😭

Coming home from the book fair feels like waking up from a weird dream. Grateful to be back with my family, comfy couches, and floors that don’t feel like they are physically attacking me

'It's a lost map!' 'Where did you find it?' 'In the Map Drawer, in the Map Room of the Map Library'. OH is seriously thinking about doing a talk on data and discovery entitled 'why we keep biscuits in the biscuit tin'. Seems appropriate.

Heart is full, bags emptier, feet in pain

Stochastic Book Fair

I love books and I love looking at them with people. That’s the skeet.

My “book fair opening night” earrings are giant gold mandrake roots. Every time, at least three people ask me if they are turnips. It’s ok; I also like turnips 🫜

I splurged for the Acela to Boston (I’m trying to keep my Amtrak select status) and immediately remembered why I hate the Acela

Increasingly the Venn diagram of my intellectual interests & commitments—digital humanities, book history/bibliography, book arts, critical making—perhaps meet in the region "Luddite Humanities" Not technological rejection—but slower, deliberate, critical, historicized engagement with technology

Granted, the purpose of Black Studies is not to become an arm of the state. But it is a discipline that was designed to support the transformation of our world. Politics - in and beyond government offices - are a part of that.

Black Studies and Black History will teach you how to imagine a very different world even when the deck is stacked against you and there’s no light in the tunnel.

Yet again, I have uncovered at the most inconvenient possible moment that new scholarship indicates that the book in my hands is a previously unknown second edition (rather than a first/only incunable edition). WHOOPS.

A good day to be a native Virginia, former New Yorker, and current Pennsylvanian 🥹

i can’t believe a good thing happened we should do this more often

Well well well

This article is one of the more wonderful things I have ever read on Plato www.bostonreview.net/articles/pla...

Great example. I’ve often heard people say they believe medieval people discouraged or punished female literacy, whereas Mary is usually shown reading during the Annunciation, so every medieval person constantly saw images of the #1 female role model reading. The anti-learning Middle Ages is a myth.

Someone sent around Ian Jackson’s article Bibliophile Cutthroat Gangsterism recently (a piece I’ve assigned and taught several times) and the office is a bit teary eyed. I never got to meet him (that posthumous article being my intro to his work) but he was well beloved here.

Dried beans cooked in broth with bay leaves, some onion, celery, garlic, whatever you got. Roast broccoli. Put it all in a bowl with some lemon and Parmesan cheese.

AnaÏs Nin ran a treadle-press in the 40s and there's this wonderful quotation of hers I printed recently.

In other words, Aristotle can go fuck himself

autumn celebrity

We are so proud of this recording. And here’s another lovely review, this time by @earlymusicamerica.bsky.social www.earlymusicamerica.org/web-articles...

Mary Magdalene was being penitent and then... she just fell asleep. It happens to the best of us! Here depicted by Hendrick ter Brugghen, whose day was today.

‘I try to make them feel as ignorant as possible’: German museum’s ‘grumpy guide’ is surprise hit

This Halloween season has left me with the insight that we should bring veils back as regular fashion accessories.

If transitory things, which soon decay, Age must be loveliest at the latest day. (Donne, ‘The Autumnal’)

Among my many takeaways from binding class this summer is that sheep is a much more common binding cover than I had thought—and many sheep bindings are erroneously described as calf. But my approach now is that if I think it might be sheep, it probably is.

Happy #Halloween! This Roman miniature skeleton with flexible joints, jumps and dances when shaken. The Romans called these skeletons larva convivalis, meaning banquet ghost, and were handed out to guests at dinner parties to remind them to have fun while they were alive.

Going to grab one and wear it at the book fair…

Choreomania at the Mutter Museum ☺️ happy Halloween 🎃

Amazon is helping fund a $300 million build of a ballroom for the White House. Independent bookstores are donating to food banks and organizations that help with food insecurity. They are not the same.

Reading Hoffmann’s The Sandman aloud with a large group in a darkened fake Dutch pub, lit only by LED candles and a flashlight, was a wonderful experience. I think everyone left with a lot to think about what we can actually get from automata & the people who peddle them!

Solidarity with BL workers on strike

I suspect a book fair we are exhibiting with for the first time next month has used ChatGPT to generate (vaguely inaccurate) descriptive text about our business for social media and I am about to lose my fucking mind at them

Venturing to NYC dressed as a ballerina, laden with Halloween goodies, props, and Tales From Hoffmann on vinyl. Will return in 12 hours laden with rare books.

Halloween is a ritualized performance of abundance, redistribution, and communal identity formation practiced by neighborly love. It’s also about skeletons.

Do you associate martinis with a particular season? I’ve just realized I haven’t made one in ages… because to me they are for the cold weather season. But now I’m ready!

Gorgeous gourds, from 1552.

Overheard in the office: “pricing books is like trying on socks” ???? Lmao

Yes everything is awful. But I try to keep my spirits up. Who is coming with me?

Back in the late twelfth century Al-Baghdadi saw your post about how ancient aliens built the pyramids and is embarrassed for you.

“Who was president in 2020?” the hardest question in American political commentary, turns out to be just a specific instance of the true hardest question, which is “Are there events?”

More than once I’ve had a convo with someone about some fraught topic like history of witchcraft or spurious “pagan origin” stories where, when faced with evidence against their beliefs, they basically respond “well it seems like it could be true so it may as well be.” It freaks me out.

A hard truth is that the search for artificial general intelligence as a commercial tool is fundamentally a reproduction of slavery. Not because computers are people or anything so silly, but because of the impetus: To acquire the products of humanity without the need for a human to consent.

If my favorite novelists are Umberto Eco, Iris Murdoch, and Mary McCarthy—what should I read next??

After I went to cheese school, I was inspired to join the Jasper Hill cheese club. The withersbrook blue cheese on pretzel crackers they sent us this month are truly a match made in nirvana. I’m ascending.

Thinking a lot today about my immigrant and refugee neighbors who have experienced unspeakable horrors before getting here and are now having horrors visited upon them. God forgive us

I’m making a ras el hanout chickpea stew rn but just had the idea to make a middle eastern inspired chili with lamb, chickpeas, and harissa paste… then also the idea to try to make as many different cuisine versions of chili as I can imagine