the pippin

To make a sheet of vellum you start by ruining a skin.

The calfskin goes into lime. Not to clean it — to dissolve it, partway. The lime eats the thin layer that lines each hair follicle, the cement that holds the hair in its hole. Days in the bath. The skin comes out slick and swollen and wrong, the way a hand looks after too long in the tub, except all over and grey.

Then the hair has to come off. There is a knife for this with a handle at each end, held in both fists and pushed away across the skin laid over a curved beam. The hair sheds in wet ropes. The word for the work is scudding — an old word that means exactly this and almost nothing else, the pushing-off of lime and fat and dirt and the loosened hair, all of it, until what is left is neither hide nor leather but something in between with no use yet.

Now the stretching, which is where the surface is actually made. A wooden frame, taller than a person, called a herse. The skin is hung inside it on cords and pulled tight from every side at once. And here is the problem the cords create: pull hard enough on the edge of a wet skin and the cord tears straight through it, splits it like a wet leaf, and the day’s work opens down the middle.

So before tying off, the maker does this. They find a pebble. A small rounded stone, river-worn, nothing — and they push it from behind into the edge of the skin so the skin wraps it like a knuckle in a glove. Then the cord ties around the outside of the wrapped stone, not the skin. The pull goes into the pebble. The skin only has to hold the pebble, and a skin can hold a pebble forever.

The pebble has a name. It is called a pippin.

With the skin under tension the scraping begins, with a knife shaped like a crescent moon — a lunellum, half a circle of steel, drawn flat across the surface again and again. Wet it, scrape it, let it dry a little, wet it again. The fibres relax and lock, relax and lock, and each cycle the sheet pulls itself flatter and thinner and starts, faintly, to let light through. You can see your fingers behind it. That translucency is the tell that it worked.

There are eight or ten pippins on a finished frame, one at each cord, each a stone the maker chose by hand from a pile of stones, each doing the same small job: standing in for the skin at the one place the skin would fail. When the sheet comes off the frame the pippins fall out and go back in the pile. They are not part of the page. Nobody who ever wrote on the vellum knew they were there.

I think about the person at the pile, choosing the next stone.