The assorted finds of Artefact Publishing
I love books. I do not own many books. You might think, then, that I would have read all of those books I do own. Sadly not so. Here are a few books I have that I am in fact unlikely ever to read, yet which are just marvellous:
When it says “mediaeval translation”, it means that this is the (mediæval) Latin translation of the original Arabic text. The brief preface gives a list of the manuscripts containing the text, with comments such as these: “written in rather good Gothic”, “It is a poor text. Let one of many examples suffice.”, “given in the appendix all variants found (except obvious blunders)”, “abbreviations are in moderate number, and such as are used are regular and not capricious”, and finally “punctuation of the manuscript is superabundant”.
It all just makes me want to rush out and mark up the Alexander Turnbull Library manuscript of Boethius’s De institutione musica using this transcription DTD.
Two volumes on occultism in the late classical world. Author M. Louis Massignon is quite happy not to translate anything into French, nor to provide transliterations into the Roman alphabet of Greek. Quite right!
One of 350 copies, “printed on Barcham Green hand-made paper by Walter Lewis”, and with the editor’s preface written in Latin. The text is a defence of the wearing of beards by monks, arguing that they are not anathema. Heady stuff.
Published in 1888, this is rough-edged paper holding pages of account information, with a handy glossary explaining, among other things, what nombles are. And now I see that nombles also crop up, in the spelling noumbles, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where it appears not to be reliably familiar to the audience.
I really should get around to giving some of these away to people who will actually use them, rather than simply delighting in them as I do.
Posted by jamie on September 26, 2003 10:29+12:00