Everything that came after started on a snowy Saturday morning in Paris in January 2013, when a Korean friend called and asked if I wanted to go to the library to see an ancient book. 

I almost said no.

I was halfway through an MBA in Arts and Culture Management, it was cold, and the friend in question, Seongwon, a Korean academic student with anime hair and a wardrobe that cost more than my education, wanted to go and see a book I had never bothered to look up. I had heard about it once, at a party in Seoul, years earlier. Someone had mentioned it was older than the Gutenberg Bible. I had meant to google it. I hadn’t.

That morning I still didn’t. I jumped in the shower and headed out into the snow. In sneakers. Who would expect a snowstorm in Paris?

Seongwon was already at the information desk when I arrived. The Bibliothèque nationale de France, the French National Library, four towers of glass shaped like open books rising over the Seine, is not a building that makes you feel small accidentally. It means to. Seongwon was standing under an enormous letter I, signifying information. They did not have it. He was appropriately overdressed for a library visit in a blue blazer, dark overcoat, and a black silk turtleneck that probably cost more than my rent. His French was considerably better than mine. It didn’t help.

The woman at the desk tilted her head to the right.

We tried Window Six. The attendant there tilted her head to the left. She suggested circulation. At circulation, a middle-aged man with hair combed carefully over a bald scalp didn’t tilt his head at all. He just pointed, with the expression of someone who had been dealing with idiots all morning and wasn’t finished yet.

We walked the length of the corridor three times. Twelve-metre ceilings soared overhead. Through the inner wall of plate glass, four storeys below, a courtyard of pine trees sat buried in snow, perfectly still, indifferent to our progress.

Nobody in it had heard of the book we were looking for.

We found the research office at the end of a corridor we hadn’t tried. A woman in her thirties with great wavy brunette hair looked up from her desk, listened to us with what seemed like genuine effort, and handed us forms to fill out. Progress.

We wrote down what we were looking for. She read it, opened her eyes slightly wider, tilted her head, a good sign by now, and pointed us toward a glassed-in office at the back, its windows covered by closed blinds.

Inside, behind a desk in the middle of the fishbowl, sat a middle-aged woman in a yellow dress. She had the expression of someone who had already decided the day was not going to improve. We greeted her with bonjour, but neither of us had thought to add Madame. She read our request form. The expression deepened.

“Pfff. Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

We explained. An ancient Korean book. Printed in 1377. The oldest book printed with movable metal type in the world. Older than Gutenberg.

She looked at us the way people look at you when they have stopped listening but haven’t decided what to say yet. Then she turned to her colleague across the desk, a man with grey hair and the satisfied expression of someone about to be proven right.

“Non. Nous avons deux Bibles de Gutenberg.” She said it the way you state a fact that closes a conversation. We have two Gutenberg Bibles. “Mais ça, ça n’existe pas.” But this. This doesn’t exist.

We insisted. She resisted. It went back and forth in the way arguments go when neither side has anything new to add.

Then, finally, she looked down at the form. She began to type. One finger. Slowly. J. I. K. J. I. Each letter spoken aloud as she pressed the key, with the patience of someone who knows they are about to be proved right.

She hit enter. She sat back. She waited.

Then she leaned forward.

Then she clicked something.

Then she sat up very straight.

“Mon Dieu.” She turned to her colleague. “C’est ici.”

My God. It’s here.

The two of them looked at each other. Then at the screen. Then at each other again. They began to talk, quickly, the way people talk when something has genuinely surprised them. What an incredible collection they had. What an astonishing library. An ancient Asian book, printed with movable metal type, older than Gutenberg, and it was here, in their institution, in their care.

They had forgotten we were in the room.

Seongwon cleared his throat.

“Comment voyons-nous Jikji?” How do we see Jikji?

She looked at us as if we had asked something unreasonable. The answer was no. It was not at this location. It was held in a vault, in the basement of the old library on Richelieu Avenue, and no, we could not apply to see it, and no, there was no process by which a visit could be arranged.

However.

She turned the monitor toward us. On the screen was a photograph of a small, worn book. She pressed the space bar. The page turned.

“Voilà,” she said, in the tone of someone who had solved a problem.

We stood there for a moment. In wet sneakers. Looking at a photograph of the oldest book in the world on a library computer, while the woman who had just discovered it existed turned back to her colleague and resumed their conversation about what a remarkable institution they worked for.

Outside, it was still snowing.

On the walk back along the Seine, I finally googled it.

There it was. Jikji. Recognized by UNESCO as the oldest extant book printed with movable metal type in human history. Older than Gutenberg. Printed in Korea in 1377. Sitting in a basement vault two kilometres behind me.

Seongwon summed it up as we walked. “It’s like someone steals your dog,” he said, “and when you find out they have it, they say you can’t see it. But here’s the link. You can look at it on Facebook.”

I didn’t say anything. I was thinking about the book. About the fact that I had heard about it years earlier at a party and hadn’t bothered to look it up. About the librarians who worked in the building that held it and didn’t know it was there.

I was also thinking that someone should make a film about this.

This is the second in a series of posts about the search for the world’s oldest book. The first post, The Box, can be found [here]. The investigation continues.