Nothing to declare

I am back!

You probably didn't even know I was gone, but I was: two weeks in Rome. It was grand. (Unintentional Grand Tour pun? No one will believe it.) I had this fine book with me, letting me impress my friends with borrowed knowledge:

It's a bit heavy, being printed with colored pictures on nice paper, and the author sometimes seems to assume that just telling you the name of the architect or artist is enough, but it was a lifesaver enough times to make lugging it around worthwhile. The pages on the Vatican Museums were essential (omigosh the Vatican Museums are ENORMOUS) and unlike most guidebooks I looked at, this one gives plenty of time to all the zillions of churches you're obviously going to want to visit.

Even better, I bought this book with the gift card from when my Something Other Than God post won the drawing at Conversion Diary.

It's a major award!

Even if I had spent my own money though: worth it. I think I will be revisiting the Blue Guide series for future travels.

Now, I must get unpacked, do the laundry, and get reading something so I can post again in a reasonable interval. Hashtag: summer.

Paper and ink versus words and ideas

Regretsy once again has set out to make us cry:


Yeah, it's "a great way to display vintage books" if by "books" you mean "part of books". "The part that makes the actual valuable part of the book possible".

The offensive stupidity of this craft project being given, I have to say I am not the hugest fan of old books these days. When I was a young lass I was an enthusiastic buyer of crumbling old books and had a "collection" of items I had gathered up at library book sales. But there's a fine line between "delightful old book smell" and "gross moldy stank" just as there is between "quirky old stories" and "boring stuff that probably isn't worth reading anymore." Once upon a time I was all about the romance of decrepit old used book stores, and now, I gotta be honest, dust and brittle pages are just not worth it for me 99% of the time. The content of some old books can be better conveyed through digital copies, frankly. While I am all in favor of libraries and archives preserving the past, I also recognize that some specimens are maybe... superfluous, whether because there are already versions of the book available for those who need them, or because an individual copy is beyond help.

Not that I don't own and delight in plenty of gross offenders on all these points. Alice got me an old etiquette book for Christmas last year that leaks some sort of charcoal-like black powder from its broken-down spine; but it has hilarious old-timey advice and endpapers, and I absolutely love it even if I do have to wash my hands after handling.

Is it maybe okay if some books get chopped up for "craft projects"? I feel like that's where I'm working around to here, but I just can't go there. As my mother said so many times as I was growing up, That's not how we treat our books.

Maybe what I dislike most is this notion that such crafts are "giving old books new life" as the subtitle of this manual of horrors book suggests. If you want to give an old book new life, read it, write about it, tell people about it. That's the only way to give it "new life". Otherwise you're just recycling the paper. Which I guess I'm okay with, if the book, for whatever reason, is in fact trash.

I think my bottom line is, if you want to admire the beauty of books, then admire some freaking books, not parts of books that have been reassembled into decorative items. It's ridiculous to destroy a book in order to "repurpose" it into something supposedly celebrating your great love of books.

Still and all, I do love those endtables shaped like a giant stack of books. Classic.

Update: Lemony Snicket says: "It has always been my belief that people who spend too much time with my work end up as lost souls, drained of reason, who lead lives of raving emptiness and occasional lunatic violence. What a relief it is to see this documented."

Pull up a carpet sample and gather round

Boys and girls, I have a very special book to share with you today!

I've mentioned before, I think, my interest in the Bayeux Tapestry. Well, this is essentially a picture book for adults about the Bayeux Tapestry.

The author, Jan Messent, is an embroiderer, who discusses the tapestry (or "tapestry") as a piece of embroidery: she uses a close examination of the design to propose her theories about how it was created. She extrapolates from her own experience as a stitcher and from contemporary mentions of textile production to construct the whole story of the creation of the tapestry. It's precisely up my alley. The book itself is oversized, exactly like a picture book, and features whole-page drawings in full color, with handwritten text (the second half of the book consists of the text typewritten in slightly larger font on a white background, which is very considerate of those who might have difficulty reading the handwriting).

Messent points out that most writing about the Bayeux Tapestry is focused on the politics of the piece and on the men who commissioned and are depicted in it. In several places she is able to point out how understanding the embroidery process can help clear up discrepancies without a whole lot of complex theories. The culmination of the book is a stunning reconstruction of the missing eight feet -- yes, eight feet. I spent a lot of time peering at the photos before I turned the page and found that the publishers had provided close up photos (heh). A section of her reconstruction is pictured there on the cover.

One of the "problems" in understanding the production of the tapestry is that here you have conquered women embroidering the story of their menfolk's defeat, which tends to make the women seem sort of weak and/or disloyal. Messent argues that women of the time would have been able to acknowledge military prowess and victory without necessarily thinking the worse of their own men. I thought she could have stressed a little more the expertise and skill of large-scale narrative embroidery. She lays out the evidence that big wall-hangings like this were a fairly standard way of commemorating victory, like commissioning a statue or something. In that kind of environment, it seems like it wouldn't be all that strange, in the grand scheme of things, that the losing side would end up depicting their loss, especially given the limits of communication. (And weren't English women known throughout Europe for their embroidery? That must come later.) I thought, at any rate, that there was room to claim that perhaps, in that society, it would have been fairly unremarkable that Anglo-Saxon women, as skilled artisans, would be asked to depict the Norman conquest, rather than the big insult some male authors have apparently interpreted it as. I should probably stop there as this isn't my period by a long shot. I did think one of her most important observations was that many Anglo-Saxon noblewomen displaced by the invasion fled into convents, and very probably ended up pitching in on the tapestry. If you imagine nuns (used to producing commissioned needlework) working side-by-side with noblewomen (used to producing needlework for the glory of their own families), it helps to explode the simplistic question "how did the women feel about it?"

I thought there was a slight gap in the book in that there was very little discussion of the replicas that have been made of the tapestry. That's probably just me thinking in terms of a literature review, though.

Perhaps one of the most striking things about Messent's book is that although she did go to see the original, she had no special access to it. In fact she researched the tapestry mostly through books; which I think really shows how far practical knowledge helps in something like this!

All told, this is probably one of the more satisfying books I've bought in a while. It's perfect for sitting cross-legged on the bed... with a cup of tea or hot chocolate... maybe a cookie? I felt like I ought to have a stuffed animal under each arm. Which is pretty high praise.