"I have vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals." -- William Goldman
He haunts Goldkrone's secondhand shops, almost a byword for oddball acquisitiveness. The merchants of Nikolausstrasse call him (not quite behind his back) Herr Dohle, but as long as they take his money, he ignores their jibes. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Who tells gold from lead by weight alone?
Books he buys to disbind, teasing
manuscript fragments from backstrips and linings, searching for
overlooked words. But those teacups, that inkwell: them he touches
sparingly, lovingly, for history fills them as full as he expects to
brim with power, once his knowledge is complete.
Author's Note: Dohle is the German word for jackdaw, a member of the crow family proverbial for snapping up unconsidered trifles; Sankt Nikolaus (Saint Nicholas) is the patron of pawnbrokers as well as of children. The saying about the one-eyed man's advantage among the blind is usually attributed to the Renaissance humanist Desiderius Erasmus. And it was long customary for bookbinders to use scraps of old manuscripts in the bindings of new books; some fragmentary pieces of medieval literature have been recovered by dissecting later tomes, to the subdued joy of my colleagues in paleography.