Finding topics for weekly blog posts should not be much of a
problem in a country in which political folly is continuous, public turpitude
habitual, and really sensational gun slaughter reliably occasional. The trick is to find a topic that one
would actually enjoy writing
about. Such a topic has occurred
to me, but I am not sure it has reader appeal, also known as “legs”. So I turned to my son Richard for
advice. Some of you will perhaps
remember that Richard’s blog “A Brooklynite on the Ice”, or “Antarcticiana,”
inspired me to begin in the first place, a hundred and fifty-seven essays
ago. In recent weeks “Antarcticiana”
has been a little thin—a circumstance explained by the fact that its bloguiste
is quite busy preparing to get married.
But he was able to find a little time to give me some advice.
His
encouragement to proceed with my proposed topic was emphatic though
oblique. He actually didn’t have
much interest in the topic one way or the other. But that was his point. In the kindest possible way he explained to me the vulgar
error of thinking that any blog could actually be written for an audience.
Clearly, it is written for the
bloguiste.
The author, John Milton (Francis Hayman pinxit)
In
the last decades of my active career I spun various fantasies about how I would
spend my time in retirement. I
have spent it in fact writing books, hanging out with my grandkids, travelling
to pleasant places, and watching several seasons’ episodes of “Breaking Bad”;
but I had various other schemes in imagination. One of them was that I could return with a focused
application to some amateur interests in the graphic arts—letterpress printing
and book-binding in particular.
With this vague goal in mind I bought up over the years on eBay, in the
good old days when it was still interesting, a certain number of noble but
humiliated old books, volumes rendered cheap because of their sad physical
condition. I would set up a
retirement book hospital in which I might nurse them back to health. I carefully stored them in crates, put
them into the deep storage of the press’s lumber room, and generally forgot
about them.
The editor, the Rt. Rev Thomas Newton
Well,
this summer, as regular readers will know, I set out on some deep cleaning of the pressroom—an
initiative that remains “in progress” as I write. Part of the progress was to get down to a fairly early
archaeological level in the lumber room.
There I re-discovered some of the crates of old books alluded to
above. An impulse stirred within
my breast; I feel moved to try to rescue at least a few of them. It then occurred to me that I might write
a little about it as I did it, since the unusually cultivated readers of
“Gladly Lerne” were bound to be fascinated by the project. It was this irrelevance that was gently
exposed by my son Rich. All that
matters is that I am fascinated by
it.
The original owner (Sir John Ingilby)
The
first volumes I encountered—abusively misplaced among a crate of reglet—are a
once famous edition of Milton’s Paradise
Lost. Specifically they are
the two volumes of the seventh edition (1770) of the great “Thomas Newton’s
Milton”, the first edition of which appeared in 1749. Like most editions of Newton’s work, this one is beautifully
printed. The text of the poem is
generously leaded for easy reading, though it generally takes up only about a
third of the lavishly and learnedly annotated pages. The beautiful old full calf binding is ruinous. Each volume has a detached front board
and a dangling back one. The boards
look pretty good, but the backs of both volumes are seriously decayed,
particularly that of the second. The
text block of the second volume is broken through about midway (between pages
306 and 307, near the end of Book Ten).
I am now proposing to dismantle the books, separate and repair the
signatures, resew them on tapes (they are now on cords), and rebind them in
leather. The backs must be
scrapped entirely. It is just possible that I can save and reuse the
original calf boards. We’ll have
to see. Not everybody knows how
books were made, and the old techniques are intrinsically interesting. So I plan now and again to post an
illustrated essay showing the evolving process which, with luck, I might
complete in a leisurely fashion over a year.
The challenge (volume 2)
There
are plenty of rich incidental topics here: Milton, Paradise Lost, the learned editor Thomas Newton, George Vertue (the
engraver of the portrait in the first volume), Hayman and Müller (the painter and engraver, respectively, of
the splendid illustrations), Sir John Ingilby (the original owner of the
books). Occasional posts
concerning them are sure to fascinate you me. I can express the same hope that Milton had for his epic:
that I fit audience find, though few.
