Aglie agrees to advise Project Hermes

Aglie agrees to advise Garamond Press on a proposed program of esoteric books, bringing Casaubon’s earlier acquaintance with him into the publishing venture. The arrangement joins a commercial editorial project to Aglie’s self-declared search for truth, while leaving the boundaries between scholarship, credulity, and opportunism conspicuously unsettled.

Reconnection and Invitation

Casaubon suggests Aglie as a potential adviser because he is erudite and approaches esoteric subjects seriously but with elegance and irony. Casaubon had met him in Brazil and believes he should now be in Milan. When he contacts Aglie, Aglie is pleased to hear from him and asks after Amparo. Learning indirectly that the relationship has ended, he apologizes and tactfully suggests that a young person can begin a new chapter with ease. Casaubon then raises an editorial project; Aglie expresses interest and arranges to meet the group at his house.

The invitation has a practical publishing purpose as well as a personal route back to Aglie. Signor Garamond asks Casaubon to make contact tentatively, subject to the cost, and to see whether Aglie might also help with the publisher’s project on the history of metals. The proposed esoteric program and the metals project thus enter the same negotiation, even though the account of the meeting concentrates on Aglie’s role in assessing esoteric manuscripts.

Defining the Work

At the meeting, Jacopo Belbo explains that Signor Garamond hopes to publish a few books of an esoteric nature each year. Aglie’s response exposes a difference in vocabulary and in purpose. When Belbo calls the subject esoteric, Aglie smiles; when Belbo tentatively offers hermetic as an alternative, Aglie smiles again. Belbo admits that he may be using the wrong word, but assumes Aglie will recognize the kind of material under discussion.

Aglie rejects the idea that esotericism is merely a publishing genre. In his account, it is knowledge: the intended project would survey knowledge that has not been debased. What might be an editorial choice for Garamond would, if Aglie became involved, amount to a search for truth and a quest for the Grail. His formulation raises the stakes of consultancy beyond classification or market selection. He presents the adviser’s task as a form of inquiry, although the publisher’s immediate need remains the evaluation of submitted manuscripts.

Manuscript Review and Compensation

Belbo describes the practical difficulty Garamond Press expects to face: casting a net among submissions may bring in empty shells and plastic bags as readily as worthwhile material. The publisher wants a stern reader to separate wheat from chaff, but also to notice curious by-products. Less worthy authors could be redirected to a friendly publishing firm, with suitable compensation arranged for the adviser. The plan therefore combines literary judgment with a secondary commercial outlet for material the main program does not want.

Aglie accepts the work while making clear that he is not dependent on its fee. He describes himself as a man of means and points out that an advantageous transaction involving a rare book or an unusual object could earn more than ten years of consultancy. His examples include another copy of Heinrich Khunrath’s Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae, a stuffed salamander, or a narwhal’s horn of the sort displayed in the Treasure of Vienna as a unicorn’s horn. These examples place the proposed editorial labor beside his collecting and dealing in rarities, rather than presenting him as a conventional, financially pressed consultant.

He nevertheless agrees to read the manuscripts in a spirit of humility. Even a commonplace text, he says, may contain a spark either of truth or of bizarre falsehood, and the extremes can meet. Ordinary work, rather than error or eccentricity, is what he expects to find tedious. He proposes to send a note at the end of the year, keeping any request within symbolic limits; if Garamond considers it excessive, the publisher can send him a case of fine wine instead. The terms make the arrangement at once professional, self-assured, and playfully resistant to a standard consultancy fee.

Significance of the Agreement

Aglie’s acceptance makes him an intermediary between the manuscripts generated by Garamond’s publishing scheme and the company’s desire to identify material worth pursuing. Yet he defines that function differently from the publisher: for Garamond it is an editorial program, while for Aglie it is a search for truth. Belbo’s net metaphor similarly holds two purposes together, the rejection of weak submissions and the capture of unexpected material. Aglie’s promise to look for truth or bizarre falsehood in even commonplace texts suggests that he will not treat eccentricity as sufficient reason to dismiss a manuscript.

The arrangement also preserves a tension that the meeting does not resolve. Aglie speaks in the language of humility and truth-seeking, but invokes profitable dealings in rare objects as evidence of his independence from consultancy fees; Garamond’s plan, meanwhile, makes room for diverting less desirable authors elsewhere. The agreement establishes the practical conditions for Aglie’s advisory role without making the parties’ motives identical. It begins as a business negotiation, but Aglie’s own framing turns it into an inquiry whose standards and conclusions remain open.