The Ledger That Would Not Lie Flat

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town there were two bookbinders on the lane behind the corn exchange, a trade in which a man is told what he wants by somebody who has never once had to say it out loud.

Two bookbinders in the town I have never named, two benches and the same calf leather.
Both bound ledgers for the merchants on the quay, and both asked seven shillings a volume.
Both took the same order from the same corn merchant in the same week of August.
One wrote nothing down, remembered every word, and bound six handsome books nobody could write in.
The other wrote it down and read it back at the door, and bound that office for eleven years.
Same leather, same price, same order. How?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two bookbinders, a mile apart and both well thought of, each buying calf from the same tanner and each asking seven shillings a volume. In the third week of August a corn merchant from the quay called on both, wanting six ledgers for the new year. Bound in calf, he said, lettered in gilt, wanted by the first of January.

The first binder had a good memory and was proud of it. He took the order in his head and did not get a syllable of it wrong, and what he delivered in December was the better piece of work of the two: full calf, boards square, marbled endpapers, the gilt laid on by a man thirty years at it.

The merchant paid and said they were handsome, and they were. Then his clerks began to use them. The books were sewn so tightly that they would not stay open, so a clerk at a sloping desk had to hold the leaves down with his forearm, and the ink went crooked in the gutter of every page. The gilt on all six spines said LEDGER, so a clerk wanting the oats of last March took down three books before he found it. And the calf had been chosen for the look of it rather than for an office with the river under the floor, so by the second February the corners had gone soft.

He never complained. He had asked for ledgers in calf lettered in gilt by January and had been given exactly that, and he blamed himself for not having said. The next year he went elsewhere, and the binder put it down to a cut price.

The second binder had the duller hand. What he had was a small ruled notebook, which he put on the counter and wrote in while the merchant talked, and the merchant slowed down to let him. Then, at the door with his hat already in his hand, he read the whole of it back. Six ledgers. Calf. Gilt on the spine. Seven shillings a volume. Wanted by the first of January.

And the merchant, hearing his own order said aloud by somebody else, put three things right in under a minute. The clerks write standing at a sloped desk, so a book that will not lie open at any page is no use to anybody. They look things up by month, so the spine wants the year and the quarter on it, since LEDGER tells a man nothing when there are six of them on a shelf. And the fog comes off the water and sits in that office all winter, so whatever goes on the boards must stand a damp February.

Not one of the three was in the order as it was first given. All three were in the merchant's head, not as requirements but as the room he had worked in for twenty years. The sloped desk was no more a condition of the job to him than the floor was.

The second binder bound those six, and bound them again every year for eleven years, and in time bound for the solicitor and the shipping agents either side of that office, because the merchant described him as a man who understood an office. He was never called the better binder, because he was not.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A customer cannot describe the job to you, but he can correct your account of it, so write down what he says and read the whole of it back to him before you leave the room. Those are two different abilities, and nearly every trade asks for the one the customer does not have.

Consider what he is holding. Not a list of requirements, but a picture of a finished thing in use, in a particular room, by particular people, on a particular morning. Asked what he wants, he reads out of that picture whatever he takes to be unusual, and there he is beaten, because he cannot tell what is unusual. He has had one office in his life. The sloped desk is not a feature of the job, it is furniture, as invisible to him as the stairs he came down that morning.

Correction, though, asks nothing of him but recognition, which is a cheaper faculty than recall. Say the job back incompletely and the missing piece arrives of its own accord and at speed, because a man hearing his own business misdescribed cannot help himself. The merchant could not have produced those three conditions if you had given him an hour and a pencil. He produced them in fifty seconds because somebody read him a version with them absent.

The second gain is in the words. Writing while he talks leaves you holding the job in his language rather than your trade's, and an estimate in his own sentences, the oats and the sloping desk and the fog off the water, reads to him as his own decision written down. The same job in trade terms reads as a stranger's proposal. There is a great deal of difference between your words for the work and his, and the only place to collect his is at the counter while he is saying them.

The third is the order of things. The read-back comes before any price, so the first thing he agrees to is not your figure but his own job, and he agrees to it out loud. By the time a number is mentioned you are two men who have settled what is being discussed, which is also how you learn what will decide it before you put a price on paper.

Two cautions. Read back his words and not your improved version of them, since full calf, tight-backed and blind-tooled will earn you a nod from a man who has no notion what he has nodded at, and you will have tested nothing but his manners. Keep the clerks and the damp and the crooked ink in it. And the read-back is not the moment to sell. Those corrections are an open door, and the temptation is to walk through it with a heavier book and a better price. Take the note instead and let the paper do that work tomorrow, in the same words you read out.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. What did my last three customers take for granted? Name, for each job, one condition nobody mentioned which decided whether the finished work suited them. If you cannot find one, you were not asking, you were being lucky, and luck of that kind is lost quietly and blamed on price.
2. Where would a correction have been cheapest? Take the last job that went back to be altered and find the latest moment at which a minute of talking would have prevented it. In most trades it is the door on the first visit, the one visit nobody writes anything down on.
3. Can I say the job back in six lines? Write out tonight's enquiry in six lines, in the customer's own words. The lines you cannot write are not gaps in your notes. They are tomorrow morning's questions.

The Answer to the Riddle

Same leather, same price, same order, and one of them bound that office for eleven years while the other bound it once. How?

Because the first took the order as given and executed it perfectly, and the order was not the job. The second said it back at the door, and hearing it aloud the merchant supplied three things he had never thought to mention and could not have produced if asked. One man was handed a description. The other let a customer correct him, which is the only way a customer can tell you the truth.

The verse:

He gave you calf and gilt and price, and told you all he knew,
And left the rest at home with the sloped desk and the rain.
So read the order back before the door has let you through,
And he will mend in seconds what he never could explain.

Until next time. Go and write tonight's enquiry out in six lines in the customer's own words, and send him the six lines this evening, asking him what you have wrong.

P.S. Mind how you end the written version. A note asking him to confirm that this is all correct will get you the word yes, because confirming is a courtesy and he will extend it without reading. A note asking him what you have got wrong will get you the three things, because that is the easier job and the more flattering one. Nobody minds correcting a tradesman. A good many people mind admitting they did not read.

Also in the archive: Four Inches of Earth, Eight to Twelve Hundred and The Two Nights in the Parlour.