There was a time – long ago to most of you, though it seems recent to me – when Rosemary, our children, and I were living from paycheck to paycheck and barely getting by. I’d had three not-terribly-good stories published in a college magazine before I went into the Army, and I thought I might just possibly write on the side and make us a little extra money. I sold a few stories. Then it was time for school to start again, and Rosemary began badgering me for money for school clothes. I would gladly have given it to her if there had been any. Another story, “Car Sinister,” sold, and instead of depositing the check I got the manager of the hardware store to cash it for me. I took it to Rosemary: ‘Here’s every dime I got for that story. That’s how much you have for school clothes.’ A few days passed, and I was sitting on the kitchen floor trying to mend a chair. Rosemary came up behind me and said, ‘Shouldn’t you be writing?’“That’s when I knew I was a writer.
A lovely piece of ephemera: Charles Dickens Reading Ticket circa 1867.Source: Print Cave
According to one person there, the ground conditions at the actual Equator are not stable enough to hold a monument nor to welcome the huge crowds that regularly arrive to see it; according to someone else, however, the monument’s original builders “believed they were placing the monument in the correct spot, except that measuring techniques at the time were not as accurate as they are today, so they were off by a few hundred feet.”This is why a private counter-monument has been built, supposedly on the real Equator, in a place called Inti-ñan: “just a two-minute drive from the Middle of the World, at a small, privately owned site called Inti-ñan, there is a sign on a gate saying that its location is ‘calculated with GPS’ to be exactly at 0 latitude.” However, as we glimpsed with the help of Marguerite Holloway, commercially available GPS is not as precise as most people believe it to be, and it is subject to its own asynchronies and drifts.
As such, we read, even nominally accurate GPS readings at Inti-ñan actually “varied depending on how devices were calibrated. That, a local guide said, was why, on this occasion, a visitor’s GPS held over the line of bricks that Inti-ñan uses to mark its claim to equatorial exactitude showed that it was still several yards to the south of where it ought to be.”
I wish I could say that in my online writing I have managed to resist the temptation to label others and thus turn them into discredited, ghostly cartoons that have little to do with their human realities, but alas, I have trod that path all too happily, only stepping off it when one of my sons challenged me to define the thems and theys of my rants. I could not, of course, but in making the attempt I discovered how readily — even eagerly — I had been discounting human beings about whom I actually knew nothing, and that my pre-judging of them meant that I was, yes, prejudiced.Mindful of that humiliating lesson, I have been trying to break that habit of broad denunciation; I have come to detest words like progressive and liberal and conservative and lefty and right-winger and the ease with which we throw these divisive labels about for the express purpose of insta-discrediting one another. Our propensity to label-and-dismiss each other is quickly leading our nation and our Church toward dangerous cliffs, and though we have gleefully turned each other into cartoons, we will not be able to reclaim solid ground from the thin air, once were launched. I accuse myself of assisting in this careening madness, and I want off.
Read the accompanying article, “Sangorski & Sutcliffe: The Rolls Royce of Bookbinding” on the Ransom Center’s blog, Cultural Compass.Front cover of Thomas Moore’s “Lalla Rookh” with a jeweled binding by Sangorski & Sutcliffe.
Back cover of Thomas Moore’s “Lalla Rookh” with a jeweled binding by Sangorski & Sutcliffe.
A Sangorski & Sutcliffe edition of Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark” is bound of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark is bound in leather with stingray onlay
“The Hunting of the Snark” has semiprecious stones inlaid inside the front cover.
“The Hunting of the Snark” has semiprecious stones inlaid inside the back cover.
Title page of the illuminated manuscript of “Selected Poems of Edgar Allan Poe” bound by Sangorski & Sutcliff.
“Lenore,” an illuminated leave “Selected Poems of Edgar Allan Poe” bound by Sangorski & Sutcliffe.
The cover of James Russell Lowell’s “The Vision of Sir Launfal” is handwritten in calligraphy on parchment by Alberto Sangorski with decorative borders and illuminated miniatures.
Cover of Percy Shelley’s poem “The Sensitive Plant” bound by Sangorski & Sutcliffe. The text is handwritten on parchment by Alberto Sangorski, with decorative borders and illuminated miniatures.
Inside front cover of “The Sensitive Plant” is embellished with multicolored leather onlyas, inlays, and gold tooling.
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William Bell, you are the man.
Jaehyo Lee.
Wooden sculptures by Jaehyo Lee.
Ellora, Narasimha - avatar de Visnu qui s’est incarné en sanglier pour sauver le Terre engloutie au fond d el’Océan Cosmique. Bas-relief de la caverne brahmanique 14 (VIè siècle).Août 1977.