by Thomas Owen, who you really should read more of…
Translated by Edward Gauvin. He recently translated the stories by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud contained in A Life on Paper (Small Beer, 2010)
Read by David Rees-Thomas, one of the editors of Ideomancer. “But he’d been a skillful artisan, and remained so. At the beginning of his career, his real specialty had been locksmithing. Ah! Nothing to do with today’s dumb little locks, all identical, with grooved keys and four screws to be slapped up any old where, which came apart with a blow of your fist. No. Real locks, ingenious, intelligent, personal, custom-made. He’d built all kinds! Secrets, thief-proof, devilishly clever. But also screaming padlocks that wouldn’t let themselves be violated, latches that struck back, a stack of sneaky, perplexing little mechanisms to turn the most sensible engineer pale.”
