The Magnus Archives - Full Transcript

MAG004 | Pageturner

Recorded March 30, 2016 | Summary: Statement of Dominic Swain, regarding a book briefly in his possession in the winter of 2012.

Warning
money, lightning, electrocution, heights, vertigo, body horror (skin mutilation), human remains, animal bones, injury (twisted ankle, scars), book burning, food mention

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ARCHIVIST

Statement of Dominic Swain, regarding a book briefly in his possession in the winter of 2012. Original statement given June 28th, 2013. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)

I work as a theatre technician in various venues around the West End; I mainly deal with lights, but a lot of the smaller venues can't afford large crews for their productions so you end up doing a little bit of everything. I guess that's not directly relevant to my experience but I just want you to know that I'm not some crazy person wandering in off the street. I work, I do practical things with my hands and I am not prone to crazed flights of fancy.

That day, I was going to see a matinee performance of The Trojan Women at The Gate Theatre, up in Notting Hill. A friend of mine, Katherine Mendes, was in it and had been trying to get me to come to see it for a while. We'd worked together on a production of The Seagull a couple of years before and had had a bit of a thing going back then. At this point I had just become single, so was keen to meet up and see if any of the old spark remained. I ended up going along on the afternoon of Saturday the 10th of November - I remember the date exactly, as there had been a lot of back-and-forth about it, since we were both involved in separate shows at the time, making evenings difficult.

So, on Saturday afternoon I found myself in Notting Hill Gate, killing an hour or two before the show was due to start. Now, Notting Hill is not somewhere I go often, as it tends towards the pricey, even for London, and I'm not sure how much you know about theatre techs, but we're not generally an overpaid profession. Still, I had some vague memories of their being an Oxfam charity shop somewhere nearby, as I'd previously bought quite a nice old military tunic there which remains one of my favourite jackets. I found it without any problems, and spent ten minutes or so looking over the clothes and knickknacks, but was a bit disappointed. It was smaller than I remembered and just seemed to contain the same tedious curios as every other charity shop. I still had some time to kill, though, so I decided to have a look through their books, something I rarely bother doing usually.

I found the book on the Science Fiction and Fantasy shelf. At first I assumed it was some sort of faux-leather special edition and I was sure whoever put it out for sale must have done the same, because the price on it was only four pounds. There was something about it that made me take another look, though, and picking it up I felt the binding and realised it might well have been bound in real leather, probably calf, given how soft it was. I'm not an expert on books, by any means, but it seemed old, and I thought it might have been hand-bound as the pages were slightly uneven.

There was no dust wrapper on it and the front had no title, but embossed on the spine in faded gold letters were the words Ex Altiora. I did some Latin in school when I was a child, but I haven't had much cause to use it since, so you'll have to forgive me if my translations don't make much sense, but I believe it meant "From Higher" or "Out of the Heights".

I was astounded, to say the least - the book was clearly worth far more than it was being sold for. If the shop clerk who put it out had been paying any attention it would have been in the glass case where they kept those things people donated that were actually valuable. I had a flick through but it seemed to be entirely written in Latin, so I didn't have much luck discerning what it was about. The only English seemed to be a bookplate at the front that read "From the library of Jurgen Leitner," although no author was listed.