Sold at the door of the Binders' Guildhall, Kessel Street, price two pence. First written by Silas Brede, guild archivist, in 1150. Revised by the guild archive in 1209, with a note on sources. Dates are in Varrow's count, from the raising of the first bridge.
Before the fire
The first paper mills were built at Kessel Bend in 912, where the river slows and turns and a mill wheel can be trusted. By 919 there were three: the Haverell, the Corley and the Bend Mill.
In that year, so the oldest story goes, Wenna Haverell, the mill owner's daughter, folded a paper boat to send a message down the millrace to her father. The boat turned in the water and sailed upstream instead, against the current, all the way to the mill steps, where it stopped and waited for her. It is the first fold on record. The street has taken it as a guide ever since.
Over the next hundred years the binders, printers and stationers came to the paper, and Kessel Street grew uphill from the mills. The folds grew with it. Most of them lived in the mills, which were the warmest buildings on the street and full of paper, and by the winter of 1013 there were hundreds of them there.
The winter fire
On the night of 17 January 1013, fire broke out in the drying loft of the Haverell mill. Drying lofts are full of hanging paper and moving air, and they burn as fast as anything built by hand. By midnight the fire had crossed to the Corley mill, and by morning all three mills at the Bend were gone.
Two mill hands died in the fire. So did more folds than anyone has ever been able to count.
The folds lost
The guild's register of the time was a register of ownership, not of persons, and half of it burned in the Haverell office. What survives lists three hundred and forty folds that were never seen again. The millworkers' own tradition, handed down in the families who worked the Bend, says "six hundred and more".
The Guildhall Book, which would know, has been asked. It stayed folded shut.
The refolding
Ninety-one folds survived the fire, all of them singed and many of them torn. They could not live long like that, and they did not want to live apart.
The street calls that whole winter the Great Unfolding, for the hundreds it lost. But the part it tells most often is what the survivors did next. The ninety-one chose to be refolded into a single god. The guild's master folder, Ysolde Marrin, and six binders worked in the guildhall for nine days and nights. Each fold, by its own choice, refolded itself into a signature, a single folded section of a book. The binders sewed the ninety-one signatures together, by hand, and bound them between boards cut from the charred door of the Haverell mill.
On the tenth morning the Book woke.
The guild's account says that Ysolde Marrin folded the ninety-one into the Book. The mill families say the folds folded themselves, and Marrin only sewed. Both accounts agree on the sewing.
What the Book remembers
The Guildhall Book is said to remember everyone. At the least, it remembers every fold that went into it, and everything those folds remembered. The street believes it remembers more than that: every fold ever made on Kessel Street, and everyone who ever folded one.
It lies on a lectern at the back of the guildhall, under the bell tower. It is asleep. When the guild archivist puts a question to it, the Book answers by falling open at a page, and the archivist reads what is written there. Sometimes it stays folded shut, and that is an answer too.
It has not fully woken, by any reliable account, since the morning it was made. The street hopes it never needs to.
How the fire began
The guild's finding of 1014 was that a lamp was left burning in the Haverell drying loft. That is the account given in this pamphlet's first edition, and it may well be true.
There is another account. A Corley mill hand named Wat Corley told the guild bench that in the week before the fire he had seen a light in the Haverell loft after hours, "low and shaded, like a folder's lantern". He also said that in the ashes the next morning he found sheets of paper lying flat, unburned and with no crease left in them at all, "as clean as if they'd never been folded".
Taking the crease from an unfolded god is the oldest crime on Kessel Street. The bench of 1014 heard Corley's evidence and found no case to answer. The guild archive records it here because it would be dishonest not to.
Why we say "unfolding"
Since the fire, the street has used the word for any death of a fold. When a fold is opened out flat and its crease is gone, Kessel Street does not say it was destroyed, or ruined, or lost. It says it was unfolded, and the word carries all of that winter with it.
A note on sources
This revision draws on the surviving half of the guild register of 1013, the minutes of the guild bench of 1014, Silas Brede's first edition of this pamphlet, and the families of the Bend, who were generous with their time and their tea. The Book was consulted on four questions. It answered one.
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