Up, coffee, tofu, e-mail, cook lunch, read book about world with no people, bicycle to work in the rain, make rude gesture at driver who runs stop sign at cross street, data entry, knit, drink hot chocolate, data entry, eat lunch, read book about emotionally confused people, shuffle papers, knit, shuffle papers, data entry, bicycle [...]
Cataloguing one’s home library has its good points. Entering in ISBNs and publication information is a wonderful way to devour time. One also gets a chance really to look at one’s books; one so seldom has the opportunity. One buys the book, sometimes one even reads it,* and then it goes on the shelf, jumbled [...]
books, libraries, and necromancy
Relics of the book trade; but see also a more impressive collection.
O. W. Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast Table:
Joyce Kilmer, Trees and Other Poems:
ibidem
H. W. Auden, Greek Prose Phrase-Book:
A. Kiesling, ed. Seneca Rhetor:
Newton & Treat, Outline for Review: Roman History:
Lord Houghton, Life and Letters of John Keats:
Charles E. Bennett, Latin Composition:
R. C. Seaton, ed. [...]
from the Cowley Image Archive
All was sunshine and flowers until the library delivered the wrong book for an interlibrary loan. I don’t care what the critics say, Allen Mandelbaum is no Gavin Douglas.*
* Brief critical introduction to and biography of Douglas. He also has the dubious honor of being somewhere commended by Ezra Pound.
To my great embarrassment, I mistook this overview of William Blades’s Enemies of Books (via) for a poem1; e.g.:
Bagford the biblioclast.
Illustrations torn from MSS.
Title-pages torn from books.
Rubens, his engraved titles.
Colophons torn out of books.
Lincoln Cathedral
Dr. Dibdin’s Nosegay.
Theurdanck.
Fragments of MSS.
Some libraries almost useless.
[...]
The care that should be taken of books.
Enjoyment derived from them.
Incidentally, I am still [...]
I call that day good in which I may spend the morning in bed reading Aubrey’s Brief Lives (cf.) and Cornelius Nepos.((A translation is available, too. Incidentally, I sometimes think that if I could choose to meet anyone in history for a cup of coffee or something, I would choose Atticus — but one can [...]
Williston Library
Carrel-choosing at the Library — it seems to be one of the social events of the early fall semester… (Yours truly now the proud resident of of carrel no. 502 — fifth floor, by the window, one shelf away from Greek & Latin poetry, twenty-seven paces from Stendhal.) Up very late reading again.
Ineffably charming, oozing good humor & politic attention; I listen & ask questions—then run to the library and hide among my friends, their dusty spines bristling at imagined indignities.
More and still more work in the library, reading about god and trying to comprehend Epidauros, which just leaves me muddled. I find it frightfully confusing that there were at least four different (?) artists called Polykleitos working in the Greek world during the late fifth and early fourth centuries BC; it just shouldn’t be [...]
Friday. Morning in various libraries, reading about the second sohpistic. The
Bod LRR is shut from tomorrow until October, which saddens me a great deal: my last two weeks in England spent without access to its darkened portraits and harried classicists. Still, there are other libraries available, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain. I’ve gotten into [...]
::
ego hoc feci mm–mmviii
© 2000–8 M.F.C.