Berlioz and Saint-Saëns

The Philadelphia Orchestra is starting up again after the summer break, and once again I’m glad to be part of the eZseatU program ($25 for a full year of free concerts). My first experience with Berlioz was to see Faust, which was good but I hadn’t been so enthralled that I went out and got [...]

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Really Big Manuscripts

Probably not going to be a reality show at any point, but there are a lot of Really Big Manuscripts out there which one normally doesn’t get to see. One notorious breed of super huge manuscripts are what my coworker refers to as “Filzas,” or large books of Italian accounts and legal documents from the [...]

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Vernon, NJ

I took a vacation for about 10 days in northern New Jersey, in a small town called Vernon.
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I was charged with caring for: two rats, three cats, a small pond of fish, a deer and her two fauns, two squirrels, and two finches. Located in the middle of the mountains, it rained once [...]

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Macabre Manuscripts

One of my projects this summer was to examine some “hybrid books” (a printed book with some manuscript – handwritten – sections) and describe the manuscript portions. Most/all of these can’t even be found in any kind of online catalog, only in the card catalog in the Rare Book room, and even they will only [...]

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New semester

I see that I have inadvertently taken a summer vacation from the blog. My apologies, classes got the best of me and then I moved to a new place around Society Hill and have spent the rest of the summer reading and catsitting in exotic locales (like New Jersey).
I did, however, get to deal with [...]

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