Once upon a time there was a Spanish chaplain …Capellanus quidam hyspanus …Which seems a good place to remember a trip to Spain about a month ago. I spent a week at the Biblioteca Nacional de España, looking at thirteenth-century Spanish manuscripts, most of them dated, no less! Here I am, trying to apply to […]
Well, it’s not coffee . . .
OK, so the Parisian intellectuals drank coffee; what was a poor English couple in the 1500s to choose? Beer, obviously. Word problem here; the booklet consists entirely of word problems. It’s a wonderful little object, only measuring about four inches wide and not quite three inches tall. It turns out that the souse is the […]
A book lost and found; a friend retained; a sonnet to say it all
The past days witnessed a tussle with a friend who had borrowed a book of mine, and was quite convinced that she had given it back to me; I surely did not think so, was getting a bit irritated with her: “she does this sort of thing all the time”—accusatory thoughts running through my mind. […]
So new we don’t even have a picture
I left last Thursday afternoon for Philadelphia to attend “The Hybrid Book: Intersection and Intermedia,” a book fair and conference about “the book as a hybrid art form and book arts as multi-disciplinary.” It was pretty intense; particularly, for me, two dense afternoons working through over seventy tables of artist’s books. In many ways, this […]
Congratulations, graduates!
Tomorrow is graduation day here at Columbia; floors are polished in the library, flowers are planted outdoors, and already the proud participants in light blue caps and gowns (with yet prouder parents) are thronging the campus. All very festive and fancy. The soon-to-be-delivered diplomas, though, don’t hold a candle to those of Renaissance Italy. The […]