The red-haired girl raised her hand again. “My mom still has books she read when she was my age. They’re really old.”

“I’m talking about books a lot older than that,” April said. “Hundreds of years older, in fact. Books written before America was even discovered.”

“You mean books from those days are still around?” Crew Cut said, voicing the wide-eyed surprise of the other kids.

April continued. “My job here at the Library of Congress is to study those old books and find clues.”

“Clues about what?”

“History . . . society . . . all sorts of things, really,” April said. She turned and motioned the children to follow her toward one of two gold display cases set in the middle of the room. “Maybe I can show you better than I can tell you.”

The children surrounded the display case and peered through the glass. The book inside was incandescent, radiating with a warm glow that seemed to come from within it. “Is that a magical book?” asked a little African-American girl in braids.

“I know what you mean,” April said. She had entertained the same possibility the first time she saw it herself. The colorful images on the pages seemed to dance, an illusion both strange and beautiful.

“Could you tell us a little more about this book?” asked the teacher, as enthralled as her students by the book’s hypnotic glow.

“It’s a Gutenberg Bible, the rarest book in existence today,” April said. “We’re very lucky to have one here at the library. It’s the reason I came to work here. For someone in my field, there’s no greater joy than to study a book like this.”

“Is this the only one there is in the whole world?” asked the red-haired girl.

“No. Rare means more than just ‘uncommon.’ It means a lot of people out there would love to have one but can’t. Only a few lucky people do. Of the one hundred eighty original copies of the Gutenberg Bible that are out there, only forty-eight copies exist today. And only a few of those are here in America. Most are in other parts of the world.”

“You mean like Texas?”

April laughed and gently motioned for a girl to stop leaning against the case. “Well, Texas does have a copy! But I’m really talking about places farther away, like France, Germany, and even Japan.”

“Why do so many people want one?”

“Because of how important it is. The Gutenberg Bible is not just a book; it’s one of the great marks in human achievement. It might even be more important than the Great Wall of China or the pyramids in Egypt.”

“The pyramids are cooler,” one boy chimed in, letting his boredom be known.

“Jeremy!” scolded the teacher. “That’s enough.”