Just one more book

I’ve just tracked down one of those rooms I said I loved (here): it belongs to Prof. Richard A. Macksey, at Johns Hopkins. The library comprises over 70,000 volumes. That’s rather a lot. Here’s a video, with shots of his beautiful library. I particularly like all the lovely Windsor chairs.

For the Birds

I must be.

Keep an eye out for the next post, which will be a very exciting affair altogether.

Worse than Selfridges

Yet again, I find myself in the terrorising elbow-patched bruise-fest that is the Cambridge University Press booksale and let me tell you, it’s been worth every dig. I’ve stopped being polite at these things: I used to be ‘Oh I’m sorry, I couldn't just squeeze past you there?’, while they politely ignored me. Now I just shove past and thrust my hand towards shelves, and anyone in my way takes their chances. During a particularly brutal crush, one girl turned to me and said: ‘It’s worse than the Selfridges Sale’. I agreed, though I’ve never been to a Selfridges sale. It must be awful though. But I doubt you see a certain member of the royal family getting stuck in like the rest of them. So I feel this sale experience has a certain amount of class. The worst is when one of the assistants brings out fresh boxes and there is a flurry of activity where everyone present jostles for the best position to see them come out of the box. There’s an awkward moment where people realise that they cannot actually put their hands into the box while she’s trying to empty it, but you can see that everyone wants to do that. As soon as they are put on the shelf, hands begin to desperately reach for whatever is placed there. It’s all wonderfully primitive and surely mitigates all the civilising influence of books. Imaging acting like a vulture over the The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music, and yet, that is just what it’s like.

Despite all this, dear readers, I’ve managed a lovely little haul and am delighted with myself. I now look a bit like Karl standing on my coffee table and looking around, ever so slightly mad. Sadly I don't have quite the space he does for books. It’ll run for another couple of weeks and I’ll probably only get a few more visits. Unless I see Cornish’s wonderful new book on volgarizzamenti, then I think I've done for this year. Now joining the crazy world of me are:

Kowaleski & Goldberg (eds), Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing and Household in Medieval England; Farrell & Puppa (eds), A History of Italian Theatre; G.H. & E.R. Crichton, Nicola Pisano and the Revival of Sculpture in Italy [1938]; D. M. Bueno de Mesquita, Giangaleazzo Visconti Duke of Milan (1351-1402): A Study in the Political Career of an Italian Despot [1941]; C.S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper [1980]; J. M. Hastings, St Stephen’s Church: An Illustrated Study of the Origins of ‘Perpendicular’ Architecture in England [1955]; Maiden, Smith & Ledgeway (eds); The Cambridge History of The Romance Languages, vol. 1; Cook, Enigmas and Riddles in Literature; Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare; Keith, Engendering Rome: Women in Latin Epic; Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England: Passports to Paradise?; Yeager, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative; Kuehn, Heirs, Kin, and Creditors in Renaissance Florence; Ricketts, Visualizing Boccaccio: Studies on Illustrations of The Decameron, from Giotto to Pasolini; Payne, The Architectural Treatse in the Italian Renaissance; Lillie, Florentine Villas in the Fifteenth Century; Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism; Matthews (ed), The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Synge; Najemy (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli; Ferris (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin; Everist (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music; McAuliffe (ed), The Cambridge Companion to the Qur'an; Brand, Italy and the English Romantics; Hardie, The Epic Successors of Virgil; Martindale (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Virgil; Gowing, Empire and Memory: The Representation of the Roman Republic in Imperial Culture; Dover (ed), Plato: Symposium; Kenney (ed), Ovid: Heroides XVI-XXI; Hinds, Allusion and Intertext; Moule, An Idiom Book of New Testament Greek; Logan (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More; Tacconi, Cathedral and Civic Ritual in Late Medieval and Renaissance Florence: The Service Books of Santa Maria del Fiore; Kelley, Reinventing Allegory; Parker, Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing.

Not in the CUP sale, but picked up in the Heffers sale were: Wolfthal, In and Out of the Marital Bed: Seeing Sex in Renaissance Art (Yale, 2010) and Andrew Cole & D. Vance Smith (eds), The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory (Duke, 2010); while in Oxfam I found a lovely copy of D.F. McKenzie’s Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts in the lovely Panizzi series published by the BL in 1986. I’ve also been very fortunate in finding a copy of Gerhard Rohlfs, Grammatica storica della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti, 3 vols (Einaudi, 1966-1969), which I’m really delighted to have.

Welcome, my pretties, one and all!

I Want It, I Want It, I Want It, I Want It!

In 2005 appeared two volumes of the Enciclopedia fridericiana (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, Treccani), ed. by Girolamo Arnaldi, Ortensio Zecchino, Arnold Esch, Antonio Menniti Ippolito, Alberto Varvaro and Cosimo Damiano Fonseca. In 2008 a third volume was added, on the work of Frederick himself. It is a massive, gorgeous, vast project, produced in the wake of the the anniversary celebrations of his birth, in 1194. Compelling, complex, learned, Frederick was dubbed by a contemporary chronicler stupor mundi. Leafing through the pages of these three volumes makes for not a little stupor at its breath and its beauty.

I want this. What can I say? God I want this SO much. And now, an Italian bookseller has the three volumes on eBay for €1,500. That sounds a lot and I know what you're thinking: don’t be insane. Indeed. But I still want this! I really want this. I cannot, of course, allow myself to even consider it. But know this: when it sells, as I’m sure it will, I shall look back upon this very moment filled with regret. And it will not go away.

So if you have €1,500 and you like the Middle Ages, then you could do a lot worse than to acquire this. If, in addition to the money and a love of the Middle Ages, you have a huge and generous heart, why don’t you buy it for me! I know you won’t though. I know that.

I’d like to go and have a little cry now.

Like this:

Books, and What to Do with Them, #2

This is the Casa Kike, in Costa Rica, designed by architect Gianni Botsford for his father and his 16,000 books. It won the RIBA’s Lubetkin Prize in 2008, and the RIBA International Award Winner 2008. I think you’ll agree that it is a very striking house. I am in love with how the books have been included as co-occupant of the house, almost built around them.

This (and photos and drawings) from Botsford’s website:

By coupling indigenous techniques and materials with modern design technologies and aesthetics GBA has created this intimate double pavilion for a writer in Costa Rica.

A main studio space, with library, writing desk and grand piano, is the writer’s daytime space. The pavilion’s wooden structure, sourced from local timber, sits on a simple foundation of wooden stilts on small concrete pad foundations. Roof beams of up to 10 m long and 355 mm deep allow for an interior with no vertical columns. The mono-pitched roof elevates towards the sea shore, while the interior is through ventilated via a completely louvred glazed end façade.

Set at a short distance along a raised walkway, a second smaller pavilion mirrors the first. This contains sleeping quarters and a bathroom. Externally, the pavilions are clad in corrugated steel sheeting, another locally used construction material. The overall effect is that of a building which blends with its surroundings, both visually and environmentally.

Photographs © Christian Richters

Books, and What to Do with Them

I am a simple man with simple taste. The worst part of my taste is that it is so good, resulting in me constantly having to do without what those tastes demand. Some years ago I was at a meeting with a medievalist in Oxford. While in her rooms I noticed a rather nice book caddy in perspex set on castors. She told me that she had bought it in Habitat and set me off on a quête worthy of a medieval knight. Now mostly when I visit scholars in their place of work I’m more distracted by what is on the shelves rather than the shelves themselves. I don’t often suffer from shelf envy; that happens much more often with books. But this was a bit different. It was one of a series of limited edition pieces that Habitat, in 2004, had commissioned from various celebs to celebrate 40 years in business. The book caddy was designed by Louis de Bernières, intended to hold those books used very often, like a thesaurus or a dictionary, and to save having to get up from one’s desk. From time to time (which means, eh...daily) I look on Ebay and generally online to see if one might appear for sale and it never does. It would seem that when they said limited edition, they meant it. As Habitat goes into administration, and its future is uncertain, my mind turns once again to this lovely book caddy and I wonder will one ever appear. I know exactly what I would put on these shelves too, my copy of the Commedia (Petrocchi, Repr. corr. edn. 1994 [4 vols]), the Rime (De Robertis, 2002 [5 vols]), the Convivio (Brambilla Ageno, 1995 [3 vols]) and the Monarchia (Shaw, 2009 [1 vol]) in the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Dante (Firenze: Le Lettere), and my Enciclopedia Dantesca (ed. Umberto Bosco, 1970–8 [6 vols]).

I did spot one in Lady Antonia Fraser’s study, though not while we were having tea and talking about literature and scented candles. Rather, it was while I was having tea with myself and reading the Guardian’s wonderful online (though now sadly discontinued) Writer’s Rooms series, photographed by Eamonn McCabe.

There must be something wrong with me that while I admire the lovely bookcases, the gorgeous desk and elegant room, I cannot really keep my eyes of that little book caddy.