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Looking at the others in your hands though, you find dates on one, and what might be a maker's mark on another. The binding of the fourth one is as virginal as the first. You feel lost - and more than a little off-kilter from the heady brew of wine on an empty stomach and repeated self-drawing casting. Looking to shake yourself loose from this, you turn back to the space where you plucked the binders from, intending to return them there so you can walk up and down the stacks a bit, in a bid that with a wider view, the scheme of the shelves will make itself known to you. But when you try to put the clump of binders back, you find the space that you took them from to be crowded in on, and that you must fight the mass and the bulk of the clerkwork to get the handful of the thin, leather folders stowed away more or less where you found them. Eventually achieving this, you make your way down the stack scanning up and down the shelves - to find a Family Patent first and foremost, but if your luck isn't as white as that, then just to get a sense of the organization. If you had just that, you might be able to make this work ... but for the life of you - and if might damn well really be for the life of you - you cannot figure out the scheme, the order, the sense.
You round the end of one stack, and start heading down another, seeing much the same - just an accumulation on the shelves. And most importantly, nothing that they all have in common, nothing that they could be sorted by. Not by type, or alphabetical order of their title - or any other way, like who the article was written up for, or written by, or when it was written. Where even. Perhaps even with what, or on what ... nothing can account for this. Could it be ... could it be that there isn't any order? That is just as it appears? An accumulation? It ... it certainly wouldn't be good for you if it was. Desperately trying to avoid feeling stuck, you stop dead in your tracks, set down your 'stick-decanter and turn to the nearest shelf to start tugging at its most loosely packed contents. You turn up quite a lot that isn't a Family Patent, but for every bit and bob you take out and off, you can at least say you have a better sense of what isn't a Family Patent. Once you have felt that you have seen enough, you take up your 'stick-decanter, and resume your brisk browsing - only to immediately stop once you muster up a compelling thought. Nearly all Master Family Patents are going to be considerably old - and paper, as well as leather and vellum and papyrus - they all show their age pretty readily. And now that you are thinking about it, all of the paper that you can see - whether it is loose, wrapped, binded, whatever - none of it is yellowed, or crumbling, or anything of the sort. Even with everything all jumbled, you cannot see anything that looks older or newer than anything else. Not on any of the shelves that you can see in the ill-matched light off of your eyes and the 'stick-decanter.
