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very grateful for the library's enormous ceiling fans keeping me from melting into a puddle during this study session

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"after all, how can one feel the loss of a thing whose existence one has become unconscious to?"

a wonderful collection of essential and constant truth bombs.

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say what you will about the historical figure of Cardinal Richelieu but the ‘black breastplate over cardinal’s robes’ look is some warhammer shit

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it's the end of the second wk of uni, and i'm alr thinking abt next summer's travel plans... :'] i miss magical places like this that look as if they're straight out of a beauty and the beast scene.

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I was working with an item today that just utterly flabbergasted a part of me (the other was deeply frustrated with the catalogue record AS SOMEONE APPARENTLY THOUGHT IT WAS PRINTED ON SILK, coming back to that in a minute) … but ANYWAYS … said item is a replica of a medieval manuscript prayer book THAT IS ENTIRELY WOVEN out of grey and black silk … WOVEN … text, images, intricate grey scale, WOVEN … NOT PRINTED …

And it’s flabbergasting because it’s from 1888, Jacquard machine, IT USED PUNCH CARDS to weave these intricate pages … something like 400 weft per near square inch … IT looks like a page of textured paper, but it’s not, it’s entirely SILK … F*CK …

Anyways …

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Finished my history degree two weeks ago. Took a week to relax and take time for myself. Now I'm back working on some independent work

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“A novel is a commodity that fulfills a certain need; people need to buy daydreams like they need to buy ice cream or aspirin or gin.”

— John Dos Passos, b. 14 January 1896

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Tiburius of the Milan Cathedral - Angelo Morbelli 1897; Milan, Italy

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Charlotte Brontë, Villette

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one of life's great joys is research rabbit holes, and today's adventure brought me to learn that Pascoli wrote a latin poem in 1899 about the Sosii brothers' Roman bookshop in I a.C. described to us by Horace (and bookmarking a bunch of interesting papers interpreting it!)

one of those cases where this was mentioned in passing in a course or textbook once, buried in some crevice of my memory, and has now been unearthed by a mention in a Petrucci text I'm reading

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another day juggling bibliography and the history of the Latin alphabet for my grad admissions exam ft. my Gutenberg Bible pencilcase 📖

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may have piled too much onto my plate recently and honestly, could use a bit of a break (but alas, there's always too much to do)

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If uppercase letters are capital letters then what the FUCK are lowercase letters

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“All libraries have a different character and setting. Some are primarily for children or primarily for students or the general public, primarily full of books or microfilms or digitized material or with a café in the basement or a market out front. Libraries are not failing “because they are libraries.” Neglected libraries get neglected, and this cycle, in time, provides the excuse to close them. Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.”

— Zadie Smith, “Northwest London Blues”

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'You misunderstand how history works,' she said. 'History is not a series of causes and effects which may be changed like switching trains on a track. It is a narrative agreement about what has happened and what is happening.'

The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley

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6 June 1926 Letters to Véra by Vladimir Nabokov