331 - Portrait and Guidebook Manuscript Creation
Even after my cold had fully healed, I was still banned from going outside for a while. Though even if they forbade me from going out, if the spirits wanted to take me, they could carry me off anytime, so I do not think it meant much.
While I was bedridden with the cold, get-well gifts had arrived from various places, so I spent my time writing replies to those and personally thanking the people who came to check on me. Even though I could not go out, I was quite busy.
"...Weren't you supposed to be holed up in the annex? You have been coming out rather often lately."
"I have something I wanted to show you today."
"This is what it is," Rannvald said, holding out a thin square wrapped in cloth to Giselle, and I guessed what was inside. The painting he had been working on when I peeked in with the Divine King must have been finished.
"Is the painting completed?"
Unable to think of anything else, I took a guess and said as much, and Rannvald and Giselle, who had been checking the wrapped item, looked surprised.
"...How did you know I was painting?"
"You mentioned something like that before, and the other day when I was with the Divine King, I peeked into the annex."
When I said that Rannvald must have noticed and looked my way, he seemed to recall something. "I thought I sensed a strange presence, so that was you," he said, oddly convinced.
"I thought so from the sketch stage, but you really are skilled."
Looking again at the painting Giselle handed me, I let out a sigh even though what was depicted was supposed to be me. The face that still had not fully shed its childishness, the slender, delicate limbs, and the archaic costume from dressing up as the goddess of arts, Ashtate... the overall finish was deeply mystical. If the contents were not me, it would be a perfect beautiful girl. And since you could never guess my personality from the girl in the painting, the girl in the painting was a perfect beautiful girl. Despite having my cheeks pulled by quite a lot of people, miraculously my cheeks had not stretched out and deformed my face.
"...If you did not know what was inside, even I might fall for this beautiful girl."
"If you are aware of it, fix the contents."
"The contents are not something you can just fix on a whim, you know."
If there was something I could do, at best it would be thoroughly refining how I present myself. For me, who still had not finished my ladyship education, that was a slightly difficult challenge.
...Besides, considering the risk of weird stalkers, I think it is better to stay as I am, a disappointing beautiful girl.
If someone fell for me on their own, then got disillusioned and left on their own, it was actually better for me to remain a beautiful girl with "disappointing" attached to my head. I could not change my face since my parents had given me a cute one, but I could add deterrents in other areas.
"...Anyway, you said I could sell it if I got permission, did you not. Give me permission."
"It is certainly wholesome in the extreme, but I believe I told you I would be demanding a cut of the proceeds."
"You are surprisingly greedy."
As Rannvald clicked his tongue and said, "You actually remembered," I idly thought about how he was supposed to be royalty, yet his gestures were more commoner-like. But when I thought about it, he had lived as a commoner among the populace for over ten years. His mannerisms would naturally start to resemble those of commoners. If they did not, he would stick out.
"...I have something I would like to do, so I need funds."
"Something you want to do?"
Surprisingly, Rannvald took the bait, so I thought it might make for a good opinion and decided to tell him. I wanted to create a guidebook for the bobbin lace Aurelia had left behind and preserve it. I wanted to spread bobbin lace to the point where I could walk around wearing a bobbin lace ribbon without getting harassed by shady merchants.
"This is pretty... You are going to spread the method for making this? I would think keeping it secret and monopolizing it would be more profitable."
When I showed him the collar Kalisa had made as a sample, Rannvald picked it up with interest and examined the details. Judging from the painting he had finished, he seemed to have an artistic side, so maybe he wanted to try his hand at weaving bobbin lace too.
"There is no point in keeping it secret. I want to create a world where I can wear this without being harassed by weird people."
I knew that if I were to live among the nobility as a lady, the skill of making bobbin lace could become a weapon. However, I had no plans to live as a lady among the nobility. I wanted to live in the city of Grenore as Leonardo's little sister, occasionally read Japanese, watch over the rites as the Spirit's Favored Child when asked, and live without getting involved in politics or troublesome factional disputes.
"So you are raising funds to make the guidebook. ...There should be those five thousand gold coins that ended up with the Eighth Princess angering King Christoph, should there not? What happened to that?"
"That money was originally taxes, and it feels too much like a windfall for me to use it comfortably on hobbies."
Since it also included embroidery material costs and labor fees, I would not say I had no intention of taking a commission at all. For one thing, when I once consulted about returning it, Christoph told me to keep it. He also said I could think of it as payment for my work in the capital, but either way, it felt like too much, and as a timid person, I found it hard to use freely. It was the kind of sum that made me think I should invest it in some public works project.
"If the king says it is payment, then that is payment you should receive. Use it without hesitation."
"The work was too simple for me to feel it is worth that amount."
As far as I was concerned, it was just a job of reading Japanese, but its value was indeed significant. If it led to reviving the secret arts of Saint Yuuta Hiraga, it would save hundreds, thousands of lives in the future. I understood and acknowledged the high value of the work, but what I actually did was just read Japanese, try actually making the secret arts from the prescriptions, and translate the prescriptions into the Erath language. I did not really feel like it was proper labor.
"Does not taking a cut from the sale of the painting I drew count as a windfall for you?"
"That would be a violation of my portrait rights, so please pay the model fee properly."
To Rannvald, who tilted his head in confusion, I answered that I thought it was a matter of scale. Thanks to having Leonardo as a well-earning guardian, I was living a luxury I could never have imagined in my previous life, but I was a commoner at heart. I felt more excitement over small, immediate sums of money than over large amounts that did not really hit home.
"Still, you really are skilled. If only I could copy it and sell it..."
"Copy? You could probably manage a tracing, but copying would be impossible."
I had accidentally said "copy," but Rannvald understood it as "copy." He corrected my pronunciation, but I had no plans to perfect my pronunciation. Writing was one thing, but even speaking was not going to be flawless, so this was fine. What I had really been thinking was how nice it would be if I could easily make copies with the copy machines from my previous life, but since this world did not have convenient machines like copiers, it just did not register.
"Come to think of it, I have not seen any full-color printing either, have I?"
From copiers, my thoughts connected to whether this world had printing presses, and I recalled the printed books I had seen. None of them were in color. If there were any, they were not full color but rather multi-color printing where colored ink was effectively added to black ink.
"Full-color printing?"
"It is a printing method where a painting drawn with four or more colors, like this picture, is separated into four colors, blue, red, yellow, and black, and printed on a single sheet with perfect alignment to produce something close to the original color scheme... I think."
"I do not think four colors can become more than four colors... Ah, I see. There are pigments where blue and yellow make green, and blue and red make purple. If you consider that, it might not be impossible."
Rannvald said that in theory it did not seem impossible, but actually attempting it would require tremendous effort. As for me, I had hit a dead end with the color separation method and had given up early on. Even if I tried to tackle full-color printing with analog methods, the painting Rannvald had done this time could not be reproduced. Just thinking about it a little made it clear that you would need to draw manuscripts for each of the four colors with perfect precision, requiring tremendous patience and time.
"If you used dots and hatching to create shading, single-color printing could probably be mass-produced..."
"If you mass-produce it, the value drops. It is precisely because it is a one-of-a-kind painting that it sells for a high price."
"...That is true too."
I had thought it was like having your portrait drawn and sold without permission, like idol photo cards, but mass production apparently was not favored. Indeed, unlike photographs, each one took time to draw, and even with printing, it could not be done like photographs from my previous life in terms of cost and effort.
"But even if full-color printing is impossible, you could probably make colorful pictures like ukiyo-e."
"Ukiyo-e?"
"Um... it is a woodblock print, I think. You carve a picture into a wooden block, apply ink, place paper on top, and print. You do not need to think about complicated things like four-color separation. You make blocks for each color, so essentially it is the same as multi-color printing."
As I rambled on about ukiyo-e and woodblock prints, Rannvald commented that I seemed quite knowledgeable about printing. I did not feel particularly knowledgeable at all, so I told him I was not. My knowledge of woodblock prints came from my memories of elementary school in my previous life, and what I knew about ukiyo-e was just secondhand information from some TV program. It was not that I was knowledgeable.
"...Come to think of it, what is the level of printing precision around here?"
In modern Japan from my previous life, even fine screen tones were printed beautifully, but in the heyday of rental bookstores, manga screen tones could not be reproduced, and artists had to express shading through stippling and hatching. Since being taken in by Leonardo, I had seen books with pictures, but I felt they were mostly expressed with just lines. If it was just lines, maybe the treatment was not so different from text.
"There are books with uniform type, books with handwritten text, and handwritten books..."
When I clutched my head over what was really going on, Rannvald looked exasperated. The fact that I was worrying about such things apparently meant I was plenty knowledgeable about printing. Normal people apparently did not even think about such things.
"If you want to know about printing, you should go see the Menhishumi Church in the inner city. If it is the wish of the master of the detached palace, they probably cannot refuse."
"Vard-san, you seem quite knowledgeable about printing yourself, do you not?"
"That is because I have worked running the printing press at the Menhishumi Church before."
"Huh? Vard-san, you actually work?"
"What do you think I am?"
"...A houseguest at the detached palace?"
Or a ghost. Or perhaps a fool who was supposed to be in hiding but sneaked into the detached palace of the person he should be hiding from and left traces of his intrusion.
"After I went outside, I worked and earned my own living like a normal person, you know. Running the printing press was one of the jobs I did."
Since running the printing press required physical strength, male workers were apparently welcome. So while he did not know the structure of the printing press itself, he apparently understood the printing procedure and the required manuscript format.
"Vard-san, how wonderful. Now please pay the rent that has been piling up."
"You were planning to charge me rent?!"
"The food and drink Vard-san has consumed are all paid for by the detached palace, and I am providing a fully furnished annex as your hiding spot, so charging rent is only natural."
On top of that, he was planning to make a profit by selling portraits of the detached palace's mistress, so it would not be wrong to get a little payback.
"Well, the rent is not exactly money I am asking for, so please rest assured on that front."
"What do you want to know?"
"It is about the manuscript for creating the bobbin lace guidebook..."
I was still in the stage of carefully reviewing the text for the guidebook, taking notes on paper and writing boards as I organized it, but if I was going to have it printed at the Menhishumi Church, I should ask about how to create the manuscript for printing. Nils was not in the capital, but if Rannvald was knowledgeable about printing, I thought asking him for advice on creating the manuscript would be a good approach.
"Ask about printing costs directly at the Menhishumi Church. A guidebook, huh... text and diagrams? If it is just text, letterpress printing with its uniform, beautiful type would be fine, but if you are including diagrams, mimeograph printing would be better. With that, handwritten text works too, so it is faster than setting type for letterpress."
As Rannvald explained the printing at the Menhishumi Church, many of the terms he used were ones I had heard in my previous life. Which meant, no matter how I thought about it, a reincarnator must have had a hand in this world's printing technology. I did not know how long ago, but I had heard that a book-loving reincarnator had brought stories from another world, so perhaps that person had even brought printing technology. And considering that printing technology had not evolved since then, it was probably technology that was still too advanced for this world. It did not have the power to evolve on its own, but instead had been preserved so as not to lose the technique.
"There is also the method of printing one page twice, text with letterpress and diagrams with mimeograph, but... well, that is a waste of time. It would be faster to hire someone with nice handwriting and print the text portion all at once with the mimeograph too."
I nodded in admiration at Rannvald's explanation, going "I see, I see." Until now, all I had been able to do was try to organize the text with the vague intention of "making a guidebook," so thanks to Rannvald, I felt like I had suddenly taken a big step closer to making it a reality.
As a result of discussing it with Rannvald, he agreed to draw small illustrations and explanatory diagrams, and in exchange, the model fee for the portrait would be canceled out. Later, when I told Alfred about this, he got angry that I had set the model fee too low, but I did not think that was the case. It was difficult for me to draw pictures that were easy for others to understand, and there would be revisions if it did not pass the test of whether it worked as a guidebook written by an amateur. It was not a one-and-done deal where you draw the explanatory diagrams once and you are finished.
"Since work has completely stopped until the materials are ready," I reduced the number of times I went to Siegwald's annex and focused on creating the guidebook manuscript. As for the printing workshop at the Menhishumi Church, when I contacted them, they kindly allowed me to tour it. Perhaps thinking they would use this opportunity to build a relationship with the Spirit's Favored Child, a Guide-class person from a different Menhishumi Church even came to escort me, but overall I think it was a pleasant tour. I also got to learn about printing in this world, so I will count it as a win.
By the time the summer martial arts tournament ended, the guidebook manuscript was complete. Rannvald asked if I was going to have it printed, but I tucked the finished manuscript into the belly of the Black Dog stuffed toy.
...I will definitely return to the city of Grenore, you know.
Making that wish, I did not immediately have it printed. Considering sales channels, it would probably be better to print it while I was in the capital, but what I wanted above all was for bobbin lace to spread and take root. First, I wanted to start spreading it within my reach, helping people who said, "I still cannot understand it just from reading the guidebook."
Next, we will probably be entering autumn. If I have not forgotten any events, it should definitely be autumn. Since Leonardo was not participating, the martial arts tournament, which Tina had little interest in, was skipped.
Will fix typos and errors at a later date.