Buttons and Books
These are my Buttony Mitts. I test-knitted them for Lilith of Old Maiden Aunt. Basically, she asked me one day if I wanted free handpainted yarn and I replied with my best teenage "dooooh" face.
The yarn is gorgeous. It is a soft alpaca-merino-bamboo blend and is handpainted in shades of forest green, khaki and pine. It knits to aran-weight but Lilith had decided to use a 4mm needle to create a warm, durable fabric. It worked a treat. The pattern itself was well-written and taught me how to make paired increases. If not for other commitments I could have finished the mitts in the course of two evenings (I love instant gratification projects).
Lilith is planning to make Buttony Mitt kits available on her site, so keep an eye out for those.
Other commitments? Among other things I went to Edinburgh on Friday night for a panel on the future of the book at The Scottish Book Trust. I was pleasantly surprised to see a relatively large turnout (fifty people or so! on a Friday night! in November!) and was even more pleasantly surprised by the panellists who all had interesting points to make. I was particularly impressed by Donald Smith (of the Scottish Storytelling Centre) who knew his book history and made good points about the book (codex) as a material object. The panel ran out of time, so the Q&A session was cut short, but I managed to raise a point about the socio-economic implications of digitalising books which was well-received. I suppose "you had to be there", but I really enjoyed myself.
As an aside, I was cornered by an American who wanted to know what I had bought my cardigan. Score!
PS. I trust the permalinks are working for people now. If not, let me know.
For the Love of Old Books
I like many things, but there are not many things that I love. I definitely love incunabula (books printed between 1455 and 1500) and early modern period printed books. Yesterday I went to Edinburgh to look at some very old printed books from Scotland. I was not disappointed. I have long been interested in and worked on the shift from (handwritten) manuscripts to the (printed) books. The shift is not as abrupt and clear as many people assume; post-Gutenberg handwritten manuscripts were still produced and printers arguably sought to make their product look as much like handwritten manuscripts as possible. Although The Scottish National Library do not hold any incunabula (as far as I know), I was pleased to see some early 16th century books which still displayed evidence of this urge to mimic handwritten manuscripts: typefaces designed to resemble handwriting, woodcuts trying to look like hand-drawn illustrations and rubrication (emphasising parts of the text using red ink). Gorgeous, fascinating stuff.
And Edinburgh was her usual, gloomy, beautiful, fantastical self.
I like visiting the city but I couldn't live there, I think.
Cadder Excursion
The HarperCollins visit was a great success. They marketed the event as a chance to see original Peter Pan artwork and unseen letters from famous authors such as JRR Tolkien and Agatha Christie, but in reality we enjoyed the visit to the cartographic offices much more. We also had a chance to peek into the process of making dictionaries. Very cool, very interesting and very cheap because the on-site bookshop was closed. Boo.
The Antonine Wall/the Cadder Fort? Underwhelming as the site was excavated in the 1930s and subsequently turned into a sand quarry during World War II. So we stood in the rain, looked across the Forth and Clyde canal and saw a bunch of trees. However, as the Antonine Wall now has been declared a World Heritage Site, we might get to see something a bit more involving in the future. We did learn that the Roughcastle fort in Falkirk is well-preserved and well worth a visit, so we might head up there at some point.
Finally, we spent some time at Cadder Parish Church which stands in the middle of a forest. There has been a church on site since the mid-12th century and although the church has been rebuilt and refurbished many times since, you could still see the passing of ages in the surroundings. Dave loves his stained glass windows and was thrilled to see stained glass windows featuring World War I tanks. I was more taken in by the graveyard and its odd open iron coffin.. It was used during the 19th c to deter grave robbers (who'd sell fresh bodies to the anatomy schools). You'd simply put the coffin on top of the grave, fill it with stones and just sit in a little waiting house nearby until you heard the unmistakable sound of men trying to remove stones from the iron coffin. The waiting house is still there -- it looks to be a favourite spot for the local foxes.
And what is this? Could this be a sighting of the increasingly common februarii ladius sweaterae? I believe this one is the organic Scottish Gray variant with mother-of-pearl features..
This photo was actually taken a day earlier during our bramble picking adventure. Bramble is the Scottish word for blackberry and we have had quite a few bramble crumbles lately. Yum, yum.
Put Those Fangs Away, Mr Propp
I'm toying with the idea of reading a couple of articles in From Homer to Hypertext: Studies in Narrative, Literature and Media. And I'm very amused that Amazon recommends 'laurell k. hamilton', 'paranormal romances' and 'dark hunter series' as similar products. I now have a vision of narratologists sinking their sharpened fangs into the alabaster necks of unsuspecting guest lecturers.. .. okay, no more coffee for me today.
Ps. I accidentally ordered some red alpaca/silk worsted weight the other day. First yarn purchase in a month! Any good ideas for cardigans or sweaters?
Old Boys' Club
Aspiring authors of the Anglophone persuasion, take note:
Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin, (..) gets four or so [manuscripts] a week - despite a note on the website that declares "Sadly, we're unable to consider unsolicited manuscripts. The best way to find a publisher is through an agent." These four are given to people in the office for a week or two on work experience; if they think there's any merit in the submission, it goes to publishing director Simon Prosser or one of his permanent colleagues. Yet nothing in the past 10 years has actually ended up in print that way. The only books that have been published and not arrived via an agent were recommended by friends in the publishing industry, or by Hamish Hamilton's writers, "which is slightly different, because there is some connection," says Prosser.
Aida Edemariam, an editor, has something to say about authors, agents and the publishing industry. The rules are slightly different in Denmark but not as different as you might expect.