patent no. 16,028 · b. j. cresswell · 1912
a volume that turns its own pages, the wrong way
a quarto bound in green roan, the spine concealing a small gear-train and a mainspring wound by closing the cover. once wound, the book turns its own pages at the average pace of a slow reader. an ivory finger lifts each leaf and lays it down on the proper side, with no need of any hand at all.
cresswell's mistake, never corrected, was to install the gear-train reversed. the book turns its pages, but backward, from the last to the first. a reader who places his attention upon page seventy will, in twenty-eight minutes, find himself at page sixty-nine, and then sixty-eight, and so on toward the beginning, which the book reaches just as the spring runs down. it is therefore a device for the slow unreading of any volume.
cresswell sold three. one to a man finishing the bible, one to a widow with a regrettable diary, and one to a library that catalogued it as a curiosity and never opened it. the book keeps itself company at night, winding nothing, turning toward page one.
field-note · do not interrupt the spring mid-cycle. the page settles between leaves and is the wrong page after.
apology machine · thinking chair · window signal · library · forget