"There was a witch and
soothsayer in England. After she died, when the priests were singing
Psalms, devils violently snatched her up and bore her away through
the air on the back of a terrible horse. Their awful cries could be
heard for almost four miles."
The Nuremberg
Chronicle (Nuremberg, 1493) is an ambitious history of the
world from Adam and Eve on. It is one of the first illustrated books,
and certainly the first lavishly-illustrated one; it contains more
than 1,800 woodcuts (including, possibly, some by Albrecht Durer, who
was a young apprentice at the shop which produced the book).
One of my prized
possessions is a page from the Nuremberg Chronicle. Page CLXXXIX, in
fact. At the top of the verso is the
above woodcut and text. The rest of the page is all emperors and
bishops and scholar-monks.
On the recto, amid
a whole bunch of stuff about Holy Roman Emperor Henry III, is a
little woodcut of a burning two-by-four in the sky, with a
matter-of-fact line of text:
"A flaming wooden beam of
remarkable size was seen in the sky, flying in the region between south and
east above the setting sun, and falling to the earth."
No doubt the fireball from
a large meteor.
I was surprised at how
cheap the page was; I paid more to have it framed than I did to buy
it. As a book-lover and former bookseller, I cringe at the thought of
someone tearing up a perfectly good book to sell it page-by-page. I
prefer to believe that some kindly soul disassembled the fragments of
a damaged copy and offered the pages for sale, so that people like me
could own at least a piece of a famous incunable.
This is much like trying to convince not only your children, but
yourself, that Bingo has gone to live at a nice farm upstate, and is
very happy.
9 comments:
You can pick up the sequel at Amazon, heavily discounted.
Is it possible that Hillary Clinton and Bill Ayers went back in time and tried to get people to pay them for their ridiculous predictions and only suckers went for it and nobody actually liked them all that much anyway(especially after they disrobed for no apparent reason) so they jumped on their time travel machine and went away to the sky?
Ancient Alien theorists say YES!
The audiobook is free. And overpriced, at that.
One of the things I miss about my kindle is the feel of a book.
In many dystopian fiction series when civilizations collapse the people who have physical books do much better than those who do not. What are we going to do if the kindle doesn't work anymore?
I share the revulsion at the thought of tearing up the book, but it IS cool to have a page.
One question about the print: why is the witch shown waving and seated upright when she was snatched from her FUNERAL?
Apparently I'm willing to believe there were demons on a flying horse, but this incongruity about her death goes TOO FAR! The fact that she's also depicted nude, I get -- sex sells, and of course the first illustrated books have naked women like the first internet entrepreneurs were porn sites.
Sixty: LOL
My Kindle could hardly work any less - I really can't stand the user interface on that thing. Physical books are much better.
I can see Troop in the role of Henry Bemis in "Time Enough at Last".
My father had a page out of a giant music book from 500 years ago or so. I guess my brother has it now. Turns out something that large and that old is much more valuable broken down and sold one page at a time.
No doubt the fireball from a large meteor.
Hah! I'm full of doubt, or at least I was full of it until I checked out Google Images of fireballs from meteorites; and found out they really do resemble a flying flaming wooden beam of remarkable size!
I don't know what I like best, the viewer's description or the woodcutter's interpretation, as both are wonderful enough to invite more wonder!
No doubt the fireball from a large meteor.
It was the Captain's log on reentry.
That's truly awful, Some Seppo.
Post a Comment