FernFolio

I recently re-read Endymion Spring, and found myself taking copious notes about references to books and libraries.  Since I share Matthew Skelton’s evident love of print and books and library collections, I am sharing some of my reflections here.

Endymion Spring is an adventure about two boys who overcome their fears of inadequacy to safeguard knowledge from those who would ill use it.  The book is a riddle; two stories that intertwine.  One is the story of a book that is discovered and stolen and deliberately lost.  The other is the story of a boy who tries to find that book before a shadowy villain, or villains, finds it and uses if for their own nefarious ends.
The stories take place in Mainz and Oxford, which Skelton bring alive for the reader.  We experience all the sights and smells and sounds of Mainz at the end of the middle ages.  We also visit the present-day university city of Oxford, and, with Blake and Duck, peer, in particular, into that city’s ancient libraries, the past seen through the eyes of the present.
Endymion Spring is also a story about the written word, about 26 letters, arranged into words, then sentences and paragraphs to record knowledge and create stories that await only the reader’s insight and imagination.  It is about the power of the written word, a power that can be sacred, uplifting and transformative, or destructive and dangerous.
Endymion Spring celebrates libraries, those temples to knowledge, and repositories of endless miles of books on shelves.  It pays tribute to centuries of collecting and preserving rare and fragile texts, to the beauty of leather-bound volumes, whether bejewelled or tattered, and to the tactile smell and feel of old books, even while it cautions against the acquisitive and proprietary impulses of those who would hoard books, and the knowledge they hold, at the expense of others.
Endymion Spring explores the idea of the written word over time, from early manuscripts and hand-copied texts, to the invention of the printing press, and on to the advent of computers and the digitalization of old books.
FernFolio Editor