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Example is the best teacher. Moral improvements occurs most reliably when the heart is warmer, when we come into contact with people we admire and love and we consciously and unconsciously bend our lives to mimic theirs.

The Road to Character

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The Book (Part 2)

Gradually, what are now called endpapers evolved into a distinct (and often distinctive) component of the book. Endpapers are any leaves at the front and back of a book that are pasted to the inside of the boards; in some books, such as the St Cuthbert Gospel, there are no more than first and last of the regular leaves in the text block; in others, the text block was arranged so that its first and last gatherings comprised only a single folio each, which then formed the endpapers; and later, as bookmakers sough to streamline their craft, loose endpapers were simply pasted directly to the inside of the boards and their facing pages. Endpapers have always served a practical purpose in anchoring the text block to the cover, and when marbled papers, decorated with swirls of colour, became available in the seventeenth century, they became a way for bookbinders to inject some personality into their products. 

Similarly, the band of coloured thread at the top of a hardback’s spine was a practical feature before it became an ornamental one. In Coptic-bound books, the “headband” was a straightforward affair, made by piercing holes near the top of each gathering and stitching them through the leather of the cover. In some cases, end bands were recessed into notches cut into the text block so they sat flush with the top and bottom of the spine. The most cited reason for the presence of a headband is that it helps protect a book’s spine as it s removed from the shelf. It is a neat explanation but it is misleading. They were, simply, integral parts of a book’s binding, an evolutionary midpoint between the chain stitching of Coptic bindings and the sewn cords of later books that help keep boards, gatherings and leather in one piece. 

Firstly, each of the single sheets in  book, folded in half and attached to the spine, is called a folio, from the latin folium, or leaf. Secondly, the two halves of each folded folio are known as leaves, though for bookbinders, collectors and codiocologists the distinction between “folio” and “leaf” is an old and robust one. Finally, each of the two sides of a leaf is a single page. As a mnemonic, consider that you leaf through a book, turning over leaves as you go, on the way to find a particular page. 

First, he (William Hancock) said, having printed, folded, collated, and trimmed a book’s gatherings, but before they had been sewn together, they were to be locked in a lying press as if ready to be rounded and backed. Next, the spine of the text block was shorn clean off with a plough of guillotine, removing the folds between the pages, and then roughened with sandpaper. Over the course of a day or two, a series of coats of “caoutchouc” or rubber, dissolved in a solution of turpentine, were painted over the spine so that they seeped into the microscopic crevices between the pages and bound the whole thing together as they dried. The spine was finished with a strip of cloth stuck to the final coat of caoutchouc and the completed text block was pasted into a separate cover or case, by its endpapers. This produced books that, in Hancock’s words, open perfectly flat or more nearly so than books bound by any other method. “case-binding” 

Today’s characteristic paperback binding, where a book’s spine is trimmed, roughened, glued and pressed into a single-ply cover, is known as “perfect binding”.

Each row of chain stitches crosses the spine from front board to the back, the thread passing in and out of each gathering in turn, and creating characteristic rows of plaited thread as it goes. In this way, each of the components of the finished book - the front board, each of the gatherings, and the back board - was sewn only to its neighbouring components. The front board was sewn to the first gathering, the first to the second gathering, and so on. The product was a book that opened entirely flat: the stitching between gatherings acted as a flexible hinge, allowing each gathering to be opened without competing against all the others. It was a small innovation but a crucial one, and today this style of binding is called Coptic stitching in honour of the Egyptian Copts who pioneered it between the second and fourth centuries CE. 

Of late, a slanting, graceful variant of roman script had become fashionable among certain scholars, and Manutius directed Griffo to cut a new typeface based on the handwriting of Niccolo de Niccoli, one of the most accomplished practitioners. Aldus’ contemporaries called the new typeface “Aldino” after the printer who pioneered it, but today we call it “italic” after its Italian origins. It was both more flamboyant and more compact than its roman equivalent, and so, apparently unwilling to dilute the impact of this new typeface, Aldus set his Virgil in italics in its entirety, with the sole exception of the Capitals that Introduced Each Line in difference to Niccolo de Niccoli’s preference for doing so. 

Aldus was a ruthless editor. Whether they had been written or printed, Renaissance editions of classical works were invariably suffocated by reams of commentary. Aldus, on the other hand, printed only the unadulterated words of Virgil himself, creating a sparse, clean book whose lack of visual frippery let the content do the talking. There was a single introductory page, then the text itself, and finally a colophon or explanatory note, describing the genesis of the book. Chapters began on new pages and each page was given over entirely to the text at hand. 

Finally in 1995, America’s de facto standards board, the nonprofit American National Standards Institute, ratified the standard 8.5-by-11 inch sheet as the starting point for a hierarchical series of paper sizes, Re-christianed as ANSI A, letter paper is doubled in size to yield ANSI B or ledger paper. doubled again to make ANSI C and so on. It may lack the geometric elegance of Europe’s A series, but the American system is here to stay: the pages of this book are half the size of a sheet of letter paper; its folios are letter paper-sized and the ANSI C octavo quires from which they are folded are four times larger again. 

Colophon - a place for the printer to record the details of the book’s manufacture, the name of its firm; its coat of arms, perhaps; and the place and date of its production. 

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The Book: A cover-to-cover exploration of the most power object of our time

Fittingly, the Mouseion, as their temple was known (we call its successors “museums”), was dedicated to the study of the natural world and the heavens above it. 

Euclid wrote Elements his ground breaking book on mathematics, at the Mouseion; it was there that an astronomer named Aristarchus surmised that the Earth orbited the sun and not the other way around, while his colleague Eratosthenes calculated the diameter of the Earth to a scarcely believable accuracy of fifty miles. And it was here that Archimedes, a Sicilian engineer who had grown up by the sea and who must have felt at home in the mighty port of Alexandria, was inspired to invent a screw-shaped pump later given his name.

Another point of standardisation was the treatment of the so-called protokollon, the first of a scroll’s constituent kollemata, or sheets. A scroll was usually rolled up for storage so that its protokollon formed the outermost surface; as such, it received the brunt of any rough treatment at the hands of its readers, and early Greek scribes habitually left it blank. Later, however, this wasted space began to gnat at the sensibilities of efficiency-minded bureaucrats, and the protokollon became a place to record a scroll’s official provenance and its date of manufacture. In time, the officious Greek protokollon became the English “protocol”.  

Rolled up scrolls were stored vertically in jars and horizontally on shelves, with protruding tags affixed to one end so they could be identified without having to be unrolled. The Greeks called these labels sittybos - a misreading later transformed this into the Latin sillybus, and ultimately the English “syllabus” - whereas the Romans preferred titulus, or “title”. 

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Daily Libra Horrorscope 1/21/2017

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 23). Your happiness is not dependent on approval, excitement or reward. You’re curious. You find it easy to like people. These qualities are what drive you to the interesting places.

via ArcaMax

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Salt: A world history part 2

Prosciutto di Parma

Parma was a good place to make ham because before the sea air reaches Parma it is caught in the mountain peaks, producing rain and drying out the wind that comes down to the plain. That dry wind is needed for ageing the salted leg in a place dry enough to avoid rotting. The drying racks for the hams were always arranged east to west to best use the wind.

It became a requirement of prosciutto di Parma that it be made from pigs that had been fed the whey from Parmesan cheese. Less choice parts of pigs fed on this whey qualified to be sent to the nearby town of Felino, where they were ground up and made into salami. (The word salami is derived from the Latin verb to salt.)

Ricotta

The cheese makers also mixed whey with whole milk once a week to make fresh ricotta. By tradition ricotta was made on Thursday so that the cheese would be ready for Sunday’s traditional tortelli d’erbette. Erbette literally means grass, but in parma it is also the name of a local green similar to Swiss chard. Tortelli d’erbette is a ravioli-like pasta stuffed with ricotta, Parmagiano cheese, erbette, salt and two spices that were a passion in the thirteenth century and highly profitable cargo for the ships of both Venice and Genoa: black pepper and nutmeg.

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Salt: A world history

In the chapter, Two Ports and the Prosciutto in Between 

Parmesan cheese, now called Parmigiano-Reggiano because it is made in the green pastureland between Parma and Reggio, may have had its origins in Roman times, but the earliest surviving record of a Parma cheese that fits the modern description of Parmigiano-Reggiano is from the thirteenth century. It was at this time that marsh areas were drained, irrigation ditches built and the acreage devoted to rich pastureland greatly expanded. About the same time, standards were established by local cheese markers that have been rigidly followed ever since. 

The local farmers milked their cows in the evening, and this milk sat overnight at the cheese maker’s. In the morning, they milked them again. The cheese makers skimmed the cream off the milk from the night before, and the resulting skim milk was mixed with the morning whole milk. 

Heating the mixed milk, they added rennet and a bucket of why, they leftover liquid after the milk curdled in the cheese making the day before, They then heat the new mixture to a higher temperature, still well below boiling, and left it to rest for forty minutes. 

Each creamery had a cheese master whose hands reached into the copper vats and ran through the whey with knowing fingers, scooping up and pressing the curds as they were formed. When he said the cheese was done, a cheesecloth was put into the vat and under his direction, the corners of the cloth were lifted, hoisting from the whey more than 180 pounds of drained curd. While the others struggled to suspend the mass in the cheesecloth, only the cheese master was allowed to take the big, flat, two handed knife and divide the mass into two. 

The two cheeses were left one day in cheesecloth and then put into wooden moulds. The Latin word for a wooden cheese mould, forma, is the root of the Italian word for cheese, formaggio.  After at least three days, the ninety-pound cheeses were floated in a brine bath turned every day. The ageing of cheese is a matter of its slow absorption of salt. It takes two years for the salt to reach the centre of a wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. After that the cheese begins to dry out. So these cheese have always had one year of life between when they are sold and whey they are considered too hard and dry, even too salty. 

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And on that day When my strength is failing The end draws near And my time has come Still my soul will Sing Your praise unending Ten thousand years And then forevermore Forevermore

Matt Redman - 10,000 Reasons (Bless The Lord)

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Speak to encourage, give to alleviate

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From Alice in Wonderland

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“No one will bring back the years; no one will restore you to yourself. Life will follow the path it began to take, and will neither reverse nor check its course. It will cause no commotion to remind you of its swiftness, but glide on quietly. It will not lengthen itself for a king’s command or a people’s favor. As it started out on its first day, so it will run on, nowhere pausing or turning aside. What will be the outcome? You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that.”

Seneca, the shortness of life

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“Among the many worlds that man did not receive as a gift from nature but created out of his own mind, the world of books is the greatest… Without the word, without the writing of books, there is no history, there is no concept of humanity. And if anyone wants to try to enclose in a small space, in a single house or a single room, the history of the human spirit and to make it his own, he can only do this in the form of a collection of books.”

Hermann Hesse

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Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action comes, stop thinking and go in

Napolean Bonaparte

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If someone offers you an amazing opportunity and you don't know how to do it, say yes first and figure out how to do it later.

Sir Richard Branson

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For leadership to exist, a leader must cross paths with a crisis; an exemplary person must meet her “sinister mate.” Without an answering crisis, a would-be leader remains just a promising custodian of potential.

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Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning. - Albert Einstein

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i am now face to face with dying but i am not finished with living

Gratitude, Oliver Sacks