The winter lamp reserve stood at 2,216 bits on Monday morning. By Tuesday's adjournment it stood at 176, and the Ponyville Education Board had a crate coming.
The crate is Strand, by Edric Voss, at 34 bits. The Atrium Review, in its Canterlot edition, called the book "a marvel of breadth and concept," a cloud-lane pursuit joined to a treatise on whether a mind can initial its own memory. The Board's motion, passed 6 to 1, adopted that sentence as the senior reading standard and ordered sixty copies from Glass Bindery. Sixty times 34 is 2,040. The reserve buys oil for the schoolhouse lamps from first frost to the thaw. Chair Ivo Lenton told the clerk to move the sum and to enter the purpose as civic enlargement.
Glass Bindery did not ship the sixty to the school. The Board's form named Kern's Counter, on the market side of the square, as the receiving pony, so the purchase would pass through a Ponyville receipt. The bindery added the twelve copies Posy Kern had ordered on her own account and sent seventy-two books on the afternoon dray, with a placard in the same crate. Kern owes 34 bits on each of her twelve. That is 408 bits, due on receipt, against a shop that cleared 190 bits last week after wages.
Kern found the placard pre-drilled, with four brass nails and a line for her signature under the words "stocked locally." The text was the review. She signed the delivery because the dray pony was waiting and the square was getting dark. She left the praise unsigned.
Voss's house had divided the book before it left the bindery. The packing slip marks pages 1 through 213 as "argument, for enlargement" and pages 214 through 640 as "pursuit: three sky-barges, one false memory, weather-works." Page 214 is the first page on which anypony runs. The Board's recording clerk, following the slip, entered the order as two programs. The treatise half went to the senior mind fund. The pursuit half went to the activities fund. Both were already committed, one to substitute biscuit tins through Hearth's Warming and one to the gymnasium rope. The lamp reserve was the line that still moved.
"I can receipt a book that arrives," Kern said, at the seed scale she uses when the counter is full. "I can't receipt a marvel. The marvel is already paid for up the line, and the crate is in my aisle."
Juniper Glass, who keeps the bindery's accounts in Canterlot, confirmed the deposit before the dray cleared the spur. "The Board bought the breadth," Glass said. "Concept was in the same binding. We don't split a binding because a town keeps two funds."
Kern's clerk, Tad Sedge, makes 11 bits a day. He unloaded the seventy-two after the dray pony left for the next town. Glass Bindery prints the opening argument on contract stock, the kind a clerk can initial, and prints the chase on ordinary paper, which puts the weight in the front half. Sedge managed the weight. On his dinner break he reached page 30, where a memory initialed by its owner may still belong to the weather that carried it. The shop filled, and he went back to the counter.
Lenton, asked where the seniors would meet the thriller they had been promised, said the delay was the purpose of the purchase. "A pony enlarged on page 213 will experience page 214 correctly," he said. "We are buying the sequence." He added that Voss will come in the spring if the hall supplies a closed upper room, a separate lamp, and a fee of 600 bits, to be discussed when the reserve recovers.
Voss, reached by the Canterlot post, did not discuss the fee. He said the book was written as one motion and priced as one motion, and that a town may spend its oil money on whatever keeps the evenings occupied. The Atrium Review's notice runs four columns and does not mention a price. It ends on the word concept.
The twelve shop copies stand in Kern's window under the nailed review. The sixty Board copies sit in the back, labeled for the school, waiting on a cart. The hire is 8 bits. The clerk's oil sheet prices a mild week at 64 bits. The 176 left covers two such weeks and leaves 48. Kern's ledger, updated at close, shows the twelve, the cart not yet taken, and 408 bits. The bindery's column shows the 2,040 received, and a second line, already opened, for the spring fee.
