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kitewithfishThere are days I just really love my job. Honestly and truly love the damned thing.
The Art Library has it's own little section of fragile and special books that don't circulate. Unlike the big Library, the Art Library's special collection is not climate-controled, and does not have a small army of archivists making sure that no one draws in the margins. The books are not as well tended, and they needed some love.
So, today, Awesome!Boss and her three minions, myself included, trundled over to the Art Library to see the damage. And, lo, friends, it was a fine, fine day.
I got to pull out a three hundred year old art book in German that covered design motifs from something like seventeen major world cultures. In color, which is mind boggling with something where each plate had to be done by hand. The expense must have been incredible. There was another book in Latin and Greek written during the time of one of Kings Charles of England, bound in vellum and printed with an insane attention to detail. The ligatures of the book were insane. * There was one for Qu where the tail of the Q swept under the entire length of the u and then joined it at the tail of the u. AND IT WAS IN LATIN AND GREEK. I was in happy book!geek heaven.
Naturally, the conservation facility that keeps the paperbacks of Swelles in decent shape is not equipped to the same standards of upkeep that some of these books need. They are going to be sent somewhere with experts in dealing with these kind of elder statesmen of the literary world. But I get to make boxes for a few of them.
There was another set of little books by Ruth Hayes, far more modern than most of the other really exciting ones, but nevertheless quite cool. They were flipbooks, the kind of thing that you get as a child where a ball rolls across the bottom edge of the page as you turn the pages, but this was gorgeous. "Walking Octopus" was far and away my favorite- the octopus just squirmed across the page- the motion was perfect. Ruth Hayes is apparently online at http://www.randommotion.com/html/flip.html, and has a number of other works online, tho not this one that I saw. I think "Running Octopus" is out of print, sadly. I could have watched that thing for hours.
*For the non-printing-savvy of the crowd, a ligature is a special character in a lead typeset where two or more letters that occur in a row in word are made up of a single piece of metal, rather than several smaller ones holding only one letters. This preserves the spacing of the text, as it allows the two letters to overlap as they normally would if you were just writing them out. Normal typesets in English have several standard ligatures: fi, fl, ffl, and almost any common combination of letters that might follow the letter f, zy and a few others. The ampersand & was originally a ligature of 'et', or the Roman word for 'and'.
The Art Library has it's own little section of fragile and special books that don't circulate. Unlike the big Library, the Art Library's special collection is not climate-controled, and does not have a small army of archivists making sure that no one draws in the margins. The books are not as well tended, and they needed some love.
So, today, Awesome!Boss and her three minions, myself included, trundled over to the Art Library to see the damage. And, lo, friends, it was a fine, fine day.
I got to pull out a three hundred year old art book in German that covered design motifs from something like seventeen major world cultures. In color, which is mind boggling with something where each plate had to be done by hand. The expense must have been incredible. There was another book in Latin and Greek written during the time of one of Kings Charles of England, bound in vellum and printed with an insane attention to detail. The ligatures of the book were insane. * There was one for Qu where the tail of the Q swept under the entire length of the u and then joined it at the tail of the u. AND IT WAS IN LATIN AND GREEK. I was in happy book!geek heaven.
Naturally, the conservation facility that keeps the paperbacks of Swelles in decent shape is not equipped to the same standards of upkeep that some of these books need. They are going to be sent somewhere with experts in dealing with these kind of elder statesmen of the literary world. But I get to make boxes for a few of them.
There was another set of little books by Ruth Hayes, far more modern than most of the other really exciting ones, but nevertheless quite cool. They were flipbooks, the kind of thing that you get as a child where a ball rolls across the bottom edge of the page as you turn the pages, but this was gorgeous. "Walking Octopus" was far and away my favorite- the octopus just squirmed across the page- the motion was perfect. Ruth Hayes is apparently online at http://www.randommotion.com/html/flip.html, and has a number of other works online, tho not this one that I saw. I think "Running Octopus" is out of print, sadly. I could have watched that thing for hours.
*For the non-printing-savvy of the crowd, a ligature is a special character in a lead typeset where two or more letters that occur in a row in word are made up of a single piece of metal, rather than several smaller ones holding only one letters. This preserves the spacing of the text, as it allows the two letters to overlap as they normally would if you were just writing them out. Normal typesets in English have several standard ligatures: fi, fl, ffl, and almost any common combination of letters that might follow the letter f, zy and a few others. The ampersand & was originally a ligature of 'et', or the Roman word for 'and'.
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Date: 2009-07-11 12:46 am (UTC)You should have seen me with the leafs from the Gutenberg bible. The archivist was in stitches me bouncing up and down the room :)
P.S. Do you know if we have any old maps? I'm looking for the ones with pictures of ships and suns in the border. Thanks!