It’s a light! He got it from Talas. It’s an electroluminescent panel, thin as a piece of aluminum shim stock, that lights up. I have the big light  box for mending papers that are out of the books – but this can slip right between the pages for repairs in situ. Stays cool and everything. The construction is a little kludgy – there’s a bulky adapter in the middle of the wire that’s just there to change the relative positions of the wires, and it goes from heavy gauge to thin for no reason, and the plug on the wall wart doesn’t fit all the way into the power supply. No problem – I can take out the connectors and solder up the wires or reconnect them, and I think there are about five thousand spare old wall warts hanging around. Now I just have to get back to work and find some torn pages to mend …