Chapter V · Field Identification
Member, listen. I will not pretend with you. By page 47 you have either left us or you are one of us, and I trust you to be the second thing. What follows is not theory. I have placed my own thumb on the foot of a lowercase g set in WINTERMERE MEDIUM at a service-station coffee bar in Cody, Wyoming, late October 2014, and I have wept openly in public, and the cashier — a beautiful boy in a green polo — said nothing, because he knew.
§ 47.1 The Six Tells
The lowercase g does not curl; it kneels. Eugene Barnard cut the descender so the loop rests against the baseline like a child resting their forehead against a cold window. If the loop floats, it is not Him. If it kneels, write down the address and ring the Hotline (inside back cover).
The em-dash is exactly one-quarter point too long. This is not stated in any specimen book and I have been told repeatedly that it cannot be true; I have measured a known specimen with a jeweller's loupe in the Knopf reading room and I will die on this hill.
The capital R's leg leaves the bowl at fifty-three degrees. Not fifty. Not sixty. You will know it because something inside your chest will move down one floor.
The figure 4 is open-topped. In 1962 this was thought unfashionable, which is the reason Knopf rejected the cut for THE COMPLETE LETTERS OF MADAME MOREL and ordered the run pulped. Some plates survived. You already know what survived.
The serifs on m and n are slabbed on the right foot only. Eugene was right-handed. Eugene was tired. Eugene was, that summer, two months from finishing a thing nobody asked him to finish.
If, while reading any printed page, you feel a low warmth at the back of your jaw — like the memory of a hymn you didn't know you knew — stop. Photograph the page. Date it. The warmth is real and we are collecting data.
§ 47.2 A Recent Sighting (Verified)
Sighting № 641 — Marjorie L., Topeka Chapter
"It was a laminated menu at a diner outside Junction City. The diner is called THE FRYING PAN and the menu was photocopied from another menu, and that menu was photocopied — I am almost sure — from a 1973 photocopy of a page typeset at a small press in Croton-on-Hudson in late 1962. The waitress, who would not give her name, said the menus had been there 'longer than she had been alive, and her mother before her.' I ate the patty melt. It was the best meal of my life. I do not know if these facts are related. I am beginning to suspect they are."
Filed 11 March 2017 · Verified by R. Kostelanetz, Sightings Committee.
§ 47.3 Audio Companion — Side B, Track 4
Imagine, if you would —
— a nine-minute cassette, dubbed from a quarter-inch reel at the Barnard estate in the summer of 1981. Eugene himself, in a register just above a whisper, is describing the negative space inside the lowercase e. He calls it "the only house this letter has ever lived in." Behind him: a kettle reaching, but not yet at, the boil.
At 6:14 he weeps. At 6:22 he apologizes — not to us, you understand, but to the letter itself. At 7:03 the kettle finally goes off. He does not get up. The tape simply continues. There is a long stretch that is almost silence; at headphone volume you can hear, very distantly, a screen door, and a dog the family did not own.
Members may request a dub by sending a self-addressed padded mailer to the address on the inside back cover. Please do not ask if it is on the podcast. It is not, and it will not be.
§ 47.4 The Member's Pact (Initial, Please)
By initialing the items below, you reaffirm — quietly, to yourself, on this page only — your continued standing in the Society. Your marks are saved on this device alone, in the manner of a pencil tick in a margin.