peripathetic

Lazy afternoon
It's grey in Belfast, the house is quiet, and I've been looking at books all the time. Did think of starting the day with some Bottled Iraq but decided against it. Every time I watch the reports, I just get irritated by this strategy of embedding journalists. A journalist in Iraq who has just been thrown out by the military for not being embedded regularly posts to a website I'm a member of. He's not happy about it. Neither am I. And to think that a major said, at the start of March, "It'll be tea and medals in Baghdad in a few days' time".

Anyway. The books I have been reading today are a blast from the past. As a kid I was always interested by historical things. It started with ancient Egyptian Books of the Dead - papyri which hung in the tombs, telling the story of how the dead man travels to the afterlife - and then a few years later I discovered illuminated manuscripts. By that time, I'd started getting into castles in a big way, and during a few summer holidays visited a lot of Welsh castles. They are truly military innovations, and architectural masterpieces. The military bases of the 14th and 15th centuries. But the manuscripts are truly amazing. Of course they're books, so you might think "Okay, they're superbly decorated books". That's okay as far as it goes.

But: they didn't have printing presses. They had to make the ink. There were different colours of ink. Most had to be made from precious stones and minerals, shipped at great expense in the case of the more luxurious books. The paint had to be made in the same way. Some of the illustrations and decorations are so tiny that it's hard to comprehend how they did it without modern magnifying-lenses. They had to write the text themselves. It had to be decorative. Try that yourself - it's not easy! They didn't have paper either - illuminated manuscripts are nearly all written onto vellum - a word for lamb or pig skin cured, stretched, scraped, treated and dried. A whole large book could take the skins of a whole herd of sheep, for example.

Examples: the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry - very famous among those in the 'manuscripts loop'. (A 'book of hours' is a prayerbook - usually medieval.) There are others, where the artists were less skilled and the labour was cheaper. Often, such prayerbooks were the most valuable single item most people ever owned. You can buy books on the subject, like those I was reading.