Curiosa: Boethius FTW!
Aug. 27th, 2008 12:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nebroadweI love it when my job involves recycling.
Binders have historically been frugal souls, using old leaves to construct new books. Every once in a while a volume comes across my desk that's fallen sufficiently apart to let me discover a fragment or two of another book lurking within its covers. Today is a good day, because so far it's brought not one but two instances of visible binder's waste. In the first, the back pastedown was a page containing the introit for Septuagesima Sunday (the third-to-last-Sunday before Lent), "Circumdederunt me gemitus mortis." The word circumdederunt begins with a large decorated capital C in red pen-work, all snakey and floral, and the whole antiphon has shorthand musical annotations atop the words (which, sadly, I don't know how to read, so I can't sing it for you. It's still awfully cool, though.). The second book was actually bound in three vellum leaves from a Latin manuscript of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy (two from lib. 5 and one from lib. 2). The back-cover leaf has the beginning of lib. 5, metrum 3, "Quaenam discors foedera rerum / causa resoluit?" and the Q of quaenam is another decorated initial, blue with red pen-work extensions (spirals and vines) extending up and down the left margin. Lovely.
Both of these volumes are incunables, too, which means that the time I spend tracking down precisely which bits of Boethius appear on each leaf can be argued as necessary to meet the exacting standards of cataloging required by such rare and early examples of the printer's art. Which explains the open Google window in my browser, of course.
Binders have historically been frugal souls, using old leaves to construct new books. Every once in a while a volume comes across my desk that's fallen sufficiently apart to let me discover a fragment or two of another book lurking within its covers. Today is a good day, because so far it's brought not one but two instances of visible binder's waste. In the first, the back pastedown was a page containing the introit for Septuagesima Sunday (the third-to-last-Sunday before Lent), "Circumdederunt me gemitus mortis." The word circumdederunt begins with a large decorated capital C in red pen-work, all snakey and floral, and the whole antiphon has shorthand musical annotations atop the words (which, sadly, I don't know how to read, so I can't sing it for you. It's still awfully cool, though.). The second book was actually bound in three vellum leaves from a Latin manuscript of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy (two from lib. 5 and one from lib. 2). The back-cover leaf has the beginning of lib. 5, metrum 3, "Quaenam discors foedera rerum / causa resoluit?" and the Q of quaenam is another decorated initial, blue with red pen-work extensions (spirals and vines) extending up and down the left margin. Lovely.
Both of these volumes are incunables, too, which means that the time I spend tracking down precisely which bits of Boethius appear on each leaf can be argued as necessary to meet the exacting standards of cataloging required by such rare and early examples of the printer's art. Which explains the open Google window in my browser, of course.
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