Summary

NOTE: Numbers, words, descriptions, or a combination of the same are used in the book to title individual chapters. For clarity, this guide refers to each chapter by using the same titles in the same order as the book. For example, a preface, appears after Chapter 2, as it does in the book.

In Chapter 1: "The Blue Door," the narrator, January Scaller, describes how she found a Door when she was seven. She capitalizes “Door” because that Door was different from other doors. She also likes the way the capital “D” appears on the page. She notes that whenever her father, a scholar named Julian Scaller, wrote about doors, he never capitalized the word.

January tells that her guardian, Locke (head of W.C. Locke & Co. and chairman of the New England Archaeological Society), took January and...