Wen bit his lower lip to keep from crying out. It was Father, no doubt about it. But the sight was heartbreaking. Father wore his only good suit of clothes—Wen remembered seeing it, as a child—but the way the robe, tunic and trousers hung on him suggested a boy wearing his father's clothing. "Is it possible," he asked Yin Fengzi, pitching his voice as low as he could in order that the officer not hear him, "that hungry ghosts can actually starve, and shrink?"
"Ah, gentlemen!" Wen bowed to the soldiers with what he hoped was a suitably heavenly flourish. "You're just in time to help us."
"Help you?" The soldiers' spears wobbled and waved, and their officer looked confused, or that's how Wen chose to interpret the response; it was hard to be sure, given the lacquered iron fu-dog mask the man wore. "We're here to arrest you. You're trespassing on the precincts of heaven, or hadn't you realized that?"
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| Cover of Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies, (1886) Macmillan |
The Public Domain Review (one of a number of lovely websites that make public domain materials easier to track down and enjoy) has published a beautiful overview of some of the best of these covers. I strongly urge what few readers I have to check it out. Some of the examples are of breathtaking beauty, and even the plain ones are impressive.
(The example to the right is by no means the best of what's on display here. Even popular science books, such as The Story of the Sun or Spectrum Analysis, got beautiful coloured covers.)
Lorna and I have a few books in our library with this sort of cover, but as I said we don't really collect books as things in themselves. Willing to bet some of our friends, though, have between them hundreds of these in their collections. Book people are sometimes weird, but invariably interesting to know.
*And expensive. By the time dust jackets could carry that graphic responsibility thanks to inexpensive mechanical reproduction, the art of embossing and colouring board bindings had become prohibitively expensive and most publishers were happy to stop doing it.
Heaven didn't look much different from hell, if all you were paying attention to was the landscape. Nobody would mistake the one for the other, though. The colors were brighter, the scents sweeter, and the light... There was no light like this anywhere, Wen decided, not even at sunset just of the coast from Měijing. Heaven was worth attaining to, he decided, if only because you couldn't help but feel better here than anywhere else he'd been.
There was a gate-house in front of the god's mansion, and though it was tiny it was still the most dazzling building Wen had ever been this close to. Walking up to the window, he rapped his knuckles against the sill. Should have demanded a fan from that judge, he thought. "Yes?" a squeaky voice said. It was more of a demand than a question.
Wen rushed to catch up with her, not caring whether the grandfathers were with him or not. "I don't think I ever thanked you properly for everything you did for me," he said, breathless. That wasn't what he wanted to say, what he should have said, but he seemed to be frustratingly out of the right sort of words. "I'm sorry," he added. "I don't seem to be doing this very well."
She stopped and smiled at him. "You've said everything that needs to be said," she told him. Brushing his hand with hers—it was deliciously cool, like shaved ice on a hot day—she added, "I haven't found your father yet, so there really isn't anything to thank me for, Xia. And it seems to me we're running out of time."
"Whatever else you do," Yin Fengzi said, "Don't eat any peaches you may find on the other side. Wen, I still think this is extremely dangerous."
"Dangerous? How could it possibly be more dangerous than what we saw on our way here?" Wen shook his head; he was never going to be able to forget the sword trees and knife hills they had passed on their way out of Fifth Hell. "I think the thing that bothers me the most is the way the body parts come back together once the victims have sliced themselves to the point where the bits all fall back to the base of the knife hills." A shiver gripped him: it wasn't so much the blood or the sliced-off body parts, reminding him uncomfortably of a butcher's shop, that bothered him; it was the beaten-down looks of resignation on the faces of the victims as they prepared to climb the hill again, knowing full well what was going to happen to them. "Tell me what that punishment is imposed for, and I swear I'll never do it again."
"Of course I can read it!" Number One Grandfather sniffed his disdain. "Why are you insulting my literacy?"
"I'm not," Wen said. "I only asked because I can't read it myself."
"Wretch! Why didn't you pay more attention to your lessons?"
"With all due respect, oh venerable one," said Fengzi, "shut up." Number One Grandfather sputtered and raised his hand to strike her. Then he saw Wen's expression, and his hand stayed put, waving impotently. "He can't read it," Fengzi said, "because it's hell-writing. I can't read it either. And you can, because you're dead. As you have pointed out, numerous times, to us."
"To me," said Wen, "it looks like the sort of writing I see in dreams; it blurs and runs when I try to concentrate on it."
"Oh," said Number One Grandfather. "I suppose I owe you an apology, then." From the expression on his face, it would be some time before that particular debt was paid.
"We are nearly finished with our business here," Wen said, then held up a placatory hand as the judge began to fume. "It's nothing significant, Excellency. I just need you to add a sentence informing any reader that everything you've dictated should be done as if you had actually written it yourself. After all, this is a new clerk, and some unfortunates may not be familiar with his calligraphy."
"There's no room on the page," the clerk said, his voice trembling. "I'll have to write it again!"
