Davies wrote a cable to Rafe Buckley’s father in Maine. A terrible thing to have to do, he thought, but the mourning would be far from singular. Before long, he thought, the whole world would be mourning.

Later — during the troubled times, when the numbers of the poor and the homeless rose so dramatically, when coal and oil grew so expensive, when there were bread riots in the Common and Guilford’s mother and sister left town to stay (who could say for how long?) with an aunt in Minnesota — Guilford often accompanied his father to the print shop. He couldn’t be left at home, and his school had closed during the general stroke, and his father couldn’t afford a woman to look after him. So Guilford went with his father to work and learned the rudiments of platemaking and lithography, and in the long interludes between paying jobs he re-read his radio magazines and wondered whether any of the grand wireless projects the writers envisioned would ever come to pass — whether America would ever manufacture another DeForrest tube, or whether the great age of invention had ended.

Often he listened as his father talked with the shop’s two remaining employees, a French-Canadian engraver named Ouillette and a dour Russian Jew called Kominski. Their talk was often hushed and usually gloomy. They spoke to one another as if Guilford weren’t present in the room.

They talked about the stock-market crash and the coal strike, the Workers’ Brigades and the food crisis, the escalating price of nearly everything.

They talked about the New World, the new Europe, the raw wilderness that had displaced so much of the map.

They talked about President Taft and the revolt of Congress. They talked about Lord Kitchener, presiding over the remnant British Empire from Ottawa; they talked about the rival Papacies and the colonial wars ravaging the possessions of Spain and Germany and Portugal.