The hidden booklet and interrupted transmission

Meaning

After Sebastian’s reported murder, the narrator finds a hidden small book in the heated room. Twenty-fourmo describes the booklet’s bibliographical format, not twenty-four steps of a process. Handgriff means the practical handling or manipulations transmitted by the book, in contrast to a merely abstract doctrine. The discovery preserves written directions for universal and particular works but not the medicine and tincture, which are missing. That separation of text from possessed substance is central to the narrative’s account of interrupted transmission.