The Jefferson Library
Two stories of dark oak shelves, brass rails, and the faint, comforting smell of old paper and beeswax. The vaulted ceiling came whole from a long-abandoned monastery in Spain, bought and shipped in the 1820s, and the library's older staircase came with it, salvaged from the same cloister rather than built for this room at all.
It is a tight ascending helix with no visible means of support, and the monastery's own records, such as they were, credited it to a wandering carpenter who appeared, built it, and left before anyone thought to pay him, the same man, or the same story, that a mission chapel in Santa Fe tells about its own staircase, and that the family's correspondence attaches to at least two other Catholic houses that no longer stand to confirm or deny it. No one has climbed this one in decades. It is admired, occasionally photographed, and otherwise left entirely alone.
For actual use there is a second staircase at the east end, added later: a circular staircase of polished brass, considerably less mysterious and considerably more trustworthy, which is the one anybody sensible takes between the two levels.
The desk at the room's centre is Jefferson's own: dark mahogany, fitted with dozens of small drawers and hidden compartments. After his death it was shipped across the Atlantic and arrived three months later with nothing inside it but a folded slip of paper reading I remember. The room has been known by his name ever since.
A Game of Whist
The Hagan Shelf
Colonel Michael Hagan took over Marshal Davout’s espionage network in Franconia, and he and Anna were married and raised a family. They kept the network running and turned it into a very profitable business. In what little spare time they had, they wrote about everyday Franconian life, and an espionage thriller series called the Franconian Gambit. All of it is on the shelves here. Hagan’s favorite hobbies were collecting ledger books, snuff boxes, and rare coins and clandestine tokens. Hagan is not a name that disappears into Franconia. I rather think that was the point.
The Franconian Gambit and Other Fiction
Franconian Life
Also on the Shelves
Voss Court Press has acquired the rights to the Hagan books and to Thomas Scull’s memoir, and is in the process of acquiring the rights to other books by those who appear in this archive. As each is secured, it will be added to the shelves of the Jefferson Library.
Found on the Shelves
The M.S. Sketch
A copy of Frankenstein, third shelf from the left, and a pencil drawing that falls out of it, folded twice, initialed in the corner.
The King
A painter fresh off the triumph of his career drives out to Voss Court with a portfolio of samples, and Sir Reginald vetoes the first one without a flicker of guilt.