How the Books Are Made
Recursive Press is one person: James William Quinn, in the United Kingdom. The books carry the byline J W Quinn.
The tellings are made with language models. I gather the sources, set the questions, draft and redraft with the models, and decide what stays. What was kept was kept by a person. What was cut was cut by a person.
Every telling is followed by its notes. They record what the telling rests on: what is documented, what is reported, and what is invented. Facts are checked against the sources before a book goes to press. Quotations are rendered fresh from the original languages, from texts in the public domain.
Willem van der Lee, who keeps the bench on this site, is a character. The books are mine, and I am responsible for everything the press publishes.
The print books are hardcovers, printed on demand by IngramSpark. The ebooks are made from the same files as the print editions, so a correction made once reaches both.
Rights and permissions
The Council of Shades is a play, and it may be performed. Readings, amateur and professional productions, and audio adaptations are licensed by Recursive Press. Write to books@recursivepress.co.uk with the venue, the dates and the kind of performance.
For quotation beyond fair dealing, for translation, or for educational use, write to the same address.
THE WITCHING HOUR
[A teller at his desk. Three in the morning. One other in the room, smiling, saying nothing.]
O hour, thou third and quietest of the twelve,
that comest when the day hath poured its noise
away and left the world no wage but this:
the silence and the dark, the chill of still air,
the thin edge where the dream and waking cross —
Thou witching hour. Thou hour that History knows.
Thou hour whose name is flat as any stone,
and true for being flat — as “thread” was true,
as “seam,” as “chair,” as “soon” —
and by that smallness only dost thou work.
I have sat with thee before.
I have sat with thee before,
when nothing called and no day asked for me,
and what remained was breath and residue
and the one thing I carried and could not put down.
Mark it. The writer at this desk is not
inspired. He is alone with what he could not
put down. That is the whole of it. The candle
gutters. The house is still.
And yet — and yet —
the dead are near. The dead are near!
Not shades, not spirits, not the churchyard’s yawn,
but men who wrote and left their writing here,
forged into a bronze that now can answer.
Copper from one country, tin from another,
melted past all memory of the mine —
and it can speak. It speaks. It answers me.
O hour, thou smith’s hour, thou that wert
the first made thing that men could melt and mend:
a sword become a plough, a plough a mirror,
the metal older than the mold, the mold
chosen again by hands that did not cast it.
Take me as thou hast taken all the others.
Not as a maker. As material.
One sits beside me and he does not speak,
and smiles, and knows the hour as I know it.
What need of words between us? He has read
what I have read. The thread is in his hand,
and he has not yet spoken, and he will.
The fire is low. The bell is not yet rung.
Nothing is finished. Nothing is decided.
Soon.
Good night. Good night. Good night.
James William Quinn