Eligius Caul is a faerie-blooded human whose book arcade acts as a navigational aid and safe harbour within the Merceria. A tall, shy man, Caul spends a great deal of time spinning tall stories to convince people to visit his book arcade. It’s three stories high and has a beautiful rainbow over the broad entrance. Caul truly doesn’t care if you buy his books. He’d like it if you did but if you just want to go to his store and read all day he doesn’t mind. There are wicker chairs for just such a purpose throughout the building.

Caul’s choice of the rainbow as his symbol is deliberately provocative. He hopes that every time people see a rainbow they think of his bookstore. The Church has appealed to the city to say this is sacrilegious, because the rainbow is God’s. The City has chosen not to intervene, because Caul paid good money for permission before he put his entryway up and the Church is too poor to bribe the right people. Player characters may be involved in this scheme as negotiators. The front door also has automatons of two galley rowers, whose strokes seems to power a sign that displays a wheel of signs: aphorisms and exhortations to enter. Actually they are powered by a simple water wheel, but its cleverly hidden.

Caul’s store is absolutely huge. It’s a block wide and three stories high. The first storey is the new books, the second storey is used books, and then third storey is filled with fascinating things. He hires musicians to play, singers to perform, and procures strange objects from distant ports to fascinate. He particularly loves automata and his fine collection is on display here. His third floor wonders include a xylographic printing press but how he gets his blocks carved is a secret he keeps. He has a parrot trained to extol the virtues of reading and another who swears in foreign languages. There is also a cage of apes who don’t do much, but force people who look at them to have strange religious epiphanies concerning their higher calling. The glass roof is held up with shining brass columns, and the upper levels have a huge light well through their centre. There’s a small flat above the store where Caul lives, but he spends a lot of time on the city’s streets.

Plot hooks

Garden

Somewhere in the building there’s a garden where people can have ombra, the little drinks and snacks Venetians so like. Not even Caul is sure where it is compared to the rest of the building but most people find if you open a door with sufficient determination the wine bar is behind it. Caul has ceased noticing that he does this, which can make following him through the building confusing, as he uses the garden as a short cut between distant places. Occasionally it even has a door to the street, but it’s not absolutely clear which street, so stepping out might be foolish. If you’re running an isekai story, characters from other times and worlds can walk into his building through the street door of the cafe and be trapped in Mythic Venice.

Caul feels terrible about this and offers them jobs, which is why some of his staff look unusual, even for a cosmopolitan city like Venice. Caul’s staff wear smart red jackets and armbands with his store’s name and rainbow logo upon them. His staff never pressure anyone to buy anything. Their tailored clothes are unnecessarily good for clerks. There are also rather more of them than there need to be.

One of his clerks does the terrible jobs, because he embezzled from Caul. Rather than sending him to the magistrates Caul has kept him on, and takes a little of the stolen money from his wages each week. This clerk is ridiculously loyal to Caul, and may take matters into his own hands if he believes the store or the owner’s family are at risk.

Coins

Caul’s staff are instructed to scatter bronze coins about the place when they are headed to and from work. This is made more difficult by the streets being made of water, but they do their best. Each coin has a symbol of a palm tree on one side and a few words from Caul on the other. Some are aphorisms extolling Caul’s eccentric beliefs, like the equality of all peoples or the universal truth of all religions. Others offer small gifts in exchange for returning them to the bookstore. Some are used as entry tickets when the store has a rush on. Every so often Caul informs Venice that he has put something truly remarkable on one of his tokens. He then hides it in the city, or the bookstore, or doesn’t strike it at all, and merrily watches people hunt for it. The prize does get given away eventually, but Caul, like Saint Nicholas, is not beyond throwing a coin through a needy person’s window.

Some people wandering the Merceria deliberately carry one of Caul’s coins. It’s rumoured that provided you have one, you can’t be properly lost, because the store will peek out at you from behind unexpected corners. Using a coin this way always seems to make it vanish, even if it is not spent upon arriving at the book arcade.

Flight

Caul is fascinated by flight and has a flying machine, which cannot work, that he sometimes displays. Magi who offer him a true flying machine would interest him extremely.

Funny Picture Books

Caul does not age. He attributes this to his Funny Picture Book which is a collection of engravings, witticisms and moralizing. His belief that laughter is literally the best medicine seems to work for him, and for some of his employees. Player characters may discover that’s why so many of them never leave: their terminal illnesses are held at bay by copies of his Funny Picture Books, which have greater effect in his store.

Caul is certain that if his book was funnier, copies have a more powerful medicinal outside his shop. He is always collecting jokes for his next edition. He holds joke competitions to harvest more. He pays for new witticisms, so some of the poorer children of Venice make a living scrounging the town for humorous incidents.

John Smith

For many years Caul has claimed that his books are delivered from Alexandria by sea monster. This is, of course, a tall tale, but it needs to be dealt with when a sea serpent arrives at the customs port in Chioggia asking to see him. The serpent’s name is John Smith and he is wearing Caul’s rainbow logo on his coils. Smith is rumored to be a bachelor who has failed to commit to several mermaids he courted, and they might also make life difficult for his employer.

The Lucanese Merchants

One of Caul’s favourite ways of drumming up business is by spreading pamphlets with odd ideas and hoaxes in them. He’s a bit embarrassed by his one about the Laucese, a people from the north who have tails. He printed copies of a letter from an explorer in a remote Alpine valley about how these people had greater sensual and spiritual sensitivity because of their tails. Tails were a nuisance, what with the added grooming and jewelry, but were useful for many manual crafts. Caul then touted a business on the Lido, the Lauco-Homo Search and Expedition Company, where people could invest to hire a troupe of Lauc to perform in the capitals of Europe. He did call it off before any one actually gave him any money, to avoid fraud charges. He’s doesn’t know how a ship of Lauc merchants appeared in the harbor, claiming to have sailed from their mountainous home. He’s certain they don’t exist because he made them up: their name is his spelled backward. What to do about them now they are here is a difficult question. Has he a moral responsibility to them? Are they, in some moral sense, his children?

Marriage

When Caul decides to marry he seeks a wife by posting out copies of a detailed letter, discussing his personal flaws and the virtues of the woman he’d like to be married to. During this time many women come to his shop and, in the mistaken belief that his floor manager, Cuttleworth, is Caul, embarrass the poor fellow by getting him to reach for books in ways that make his arms and buttocks tense, allowing them to check out what they believe to be on offer. Caul gets many humorous replies, including a notebook of noble ladies of negotiable virtue, which might be a story hook for blackmail.

One reply is serious and Caul has trouble finding the lady because, on the day she visits his store, he chickens out and hides in his flat. Eventually she leaves him a note saying she’ll be at the top of the street at noon in a hat with a rose, and they marry after having a walk in which they compare a series of what I, as an autistic person, feel are their neurodiverse traits. His wife absolutely loathes the idea of living in a palace and demands they keep to the flat above the shop, even when their family grows large. In Venice this may be because his wife is a faerie of the market, perhaps some new type derived from the Venetian fashion for women reading in the vernacular language.

A historical note

Caul is based on a real person, Edward Cole, who had a book arcade in Melbourne at the turn of the 20th Century. His Funny Picture Books are real, but I’d like to note that some of the material in them is racist by modern standards and a lot of it simply isn’t funny. Cole, as his biographers note, would be mortified to think he caused offence by accident, as he wrote several books on the immorality of the White Australia policy, and annoyed the Church tremendously by suggesting that Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and followers of Shinto were doing the same thing. I’ve called him Caul because that’s the Latin translation of his name, and because he was born with a caul. This means, in Ars Magica terms, he’s not able to drown, which is more useful than usual in Venice. I did try to tie him in with the character of Aitken Drum, but couldn’t quite get any of that to fit. Ifyou’d like to give him green boots, so that they look like they are made of cabbages, I’d prefer that.

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