Nouvelles

by Sarah Laskow, November 09, 2016

Medieval scribes protected their work by threatening death, or worse.

In the Middle Ages, creating a book could take years. A scribe would bend over his copy table, illuminated only by natural light—candles were too big a risk to the books—and spend hours each day forming letters, by hand, careful never to make an error. To be a copyist, wrote one scribe, was painful: “It extinguishes the light from the eyes, it bends the back, it crushes the viscera and the ribs, it brings forth pain to the kidneys, and weariness to the whole body.”

Drogin’s book had dozens of such curses in it, and he had collected at least a dozen more to include in the second edition, which was never published. Inside his copy of the book, he still has a baggie of antique file cards, full of book curses.

As Drogin collected curses, he started to find repeats. Not all scribes were creative enough to write their own curses. If you’re looking for a good, solid book curse, one that will serve in all sorts of situations, try this popular one out. It covers lots of bases, and while it’s not quite as threatening as bookworms gnawing at entrails, it’ll get the job done:

“May whoever steals or alienates this book, or mutilates it, be cut off from the body of the church and held as a thing accursed.”

Source : Atlas Obscura

December 1, 2016
image

Protect Your Library the Medieval Way, With Horrifying Book Curses

by Sarah Laskow, November 09, 2016 Medieval scribes protected their work by threatening death, or worse. In the Middle Ages, creating a book could take years. […]
November 19, 2016
29904105501_f3bb710a52_c

PayPal study finds two-thirds of eBook buyers prefer format for price and convenience

by TNM Staff SAN JOSE, Calif. – November 1, 2016 — PayPal today released the results of its Digital Goods Economy Survey, which looks at the attitudes, habits and […]
November 15, 2016
vincent-van-gogh-carnet-retrouve

Van Gogh – Book of 65 sketches found by Canadian and published worldwide today is disputed by Amsterdam museum

By Nigel Hunt, CBC News, Nov 15, 2016 5:00, Last Updated: Nov 15, 2016 1:32 PM ET After 126 years, a lost sketchbook by Vincent van Gogh […]
November 2, 2016
161101_eg0w6_aetd_notman_11_sn635

William Notman’s life and work on display at McCord Museum (Montreal)

By Kristin Falcao, CBC News Descendants of Canada’s most celebrated 19-century photographer gather from across Canada, U.S. for exhibit What was it like to walk the streets […]
http://artsvox.com/category/uncategorized/page/8/
artsvox.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-26
83421
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:XMZXR7SDSIIE736PK6SGHQ4JHQI7KSMR
<urn:uuid:023073e2-228f-4567-8a1d-44893179ecc1>
2018-06-25T04:25:22Z
173.243.192.106
text/html
sha1:KXXEQXZ6RNIHAR2XKUQPY7BCN3HGS37R
<urn:uuid:a1575110-b940-4408-b5b4-9da17fe18026>
http://artsvox.com/category/uncategorized/page/8/
response
<urn:uuid:6da08600-6db2-4ba2-84e9-1b0407233cfa>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-159-200-107.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-26
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf