on Twitter, Facebook, and my blog, who helped me with more nitpicky details than I can count, from the plausibility and potential problems of trying to read books underwater to an extensive debate about whether or not sparkling vampires could metabolize marijuana.3
As a reward for reading this note, here’s a behind-the-scenes tidbit: the T-shirt Isaac wears in chapter 13 originally said simply, “Ook.” I changed it because I didn’t think everyone would get the joke, but you and I know what Isaac’s favorite shirt
Thank you, and I hope you enjoy the second volume of
AS A LIBRIOMANCER AND a researcher, this was one of the moments I lived for. I loved that this brilliant, untrained fourteen-year-old girl had just shattered an entire body of magical theory.
I hated the fact that I couldn’t figure out how she had done it.
Jeneta Aboderin slouched in a white plastic lawn chair on the old deck behind my house. Plastic sunglasses with pink-slashed zebra stripe frames hid her eyes as she read from an electronic tablet. “You’re not concentrating, Isaac,” she said without looking up.
Her words blended the faint Nigerian and British accents she had acquired from her mother and father, with a generous helping of teenaged annoyance at me, the thickheaded librarian who couldn’t pull magic from a simple poem.
“Am, too.” Not my most brilliant comeback, but I was off my game today. I was concentrating so hard my forehead would be permanently creased. I just wasn’t
I was afraid I was going to drop the damn thing.
“Try again,” Jeneta said.
I scrolled up through Walt Whitman’s
She snorted. “‘Look Down, Fair Moon’ isn’t about moonlight.”
“Are you sure? It’s right here in the title.” I tilted the screen toward her and pointed. “Maybe I’ve got a defective reader.”
I imagined her eyes rolling behind her glasses. She yanked the reader out of my hands, and her fingers tapped a staccato beat on the screen. “Check out this one. ‘Dream Deferred,’ by Langston Hughes.” Slender brown fingers sank into the poem, emerging moments later with a raisin held between them. “You think Hughes was going on about raisins? It’s a metaphor.”
She left the “duh” at the end unstated. Shaking her head, she popped the metaphor into her mouth and said, “He packs every syllable with hope and fear and desperation, until the words are ready to explode. How can you not feel that?”
Her exasperation at my obvious thickheadedness didn’t bother me. I was more interested in how easily she had produced that raisin from an electronic device. Johannes Gutenberg himself, the man who
Gutenberg had built his printing press more than five hundred years ago based on his theories about