Summary

Editor’s Foreword:

In prologue-like, first-person narration, the ostensible editor of the manuscript that follows, Dr. Voth, describes how he came to leave the university where he worked, taking an important manuscript with him. He describes being given the old, uncatalogued manuscript by a student during a university book sale, studying it and transcribing it, and then realizing that there was something unusual and important about it. As a result of his realization, he says, he also realized he had to leave. He then describes leaving his office building and a campus that had both been crumbling, getting into his car, and starting for a destination that, he says, he had long been thinking of as the perfect place from which he could publish the manuscript. He describes weeping as he drove, commenting that “it is possible to hold back...