Writing Prompt: It was a strange book.

Morning all. Feeling a little draggy today, but otherwise ready to go. Coffee is brewing so lets wake up with a prompt before caffination. Timers set to fifteen minutes please.

I like this one. I don’t know what the deal is with the book, but I suspect it is going to lead to some sort of treasure hunt or mystery. It is something I need to think about before writing, but definitely something I will return to.

Tuesday, April 23^rd: It was a strange book.

It was a strange book.  The leather binding was old but clearly well cared for.  It looked as though someone rubbed it with oil, making sure the leather remained supple and strong.  When he opened it, there was a soft sigh rather than a creak.

‘Ot was important to someone,’ he thought.  ‘At least important enough to care for.’

The pages were thick and smooth to the touch.  It felt like the best quality paper had been blended with silk fibers.  The pages were soft to the touch and felt expensive.  That was the over all feel of this book.  From the cared for leather binding, t the gilded print on the spine and along the outer edges of the pages to the pages themselves.  It looked like whoever made this book decided to spare no expense. 

‘That goes for the ink as well.’ 

There was something about the ink that drew him in.  it seemed to almost stand out on the page, lifted from it in three dimensions even though when he ran his fingers over the text the page was smooth.  He expected it to feel more like brail the letters looked so raised. 

Yet they weren’t.  ‘Maybe it is a combination of paper and ink,’ he thought. 

He wasn’t sure what sort of ink it was.  It was a shiny black despite the age of the book and the shine helped create the three-dimensional looking letters.  He just didn’t know what the ink was. 

‘But it has to be old.’

He knew the history of this library.  He made certain to check it out before he agreed to purchase the contents as a job lot from the owner who simply wanted a clear out.  He was certain the new owners were just stripping their inheritance down as they tried to make certain they got as much money from it as possible.  The furniture, he knew, had been sold off.  He was friends with the dealer who bought it.  In fact, that dealer was the one who told the family about him and enabled him to buy the contents of the library. 

His friend, Jason, told him that he wouldn’t be surprised if the new owners would start selling off the roof tiles once the contents were cleared.  He didn’t know if they had gotten to the slate rof tiles yet, but he knew that when he picked up the books, someone was in and valuating the decorative floor tiles.

He shook the thought away.  The dismantling of the house was someone else’s concern.  He knew the real value was in the land, or so the new owners thought, so everything else was just extra money they could get before the land was sold off to a developer.  Goven the beauty and the age of the house, he found it sad, but it was not something he could stop either.

‘And I did get a good deal on the books,’ he thought. 

The new owners were so eager to sell everything off that they accepted his first offer without looking at any of the titles.  There were quite a few first editions, the sale of two of them more than paid for his investment and left him time to sort through the rest.

But this book was strange.  He knew from the records that the current owner inherited the estate from his father.  But it looked as though his father and grandfather merely lived in the shell of what they inherited.  Anything of note was purchased by previous generations.  Yet some of these volumes, many several hundred years old, had a brightness to them that defied age.