I signed for the package from DHL and opened it. The “first pass pages” of my novel amounted to a stack of paper four inches high. This stack sat all day on the dining room table as I walked around it, stunned, unready to attack this pristine marvel with red ink. The kids, the husband, all said “Wow.” It lay in state for a whole day before I felt ready to approach it. I was reminded of a line I put in Peter Schoeffer’s mind about the Bible they had printed. “Twelve hundred eighty two imprinted pages: from the doorway of the shop they looked like giant loaves.”
It’s a strange feeling, seeing my story take a physical shape. Perhaps that’s why I grope for images, connecting my own work with all the works that I have read and loved before. A book is a long endeavor—for years I told people it was un oeuvre de longue haleine, a work of long breath. The final lap is when the text takes on its outward form; the incorporeal becomes something bodily at last. Small wonder that my thoughts turn to Christian images and transubstantiation. The novel is about the Bible, after all. The imagery arises from the subject, and from other books as well—which also came into print one day and made their way out in the world. Writing about the Book of Books as it set out on its first printed journey, I saw the loaves of the New Testament and all those multiplying fishes. But it was Tolkien whom I channeled when I pictured those big books: “Like oliphants, he thought: great hidebound beasts out of the East.” Like Sam Gamgee, considering my own book in a few weeks’ time: “Spreading across the land, bearing their thick and transcendent cargo.”
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