The
Slightest
Shift

The first proof arrived on a Tuesday, in a cardboard tube bound with string. Anna cut the string with the small knife she kept for opening mail and let the pages unroll across her desk, holding down the corners with a mug, a stone, and the heel of her hand.

She had proofed eleven novels that year for Halloway & Finch, and she could tell from the smell of the ink whether a book would be good. This one smelled of rain. The title page said “The Long Room”, by E. A. Sloane, and beneath it, in the smaller type the compositors used for things they did not wish to set twice: “A Novel of Uncertain Length”.

“Uncertain length,” Anna said aloud, to the empty office. “That’s honest.”

She began at the top, the way she always did, with a pencil in her right hand and a ruler under the line she was reading. The novel was about a house with too many rooms. Its narrator, a woman named Agnes, had inherited it from an aunt she had never met, and on the first page she stood in the hallway counting doors. There were seven. On the second page there were nine. By the end of the chapter Agnes had stopped counting and begun to draw a map.

Anna found the usual errors. A “form” for a “from”. An inverted comma. A line of dialogue missing its closing mark. She circled them in pencil and wrote the corrections in the margin in her small, upright hand. The work was slow and pleasant and required almost none of her.

Near the bottom of page fourteen, she stopped.

The word was “window”. Except that the i was not quite where it should be. It sat a little to the left, as though it had been set in a hurry and had not yet settled. Anna moved her ruler. The i stayed where it was. She tilted the page toward the lamp. The letter had a faint shadow on its left side, the way a thing has when it has recently moved.

She looked at it for a long moment. Then she wrote, in the margin, in her careful pencil: i low. And turned the page.

That night the presses ran until two. She could hear them from her flat above the bindery, a low periodic shudder that came up through the floor and into the legs of the table. At half past one she got up to make tea and found the proof she had left at the office lying open on her desk.

She told herself she had carried it home. She told herself a great many things. But she sat down with her tea and read page fourteen again, and where the word “window” had been, there was now a small clean gap the width of a letter, and the word read “w ndow”.

Anna put her hand flat against the page.

“All right,” she said. “All right.”

The second proof came on Friday, and the i had returned. It stood in the word “winter” now, in the middle of a sentence about the garden, and it leaned very slightly to the right. Anna checked the first proof. The i was where she had left it, low in “window”, faithful as a stain. She checked the second. The i in “winter” leaned. Somewhere between one page and the other, between one day and the next, it had changed its mind.

She began to keep a list.

Page 14: i low. Page 63: i leans right. Page 91: the o in “room” is too far from the r. Page 92: the second o is further still. Page 108: the full stop has risen. Page 109: it has risen again.

By the end of the week the list filled two pages. The errors were small, each no larger than a grain of rice, and they were spreading in a way that was difficult to name. A letter would drift a hair’s breadth from its word and then, a hundred pages later, drift back. Sometimes a word lost a letter entirely and became a different word that made a different kind of sense. “The house was still” became “the house was ill”. “She opened the door” became “she opened the oor”, and then, on the following page, “she opened the or”, as if the door had been eaten away from the inside.

The novel, meanwhile, was getting longer. The production schedule said three hundred and twenty pages. The proofs said three hundred and eighty. When Anna asked the bindery, they said the signatures had been arriving in the wrong order, and that it was nothing to worry about, and that books often knew their own length better than their makers did.

She took her list to Mr. Bell.

Mr. Bell was a small man with ink in the creases of his hands and the patient air of someone who had been interrupted many times and had decided not to mind. He read the list twice and handed it back.

“Type settles,” he said. “Especially old type. It’s been used. It has opinions.”

“Letters don’t have opinions.”

“These do.” He smiled, briefly, and turned a composed page toward the light. “You should see the composing room. The e’s are worn to nubs. The t’s have lost their crossbars. We keep them because Mr. Halloway says a book should look as if it has been read before.”

“Even before it’s been read?”

“Especially before.”

She asked whether the plates could be reset. He said they could, and that it would make no difference, and that she should get some sleep.

That night she dreamed of the house in the novel. It had more doors than she remembered. She walked from room to room with a pencil in her hand, correcting the walls.

The errata arrived on a Monday, in an envelope with no return address. It was a single sheet, set in the same type as the novel, and it listed thirty-one corrections. Anna read it at her desk with the second proof open beside her.

p. 203: for “she stayed” read “she left”.

She had not read page 203. The proof ended at page 188, where the binder had run out of signatures. She turned the sheet over. There was no page 203 to turn to, only the soft grey underside of the paper and, beyond it, the desk.

p. 244: for “the house” read “the field”.

p. 301: for “Anna” read “Agnes”.

She read the last one several times. Then she took the lift to the basement, where the unbound signatures were stacked in brown paper, and found the gathering that began with page 297. Page 301 was there. It had been set, and printed, and corrected. In the middle of a paragraph about a woman standing at a window, her own name appeared:

Anna did not turn around.

It was not a mistake she could explain. The compositors set type from manuscript. The manuscript had no Anna in it. She knew because she had read it, and because the manuscript was in her handwriting. She knew because she had written it, in a room she did not remember, at a desk that was not her desk, on a night the calendar insisted had not yet happened.

She took the page upstairs and locked it in her drawer. On Tuesday there was another errata sheet. On Wednesday there were two. The corrections were for pages that did not exist, in editions that had not been printed, in a book that was still, according to the production schedule, four months from publication. Each sheet was set in a slightly different type. In one the commas leaned left. In another the full stops had begun to drift toward the tops of the lines, like small dark balloons. By Friday the sheets were arriving at her flat, pushed under the door, warm to the touch.

p. 407: for “the reader” read “the proofreader”.

p. 408: for “the proofreader” read “the woman who could not leave”.

Anna stopped going to the office. She told Mr. Bell she was ill. He said he understood, and that the book was nearly finished, and that she should not worry about the last chapters.

“What happens in the last chapters?” she asked.

“You’ll see,” he said. “You’re in them.”

She went back on a Sunday, when the building was empty and the presses were cold. The composing room was in the basement, behind a door marked with a fading sign: NO ADMITTANCE. The door was not locked. It had not been locked for years, Mr. Bell had once told her, because no one had ever wanted to go in.

The room smelled of oil and lead and something sweeter underneath, like paper left in the sun. Along the walls stood trays of type, thousands of small metal letters sorted into compartments, each compartment labelled in a hand that was not quite legible. The labels had drifted too. The tray marked E held a handful of a’s. The tray marked A held nothing at all.

On the composing stone in the centre of the room lay a forme, locked up and ready for the press. Anna leaned over it. It was page 412. The type was set backward, as type is, and she read it the way she had learned to read it years ago, from right to left, resolving the letters into their mirror images.

The woman came into the composing room on a Sunday, when the building was empty and the presses were cold. She had come to find the end of the book. The book had other plans.

Anna straightened. The letters in the forme were moving. Not quickly, and not all at once. One letter would shift a fraction of an inch, pause, and then another would follow, the way a crowd adjusts itself when someone important enters. The a’s moved toward the left edge of the page. The e’s moved downward, into the gutter, and gathered there like water.

She reached out and pressed her finger against a single letter. It was warm. It was the i from page fourteen, small and familiar, and it leaned under her touch and then, very gently, leaned away.

“Please,” she said, to the room, to the letters, to whoever was listening. “I need to finish.”

The clicking stopped.

In the silence she heard the building settle, the way old buildings do, a long series of small adjustments passing down through the floors. Then, from the trays along the wall, one letter fell. Then another. Then the room was full of a sound like rain on a tin roof, and the floor was covered in type, and Anna stood in the middle of it with her hands open, and the letters moved around her feet like a tide.

She did not try to hold them. She had learned that much.

The book was published in the autumn, in an edition of five hundred copies. Anna received the first one on a Thursday. The cover was grey, the title was gold, and the author’s name had been set, by mistake or by design, as E. A. Sloane, which was not a name anyone at Halloway & Finch could remember choosing.

She read it from the beginning.

The first chapter was as she remembered it, nearly: the house, the doors, the aunt she had never met. The i in “window” was exactly where it should be. She turned the page, and the next, and the next, and each page was a little less certain than the one before. By the middle of the book the words had begun to lean into one another. By the end, whole sentences had come apart into their letters, and the letters had arranged themselves into new sentences, which were also true.

She found her name on page 301. She found it again on page 408, and again on the last page, where it had been set in a type she did not recognize.

The final line of the novel was this:

Nothing is fixed. Not even the letters.

Anna closed the book. She put it on the shelf with the others, and she went to the window, and she stood there for a while watching the street. It was raining. The rain moved down the glass in small, clean lines, each one separate, each one going where it liked.

She thought about the proofreader’s job, which is to find the places where a book has begun to drift, and to mark them, and to send them back. She thought about how little difference it made. The book drifted anyway. It drifted in the warehouse, in the shops, in the hands of readers who turned its pages and set it down and picked it up again. It drifted in her own hands, even now, even as she remembered it.

She went back to the desk and opened the book to page fourteen.

The i was low.

She smiled, and took out her pencil, and wrote in the margin, in her small upright hand:

leave it.

And beneath that, after a moment:

it knows where it is going.