The Art of Reading: Grace Reading at Howth Bay by William Orpen

Shakespeare Goes To The Olympics

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.

     At the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympics last night in London, Kenneth Branagh recited these lines taken from Caliban's speech in one of Shakespeare's final plays, The Tempest. Branagh was dressed as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a famous British engineer known for building bridges, dockyards, and Britain's first major railroad, the Great Western Railway.

Waxing Poetic: Why Did I Dream Of You Last Night? by Philip Larkin

  
   Why Did I Dream Of You Last Night?

Why did I dream of you last night?
Now morning is pushing back hair with grey light
Memories strike home, like slaps in the face;
Raised on elbow, I stare at the pale fog
beyond the window.

So many things I had thought forgotten
Return to my mind with stranger pain:
- Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.

Ex Libris: This Book Belongs To...

    

     I have always been intrigued by bookplates.  There's something slightly thrilling about opening a book and finding a bookplate pasted inside the cover. I love browsing in used bookstores and coming across these small prints that give a glimpse of the previous owner and add history to the book.You don't often see them used these days and with the rise of e-books, they may well die out completely.  A bookplate, or Ex Libris, is a small print for pasting inside the cover of a book to express ownership.  Ex-Libris means "from the library of" and was frequently inscribed on bookplates which were printed on heavy paper and glued into books by the purchaser.
     Between the late 15th and 19th centuries, books were expensive, prestigious, luxury items.  Most were bound in leather, and printed in gilt. To own a book was to hold status in society.  Those wealthy enough to have books wanted something to identify them as the owner of a particular book.  So, they commissioned bookplates, a print they could paste inside the front cover. That way, anyone who read their book would know exactly who it belonged to.  The first bookplates usually incorporated the decorative coats of arms of the fabulously wealthy. By the late nineteenth century, bookplates had developed into a highly imaginative form of the engraver’s and printmaker’s art in miniature.
      Bookplates are highly collectible (either loose or attached to books).  Many collectors concentrate on specialized themes,  those designed by famous artists, or those owned by notable people, like this one belonging to Ernest Hemingway:

There are a number of organizations devoted to bookplate collecting, such as American Society of Bookplate Collectors & Designers and The Bookplate Society (UK).  They are very often of high value, exceeding that of the book in which they are placed.
     After reading more about them and seeing so many beautiful examples of vintage bookplates, I'm thinking of purchasing some and placing them in all the books in my personal library.  What do you think?  Do bookplates have a place in the increasingly paperless world?
     Here are some of my favorite from designs that I've come across on the internet:

The Art of Reading: Café 'Le lapin agile', Montmartre by Louis Abel-Truchet

Italo Calvino: Why Read the Classics?

Italo Calvino’s 14 Definitions of What Makes a Classic

1. The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: ‘I’m rereading…’, never ‘I’m reading….’
2. The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.
3. The classics are books which exercise a particular influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable, and when they hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual’s or the collective unconscious.
4. A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
5. A classic is a book which even when we read it for the first time gives the sense of rereading something we have read before.
6. A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.
7. The classics are those books which come to us bearing the aura of previous interpretations, and trailing behind them the traces they have left in the culture or cultures (or just in the languages and customs) through which they have passed.
8. A classic is a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off.
9. Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.
10. A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.
11. ‘Your’ classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it.
12. A classic is a work that comes before other classics; but those who have read other classics first immediately recognize its place in the genealogy of classic works.
13. A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, which at the same time the classics cannot exist without.
14. A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.

Bookish Quotes #46

“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”
~ Umberto Eco

 "Even books, word-things that should be judged by their content, fascinate me as objects.  I confess I have many books in my library that I have never read nor had the intention of reading.  I want them because their sheer presence represents a yearning, a mood, a love, and yes, an act of self-preservation.  When my eyes scan my library, the typefaces of the titles, the textures of the covers, and their imagined weight give me a moment very like the pleasure of reading."
~ Leo Lionni