Paper, Church, Library
This recent for-sale ad caught my eye for some reason; it read: Sale of second-hand stock of philosophy books and related subjects, ca. 18,500 books. The stock is on offer as one lot, inclusive of shelving (optional). So I read that and thought who on earth collects (and attempts to sell) so many books? As it turns out, quite a number of folks. Then came this: Fast-forward to the fourteenth century and the Catholic church was again in trouble. Between 1378 and 1417, first two and then three concurrent popes claimed authority over western Christendom. Each contender maintained his own Sacred College of Cardinals, and his own administrators and offices. The causes of the split were political rather than theological. The followers of the rival popes were divided, in large part, along geographical lines...in 1414 a general council of the church convened in Constance with a view to mending the schism. The council was a logisitical exercise with few precedents. Apart from 30,000 horses and 700 prostitutes plus scores of jugglers, more than 20,000 cardinals, abbots, monks, friars, and priests converged on the Swiss town. The council lasted four and a half years, and ultimately succeeded in obtaining the resignation of the Roman pope, Gregory XII; dismissing the Avignon pope, Benedict XIII; neutralizing the Pisan pope, John XXIII; and, in November 1417, electing Martin V as the sole pope. Who knew?
All of that (minus the for-sale ad) emerged from Stuart Kells massively-researched book simply titled, The Library. As the author notes on his publisher's page: Libraries are romantic, melancholy places. I wanted to write a book that was built around elemental, human themes. I sketched a draft outline that looked like the tracks on a Cure album: Love, Sex, Theft, Fire, Death. I’m fascinated by stories of people living, sleeping, dying with their books. And by library secrets, controversial libraries, dangerous libraries. My ambition was to change how people thought about libraries and their importance. For people who’d fallen out of love with their libraries, I wanted to give them a nudge, an excuse to reconnect. So there I was, at the library, and started to browse through his book; how interesting could it be? And yet, there it was, Alexandria, papyrus (notoriously bad at retaining ink and possibly the cause of that great library's loss of what was estimated to be nearly 500,000 manuscripts from throughout the known world at the time), parchment and vellum, not the mention something that we now take for granted, paper. Even the process of codices and bindings and cataloguing. So, if you're not quite interested try this: In pre-modern times, lapis lazuli came from as far away as Afghanistan, while purple ink was derived from the glands of Mediterranean snails. About one and a half grams of the dye cost 12,000 snails their lives...Parchment is made by washing and stretching a split (animal) skin and rubbing it smooth. A single flawless sheep yields one folio sheet. As Lewis Buzbee noted in The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, twenty skins might be needed to make a small book, "but you could eat the leftovers. And yes, that's why a diploma is called a sheepskin." In the year 1000 C.E., an average-sized book consumed the skins of dozens, even hundreds of animals. A 1,000-page Bible, for example, needed 250 sheep. In Curiosities of Literature, Isaac D'israeli marveled that the volumes written by Zoroaster, entitled The Similitude, were said to have taken up the space of 1.260 cattle hides. The largest surviving medieval manuscript, the Codex Gigas of Devil's Bible, is thought to have been made from the skins of 160 donkeys...Vellum, the most deluxe and tragic form of parchment --made from the skin of bovine fetuses-- is smooth, white, and highly workable...also highly durable. What about paper, you ask? Back in those days, the making of paper was known only to the Chinese and they successfully kept the process secret for over 700 years (paper didn't come to the outside world until 1085 C.E. when the Muslim world brought it to Spain; France followed a hundred years later, then Italy a hundred years after that, then Britain only introducing its own paper mill some 75 years after that!...a long 400 year sloth for paper making to catch on).
So why would such simple things be so fascinating to me? I think it's because it continues to remind me not to take the everyday for granted. We wake up and have our coffee or tea and a bite to eat, we stream a movie or a song, we start the car or jump on a bike, we process the day without thinking about how. In a series of lectures on the brain, Professor John J. Medina talks of people whose brains operate only in still pictures, or can identify everything normally except animals, or cannot remember anything that happened more than 30 seconds ago, or for the rest of us the delicacy of our cells, the longest of which stretches from our feet to the base of our spine (one cell!). The human entrance or participation in this world of ours, while seeming so massive, is evolution in action. Take this struggle to find our way in reading (again from Kell's book): Cuneiform was written and read left to right; Arabic right to left; Chinese top to bottom; and ancient Greek, for a time, back and forth...like plowing a field...(Lemuel Gulliver documented the manner of writing...in the land of the Lilliput -- "aslant, from one corner of the paper to the other...").
Dogs for the most part are lactose intolerant (so stop with the cheese already), and just two macadamia nuts (per pound of body weight) can poison them (grapes, onions, garlic and leeks are all really bad for them as well...look it up). What about this one...a study of 293 water bottles (U.S. and 8 other countries) found small plastic particles in 93% of them said a recent study. Or this...forget heroin and other opioids; the next addictive killer drug might be paco, a residue mixed with "kerosene, industrial colvents, or even rat poison" and one that has plagued Argentina for close to 20 years. Aghh...enough depressing stuff, you say. So what about these? The largest mass migration recently discovered might just be...insects; over a 10-year study, it was found that their body mass overall is more than 7 times that of birds migrating, said Science News. And the end of animal testing, at least on eyes for cosmetics, might be around the corner as a new more effective method was found using...protozoa, something National Geographic reported: ...the cheap and abundant single-celled organisms may have enough genes in common with humans to make them good trial subjects. Or that kelp, sometimes called "sea vegetables," are proving especially effective at capturing carbon dioxide (China has already begun to "farm" kelp, adding to those long run in Japan and Korea); kelp grows in both warm and cold ocean waters.
The point of all that random stuff thrown in above is that there is much to discover in the everyday, to be surprised when you sit and talk with a person you've known "forever" and hear he/she tell someone something and you stare quizzically and say, "I never knew that about you." It's discovery, it's finding the new and it's all around us and constantly happening. Laurie Anderson told of her recently-passed husband: The day before he died, we were out swimming in the pool. Looking at the trees. And he was floating and saying: "You know, I am just so susceptible to beauty." I think of that every day. How to open yourself to the world. And really appreciate it. A good friend of mine described himself as forward looking, as not settling for "this is it;" and in doing so he told me of a email going around about a man turning 70 and excitedly planning out his next 20 years, all the things he not only wanted to do, but planned to do. Travel the world, see and meet other people, gaze in wonder at the stars, hug a cat nightly. Thinking that way is exciting; and finding that path might be as simple as changing your thought pattern...maybe even as simple as discovering something new at the library.
All of that (minus the for-sale ad) emerged from Stuart Kells massively-researched book simply titled, The Library. As the author notes on his publisher's page: Libraries are romantic, melancholy places. I wanted to write a book that was built around elemental, human themes. I sketched a draft outline that looked like the tracks on a Cure album: Love, Sex, Theft, Fire, Death. I’m fascinated by stories of people living, sleeping, dying with their books. And by library secrets, controversial libraries, dangerous libraries. My ambition was to change how people thought about libraries and their importance. For people who’d fallen out of love with their libraries, I wanted to give them a nudge, an excuse to reconnect. So there I was, at the library, and started to browse through his book; how interesting could it be? And yet, there it was, Alexandria, papyrus (notoriously bad at retaining ink and possibly the cause of that great library's loss of what was estimated to be nearly 500,000 manuscripts from throughout the known world at the time), parchment and vellum, not the mention something that we now take for granted, paper. Even the process of codices and bindings and cataloguing. So, if you're not quite interested try this: In pre-modern times, lapis lazuli came from as far away as Afghanistan, while purple ink was derived from the glands of Mediterranean snails. About one and a half grams of the dye cost 12,000 snails their lives...Parchment is made by washing and stretching a split (animal) skin and rubbing it smooth. A single flawless sheep yields one folio sheet. As Lewis Buzbee noted in The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, twenty skins might be needed to make a small book, "but you could eat the leftovers. And yes, that's why a diploma is called a sheepskin." In the year 1000 C.E., an average-sized book consumed the skins of dozens, even hundreds of animals. A 1,000-page Bible, for example, needed 250 sheep. In Curiosities of Literature, Isaac D'israeli marveled that the volumes written by Zoroaster, entitled The Similitude, were said to have taken up the space of 1.260 cattle hides. The largest surviving medieval manuscript, the Codex Gigas of Devil's Bible, is thought to have been made from the skins of 160 donkeys...Vellum, the most deluxe and tragic form of parchment --made from the skin of bovine fetuses-- is smooth, white, and highly workable...also highly durable. What about paper, you ask? Back in those days, the making of paper was known only to the Chinese and they successfully kept the process secret for over 700 years (paper didn't come to the outside world until 1085 C.E. when the Muslim world brought it to Spain; France followed a hundred years later, then Italy a hundred years after that, then Britain only introducing its own paper mill some 75 years after that!...a long 400 year sloth for paper making to catch on).
So why would such simple things be so fascinating to me? I think it's because it continues to remind me not to take the everyday for granted. We wake up and have our coffee or tea and a bite to eat, we stream a movie or a song, we start the car or jump on a bike, we process the day without thinking about how. In a series of lectures on the brain, Professor John J. Medina talks of people whose brains operate only in still pictures, or can identify everything normally except animals, or cannot remember anything that happened more than 30 seconds ago, or for the rest of us the delicacy of our cells, the longest of which stretches from our feet to the base of our spine (one cell!). The human entrance or participation in this world of ours, while seeming so massive, is evolution in action. Take this struggle to find our way in reading (again from Kell's book): Cuneiform was written and read left to right; Arabic right to left; Chinese top to bottom; and ancient Greek, for a time, back and forth...like plowing a field...(Lemuel Gulliver documented the manner of writing...in the land of the Lilliput -- "aslant, from one corner of the paper to the other...").
Dogs for the most part are lactose intolerant (so stop with the cheese already), and just two macadamia nuts (per pound of body weight) can poison them (grapes, onions, garlic and leeks are all really bad for them as well...look it up). What about this one...a study of 293 water bottles (U.S. and 8 other countries) found small plastic particles in 93% of them said a recent study. Or this...forget heroin and other opioids; the next addictive killer drug might be paco, a residue mixed with "kerosene, industrial colvents, or even rat poison" and one that has plagued Argentina for close to 20 years. Aghh...enough depressing stuff, you say. So what about these? The largest mass migration recently discovered might just be...insects; over a 10-year study, it was found that their body mass overall is more than 7 times that of birds migrating, said Science News. And the end of animal testing, at least on eyes for cosmetics, might be around the corner as a new more effective method was found using...protozoa, something National Geographic reported: ...the cheap and abundant single-celled organisms may have enough genes in common with humans to make them good trial subjects. Or that kelp, sometimes called "sea vegetables," are proving especially effective at capturing carbon dioxide (China has already begun to "farm" kelp, adding to those long run in Japan and Korea); kelp grows in both warm and cold ocean waters.
The point of all that random stuff thrown in above is that there is much to discover in the everyday, to be surprised when you sit and talk with a person you've known "forever" and hear he/she tell someone something and you stare quizzically and say, "I never knew that about you." It's discovery, it's finding the new and it's all around us and constantly happening. Laurie Anderson told of her recently-passed husband: The day before he died, we were out swimming in the pool. Looking at the trees. And he was floating and saying: "You know, I am just so susceptible to beauty." I think of that every day. How to open yourself to the world. And really appreciate it. A good friend of mine described himself as forward looking, as not settling for "this is it;" and in doing so he told me of a email going around about a man turning 70 and excitedly planning out his next 20 years, all the things he not only wanted to do, but planned to do. Travel the world, see and meet other people, gaze in wonder at the stars, hug a cat nightly. Thinking that way is exciting; and finding that path might be as simple as changing your thought pattern...maybe even as simple as discovering something new at the library.
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