Nekane offers to save one single title out of two hundred

Previously: Ainhoa Cortabarria found, in a book from 1974, a fourth chapter written by Herminia Sasal, a schoolteacher who died in 2011 and was never credited.

118 titles and six days left. Ainhoa Cortabarria, book restorer at the Huesca Provincial Library, had the sum in pencil on the edge of her worktable: 118 divided by 6 is twenty a day, and a decent verification — cover, collation, stamps, catalogue card and condition — took her forty minutes a book. Twenty books is thirteen hours. The working day is seven.

Nekane Ferrer, inspector for the National Deduplication Programme, arrived at ten with a folder and no coat, like someone with no intention of sitting down. She laid the new calendar on the table, turned towards Ainhoa so she could read it the right way up.

—The 19th, six in the morning, rear dock, two lorries —she said—. You know that already. I'm here about the other thing.

—What other thing?

—Article nine of the campaign regulations.

Fabián Oyarzun, floor manager and the man responsible for the cull, came out from behind the shelving with the printed list in his hand. He had spent two weeks measuring Ainhoa's work in books per hour, and the numbers did not add up for him either.

—I haven't seen any article nine —he said.

—It's in the regulations, not in the order. Once per campaign and per province you can pull one title out of the batch and mark it as a heritage copy. One. It isn't pulped, it doesn't count towards the weight, and it never enters deduplication again.

—One out of a hundred and eighteen —said Ainhoa.

—One out of two hundred and fourteen, if you want it to sound worse. I don't choose which. I'm telling you the box exists and that it closes on the 18th at two.

Ainhoa put the pencil down on the edge of the table, on top of the sum.

The eleven days had been taken from her the Thursday before, in three lines signed standing up. With the eleven, the whole verification worked out: forty minutes a book, seven hours a day, two hundred and fourteen books, with an afternoon to spare for the doubtful stamps. Without them it did not work out at all. What Ainhoa had been doing since Thursday was going faster: thirty minutes, twenty-five, twenty-two, looking at the cover and the card and not the inside. On Tuesday she signed fourteen verifications that were not verifications.

—I'm not going to do twenty a day —she said.

—That's your boss's problem —said Nekane.

—It's mine —said Fabián—. If the batch goes out unchecked, the signature on the record is mine.

—The batch goes out on the 19th with your signature or with mine. The only thing that changes is whose name is on it.

Ainhoa took the list out of Fabián's hand and set it beside the calendar. A hundred and eighteen titles in two columns, with the number of copies in the margin. Four had three copies; the rest, two.

—I'm going to do it the other way round —she said—. I'm not verifying a hundred and eighteen in six days. I'll verify the four with three copies properly, and with the days that are left I'll build the file for one.

—For one —Nekane repeated.

—For «Oficios de invierno», Huesca, Tramullas printers, 1974. Five hundred copies then and two in the system now.

Fabián put the list down.

—Ainhoa, if you spend six days on one book, on the 19th I sign a record for a hundred and fourteen unchecked titles and the disciplinary file lands on me.

—If I spend six days on a hundred and eighteen, on the 19th you sign a record for a hundred and eighteen unchecked titles. The difference is four books and one file.

Nekane looked at the wall clock, which had been running eleven minutes fast since March and which nobody had corrected.

—Your colleague is right about the arithmetic —she said—. And I don't care. I don't decide what gets saved. I decide when the lorry arrives.

Ainhoa stood up, fetched the empty trolley from the corridor and pulled it up to the table. She found the four titles with three copies on the list — two agronomy manuals, a grammar and a volume of municipal records —, took them down from the shelf and set them on the trolley, one on top of another, with the catalogue card tucked into the first page.

Then she opened her notebook at Tuesday's page, where the fourteen twenty-two-minute verifications were, and crossed them out with a single line from top to bottom.

—That is signed and uploaded to the system —said Fabián.

—And crossed out in my notebook. On the 19th, when whichever inspector is on duty asks for the working paper, they will find fourteen titles marked as unchecked with my name beside them. It's fourteen, Fabián, not a hundred and eighteen. That can be defended.

Fabián stood looking at that line for a long while. Then he took the list, put a cross beside the four titles on the trolley and handed the sheet back to her.

Nekane opened her folder and took out a two-page form, stapled, with the programme's letterhead and a small grid. She laid it on top of the calendar, covering the 19th.

—Box one, title and year. Box two, library and registration number. You fill those in in ten minutes.

—And box three.

—Box three is the reason nobody uses article nine.

Box three was headed «Certification of authorship» and asked for two things on the same line: the author's name as it appears on the title page, and their original signature, in ink, inside the frame. Below, in italics and in six point, a condition one line long: «Only the signature of the author of the work while living is accepted».

Ainhoa read that line twice. Then she looked up the only address on the book's catalogue card, the legal deposit address from 1974, and copied it onto the back of the form: Casimiro Lete Arbués, eighty-nine years old, Ayerbe.