I was thinking about Gerry earlier (like you do) and especially about the scenes where we see him interacting with Leitners. He's pretty unique among TMA characters in that - while he spends more time around these books than almost anyone else - we rarely see him get affected by them in any meaningful way. You could argue that he's just careful and knows how to handle them, but...
GERRY: Can I use your wastepaper bin?
GERTRUDE: Yes, it’s just– Wait. Surely you didn’t bring it here!
GERRY: Well, yeah, I, uh –
GERTRUDE: Gerard, we’ve talked about this. Bringing unvetted artefacts or books into the Archive is incredibly dangerous.
GERRY: It’s locked away!
...Gertrude, at least, would argue that he's not really very careful at all.
But he is one other thing, that basically no one else is when it comes to Leitners:
Unafraid.
Gerry doesn't give a shit about how dangerous these books are. He's cautious enough, he knows how much trouble they can cause, but he's been hunting them for practically his whole life and they don't really scare him that much anymore. Compared to Gertrude here, he's downright blasé about the threat they pose.
And because he's not scared of them, these books that thrive off of people's fear can't really hurt him much, after all.
This is not a big paradigm-shifting analysis of the show, but it does make me wish even more that he and Georgie had gotten a chance to meet.
