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"What is it?" Crowley asked, fascinated, hitching his toga up over his shoulder.
"It's a book," Aziraphale said, grinning proudly and shoving it at him. "Isn't it clever?"
"It's so neat," Crowley said, lifting the book in one hand. "Did you give them the idea?"
"No," Aziraphale said, "they came up with it all by themselves." He smiled as happily as a doting new father presented with a fat and gurgling baby.
"Much handier than scrolls," Crowley said, looking about him at the scrolls heaped on Aziraphale's table, filed on shelves on the back wall and held open with weights on the angel's reading desk. "But do you think it'll really catch on?"
"I believe so," Aziraphale said with just the slightest edge of malice in his voice. "The people involved have a certain . . . incentive. Have a look inside."
Crowley curiously opened the book and read a couple of lines before dropping it as if it were a particularly unpleasant dog turd he had suddenly found in his hand.
"Ugh! You might have warned a fellow, angel."
He wiped his hands compulsively on a corner of his toga, shivering. Aziraphale smiled cheerfully, feeling that he had perhaps been a little mean to the poor chap, but it felt remarkably pleasant to see the yellow eyes widen in reflexive fear. It wasn't a result Aziraphale got all that often. Still, he thought, love your enemies and all that. Poor Crowley was looking a bit pale and miserable as he stared down at the book.
"Why don't we have a drink, and you can tell me all about your latest schemes?" he said cheerfully.
Crowley perked up at that, and Aziraphale ushered him away to the garden, where they sat happily, drinking the very good wine that Aziraphale always made sure he had at least three amphorae of. Soon they had quite forgotten advances in the technology of literacy, and were giggling over the outrageous things humans did when they thought no one was watching.
The book lay on Aziraphale's table, still open to the passage Crowley had read.
And while they were there, the time came for her to be delivered. And she gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.