Half an hour later, I knew that. I’d also had a short history of watermarks, and what Dave assured me was a quick description of the ancient Chinese method of papermaking, and an explanation of the differences between that and the process used in Europe during the Renaissance, which Dave assured me was very close to what he was doing, and who the really great papermaking artists were and why, and how a high percentage of cloth fibers in the pulp made better paper, and that a deckle was the wooden frame in which the pulp was confined to form sheets, that the stretched screen the pulp was spread on was a mold, and that the rough edge on the piece we’d brought him was called a “deckle edge” because it was just as it came out of the deckle, without trimming.

I got a tour of the equipment, with Rico following along, looking bemused. The steaming vat was full of a heaving white porridge of broken-down cloth and old paper. The heat from that, and from the wood fire burning in a stone-lined pit underneath it, kept me from getting close, but I craned my neck. In the vat a four-bladed wooden paddle went round and round, attached to a wooden shaft turned by a cluster of enormous wooden gears (they seemed to be the source of the humming and clunking), which were themselves turned by another wooden shaft that disappeared out through the back wall. The shafts looked like young tree trunks, hand-hewn.

“Got a water mill out there in the stream to turn it,” Dave explained. “If I had to stir the stock by hand, it’d slow me way down. This way I can mold and roll one batch of stock while another one cooks.”

There was another vat, not as hot, where the stock was thinned with water before it was scooped into the mold, and basins for sizing and starch. There was a press made from what looked like the timbers of another barn, with a huge hand screw on top, to force the water out of a stack of formed sheets. Another press was mounted with a cylinder that would squeeze the surface of a sheet down to a smooth finish. The cylinder bore the slightly raised double-dead-fish logo at regular intervals on its polished face. On the other side of the room was a wide table with a heavy draw knife mounted in a frame, to trim the sheets to size.

My hair hung damp and curling in my eyes. I wiped it back and asked Dave, “Is there anybody else in Bordertown who makes paper?”

“A few people. Nobody with this big a setup. And nobody as high-quality as me.”

“Why are you doing it all the way out here?”

“Takes lots of water,” he said, waving one platter hand at the vats. “Got the stream right back of the barn to pump from.”