Dirt in Medieval Books | Hacker News Reader

Dirt in Medieval Books

medievalbooks.nl

133 pointsThevet17 comments

I love little things like this. I ordered a nice old two-volume set of Les Miserables and found when I opened it that someone had stuck a four-leafed clover in at the title page. I contacted the seller and asked if they had put that there and they said they had no idea. So now I have this wonderful little mystery and a clover that may be a century old flattened into one of my favorite books.

my mom puts 4-leaf clovers she finds in her yard in books. i am sure that one day those books will end up in someone else's hands.

The white gloves link is interesting - you're more likely to damage books by wearing the gloves than with clean hands, and they recommend against wearing them.

I was curious and found this article which might support your claim: https://www.ilab.org/eng/documentation/441-white_gloves_func...

> Collectors and dealers take note: overall, there’s a noticeable trend toward preferring clean, dexterous hands over clumsier gloved ones. But with variations in library policies, and the white gloves image so often in the public eye, it’s no wonder people are confused. This is one issue that would benefit from less heat and more light - light levels appropriate for special collections, of course.

There is a group of beekeepers who advice against using Gloves[1] when working in a hive. The reasoning is the same: you are far more likely to handle the hive brutish or clumsy when wearing gloves. Bare hands give more feeling and make you a lot more carefull. Dropping a frame when nog wearing gloves is a guarantee for stings. So you won't drop a frame when barehanded.

I wear gloves, though. I'm not near experienced enough, so my bees are rather stingy, still.

[1] http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=beekeeping+gloves

I collect old manuscripts, palimpsests, incunabula, all sorts - and have had a few interesting discoveries in my acquisitions over the years.

There's the 17th c. family bible that someone has made a fortune-telling doohickey in the rear cover of, made of two circles of paper with different starts and ends of fortunes, which rotate atop each other.

There's also the BBC archive copy of the Times from the outbreak of WWI, covered in notes from radio editors who it appears got their news from re-hashing broadsheets.

My favourite, however, is an early edition of Pope's translation of the Iliad that came complete with a lamb-gut condom. Can only imagine it sat next to someone's bed some centuries ago.

Used?

Just FYI, the fortune-telling doohickey sounds like a [volvelle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvelle).

Yes! Thank-you - spent a good minute fishing for the word in my head and gave up.

I wonder if historians will someday uncover the annotations in people's ebooks, because that's all digital era readers will leave behind.

Nah. With my "no screens after 10" rule I'm still swimming in physical books, usually with receipts in them.

Booksellers should just print the receipts on an actual bookmark. I can't stand touching that thermal paper every time I start, end, or interrupt a reading session.

I loved this article. I showed the picture of the cat prints to my wife. We both agreed that cats have always been jerks. Our cat somehow manages to walk all over my laptop and my wife's iPad, usually with some impact to what we are doing. Sadly those moments won't be captured anywhere.

> Sadly those moments won't be captured anywhere.

Now they are.

I can see the titles already

"Junk Data not so 'junk' after all"

"What many scientists believed to be areas of corrupt data in early 20th century 'e-books' turns out to be vital to our understanding of that period, from which so much was lost to proprietary formats and 'Digital Rights Management'. A group at the Luna City University for the first time managed to decode parts of ancient e-books and found them to contain notes and scribbles from the readers..."

I seriously love Erik Kwakkel's blog. I wish it had existed back when I was studying medieval lit.

For some reason, now I'm thinking about all the items that I've touched in my lifetime. What evidence of my existence did I leave on them? How many did I touch once, and will never touch again?

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