Category: Books on Books

The short version: Archimedes is considered one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. He died in 212 BC. He wrote his thoughts and proofs in Greek on papyrus rolls and sent them as letters to other mathematicians. Over time these ideas were preserved both by being translated (into Latin and Arabic) and rewritten (by scribes into the codex book form). Little of the Greek original remains today, in any form, and much of what he wrote is presumed lost. One rare codex that contains the original Greek is the The Archimedes Palimpsest. A palimpsest is a parchment text where the writing has been partially or completely erased and another text written over it. The Archimedes Palimpsest outwardly looks like a medieval prayer book from the 13th century, the text that was erased and overwritten by the prayers is a transcription of several of Archimedes’ letters. The book is in horrible shape — full of mold, with pages lost or cut out, and very bad mending. In 1998 an anonymous collector bought the book and since then it has gone through another transformation — conservation and digital imaging to allow scholars to read Archimedes’ text. The Archimedes Codex tells the story of the codex and what was found in reading the texts.

The chapters in the book alternate between the story of the physical object and the story of reading the texts contained in the codex. My original interest was in the conservation effort, and while there’s certainly a lot of that, I got much more. For example there’s a discussion of the “technology changes” in reading and writing between third century BC and now. Archimedes wrote in uppercase Greek with no word spaces — just thinking about reading an all uppercase text gives me a headache, so I can’t imagine reading something with no word spaces. Conserving the book also meant taking pictures of the pages, and if possible, making the underlying Archimedes text legible. The second half of the book details that effort, which surprisingly involved using Stanford’s linear accelerator to image and get to some of the text that was covered over by thick layers of paint. The photo at the upper left shows one page of the book, with a diagram from Archimedes showing up faintly in the background. To the right you can see the Greek under the Latin prayer text and pointing hand.
The alternating chapters tell what was found in the texts and how they were read and interpreted. Here’s where I got my biggest surprise. I majored in math in college, but that was a long time ago and I’ve forgotten most of what I learned. Calculus and even geometry just aren’t something I use in my current every-day life. In these chapters, the authors work though some of Archimedes’ logic and proofs. At first I thought I’d just skim or skip them, but found myself drawn in, working carefully through the text, and remembering doing the same thing as a student. And I was quite captivated by the “stomachion,” a puzzle that Archimedes talks about where the 14 shapes in the first square to the left are rearranged to make another square (the next 2 squares are rearrangments; Archimedes wanted to know how many such rearrangements there are). I found the design really pleasing to look at. You can see all the permutations here.
The book reads like a good mystery, and while quite enjoyable and engrousing, it unfortunately has very sloppy copy editing and proof reading (misplaced commas, extra words in sentences). And the two authors alternate chapters, but don’t tell you ahead of time who’s writing, leaving this reader confused.
There’s a nice overview article about the palimpsest and the project from the New York Times here. The project itself has a very informative website, with videos as well as text. It might be better than reading the book.

When I have a table at a book or craft fair, I’m usually manning it by myself and the day is too hectic to allow me to look at all the other vendor tables. I especially missed doing that at the BABA Book Jam fair a few weeks ago. When I got home and remembered that I hadn’t really looked at the copy of 500 Handmade Books I’d bought recently, I sat down with the book in my lap hoping to get the hit of book-artist-ness that I’d missed. It’s part of Lark Books’ 500 Series, essentially fat picture books of contemporary (mostly handmade) design on subjects ranging from chairs to bowls to 50 types of jewelry to dolls.
I was hoping to be inspired. But instead I had my usual reaction to most such treatments of artist’s books — oh to be able to touch the books and read the words! Yes, the photos are beautiful and most have 2 images per book. But the larger one is usually the cover (boring and tells nothing about the binding or the content) and the second one is too small to see any details. The books appear as static sculptures and completely miss what drew me to artist’s books in the first place — the interaction with the words and binding and paper and makeup of the book. A few sentences by the artist for each book, about the content or the binding, would have gone a long way to making this collection much more interesting and inspiring.

After reading People of the Book, I’ve been looking for more fiction that features books and bookmaking. My friend Sharon suggested Robert Hellenga’s 1995 book The Sixteen Pleasures, about a 29 year old midwestern American, Margot, who is trained as a book conservator and goes to Florence in 1966 when the Arno flooded and destroyed or damaged millions of books and other artwork. Ostensibly she goes to Italy to help repair and protect the books, but she’s really in search of adventure and the memory of living in Florence as a teenager. She ends up staying at an abbey of cloistered nuns and one day a nun comes upon a pornographic volume bound with a prayer book that has been damaged by the flood. It turns out to be the only copy of long lost erotic sonnets, accompanied by rather anatomically explicit engravings. The abbess asks Margot to take care of the book and sell it, to help the abbey (but to be sure the Church doesn’t find out about it). So Margot rebinds the folios and repairs the spine and covers and goes about trying to sell the book. In the meantime, there’s lots of fine detail about the restoration as well as wonderful passages about art and the life of Florence. Plus Margot finds lots of romance and adventure.
The book was a good read. And I quickly discovered that Hellenga recently wrote another book about Margot, The Italian Lover — I always want to know what happens to the characters in the books I’ve enjoyed. “The Italian Lover” takes place in 1990, Margot is now 53 and still living in Italy, still restoring books. The conceit in the new novel is that Margot wrote a book called “The Sixteen Pleasures” about her life and it is to be made into a film. While Margot is still (mostly) front and center, and there’s a bit of book restoration, there are many more characters in the new novel and a lot of plot about making movies. Worse are the annoying product placements (not just an espresso maker, an Alessi espresso maker). Oh well, I did enjoy finding out more about Margot’s life.