Group seed: Cosgrove and Stewart.

Cosgrove and Stewart – Google Docs

Cosgrove and Stewart

 

To begin with, that’s the name of the company, not the two people who currently run it.  Cosgrove and Stewart has the exoteric background of being a bookbindery that specializes in restoring and preserving truly antique books and scrolls; the company maintains offices in London and New York City.  It is very much a high-end business institution: Cosgrove and Stewart is on long-term retainer with numerous national and academic libraries, Cambridge University Press, B’nai B’rith, the Genda Shigyo paper company, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Universal Exports, Bolten-Brauerei, the Windsor dynasty, Schwabe, Gazzetta di Mantova, the DIA, the World Council of Churches, Chief Khalsa Diwan, the National Geographic Society, and the Girl Scouts of America.

Yes, with a client list like that, Cosgrove and Stewart must be involved in something well and truly esoteric; and, indeed, what the bindery does for a living is taking various Blasphemous Tomes of Forbidden Lore, and rendering them occultly inert.  It is said that a C&S crash team can field-strip an Infernal Grimoire in less than forty minutes, using nothing more than a red marker and a couple of thumbtacks; it’s certainly true that what the company doesn’t know about neutralizing evil books isn’t worth knowing anyway.  And Cosgrove and Stewart’s employees are very, very enthusiastic about their work, too. They don’t cut corners — and don’t take chances, either. If they can’t neutralize a particular book, they’ll go ahead and destroy it with nary a qualm.

 

This gives Cosgrove and Stewart a somewhat mixed reputation in their rather specialized field.  On the one hand, they’re not exactly well-suited for assessing the dangers of powerful, but possibly morally neutral, magical books; and their default attitude is very much ‘when in doubt, burn it.’  On the other hand, when you need a Blasphemous Tome disabled or (preferably) flat-out destroyed Cosgrove and Stewart is just the firm to do it. The Necronomicon does not exist in the Cosgrove and Stewart universe — but the works of HP Lovecraft do, and the people who run the company often wonder how they’d face off against cosmic horror tomes like those.

 

Probably badly, of course.  But for anything less bleakly nihilistic than those particular Forbidden Books, Cosgrove and Stewart’s the place to go.  And their prices reflect that, too.