Lists

A visit to the famous Di Bruno Bros. (mostly just to drool over their cheese selection) left the roommate and I with some nice Brie and sparkling lemonade (we know how to live it up). I made some french fries from the potatoes I got at one of the local farmer’s markets, and we had [...]

Read Full Post »

Destructive Art

On many of the older manuscripts I work with (13th, 14th century), there’s a certain kind of paper and certain kind of ink that one sees frequently, especially in legal or royal documents. The paper seems thinner, browner, and more brittle than usual, but what makes this particular combination unique is the ink. I don’t [...]

Read Full Post »

Counting

Although I finished organizing the Inquisition documents (I’m sure they’d be exciting if one read them fully, but sorting a few boxes of civil suits and cases, no matter the subject, is a little dull), I’m on to bigger and weightier collections. Since I don’t know Italian and the collection is immense, I’m just organizing [...]

Read Full Post »

Relaxation

This weekend brought the end to our towering pile of cardboard, and with the presence of a new sofa, the apartment looks like an apartment at last. My roommate and I celebrated by watching Blackadder by candlelight. Here you can faintly see our Household God (a wooden rabbit statue) dimly illuminated by our sacrificial candlelight:

Read Full Post »

Everyone’s got something to say

Yesterday was the second time I have ever seen hail. The first time, when I was about 10 years old, it scared my cat (aptly named Dewey Decimal) so much he’s been terrified of thunderstorms ever since. My father saved the hail (quarter-sized) in a tupperware container, maybe even for over a year, until my [...]

Read Full Post »

Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Since we’ve run out of computers to use, for the next couple of weeks I’ll be organizing a collection of about 200 documents of various shapes and sizes that all deal with the Spanish Inquisition, from about 1500-1825. This sounds fantastic except for the fact that I don’t quite know Spanish… however, from a quick [...]

Read Full Post »

Vellum

While I, just like any other person, find holding a bunch of vellum leaves to be aesthetically pleasing, the faint scent of rotting animal that can hang around them puts me right off (and also brings me back to my middle school art room, where an animal died behind the wall and for weeks the [...]

Read Full Post »

Alicia in Terra Mirabilis

I have never felt as if I were in a Lewis Carroll novel so much as I do in the stacks of my workplace library. As I am always forgetting to bring a camera here, a verbal description will have to suffice. The building is about as long as a city block, and when you [...]

Read Full Post »

The Eden in Sweden

Part of the collection I’m working on (the previously mentioned one with the magical alphabets) includes some work from the scientist, writer, and professor Olaus Rudbeck. While one of the pioneers of the lymphatic system, Rudbeck wrote a very interesting work called Atlantica, or Atland Eller Manheim. The 3,000 page work, which spanned four volumes, [...]

Read Full Post »

Library Scents

It seems that other people have noticed book scents, and some have decided to capitalize upon the idea:
Presenting the perfume scent “In the Library.” As the website tells you, the perfume smells like “English Novel taken from a Signed First Edition of [...]

Read Full Post »