I’ve started reading Alice in Wonderland as a respite from schoolwork. Come to think of it, I haven’t done much schoolwork at all in the past couple of weeks… But anyway, Alice is even better than I remembered. I’m only 15 pages into it but the twists of logic and the absurdity and just the pure delight of the whole thing are fantastic. If only I could abandon all my schoolwork and finish reading it… Oh, drat, I’ve got a paper due tomorrow afternoon that I haven’t even started researching yet. (Thank heavens it’s a first draft, but even then you still have to have most of the work done to put out a first draft.) Tomorrow will be…busy.

Just realized that the Plan of Salvation thumbnails on the Riverglen Press site weren’t showing up (I was capitalizing “Small” but the filenames weren’t capitalized). It’s working now.

I intended to do homework today, but the Plan of Salvation cards were begging me to create a website home for them, so I did that, at Riverglen Press. I have 21 languages up so far, with a few more in the works. Now I just need to find time to set Pride and Prejudice… If I had more time I’d write more about it all, but I’ve got a lot to do in the next couple of hours…

The calligraphy bug bit me today. It happened when I saw the back of a greeting card — the name of the press was styled in some kind of chancery cursive, and it looked really good. Hand-lettering would give a nice feel to my Riverglen books (the title pages, that is). So I’m going to learn calligraphy. There’s a calligraphy class here on campus and hopefully I’ll be able to get into it this next spring term, but even if I don’t, I still plan to teach myself.

Beyond that, eventually I’d like to start designing my own typefaces which I could use for printing books. But that’s a ways down the road. FontForge could do it, I suppose, but it’d be nice to have a native Mac font-making app that isn’t $700 (ahem, can we say Fontlab?). I’m really tempted to write my own. But that’s a project that will have to wait, because I’ve got too many other things on my plate right now. Someday, though… ~wistful sigh~

One last thing: for some typographical coolness, check out Caligraft.com. Wow.

Late last night I was having trouble falling asleep (probably because of the chocolate I ate ten minutes before ~sigh~), so I figured I’d try reading a math book and hopefully that would put me to sleep. Half an hour later, The Nature and Power of Mathematics had me more awake than I was when I picked it up, as I read about Euclid’s propositions and proofs and delicious stuff like that. So I gave it up and put it back on the shelf and eventually fell asleep. Next time I have insomnia, remind me to find a boring book.

Hmm, I’m tempted to get to work on Sean Crist’s image files of Bosworth and Toller (an Old English dictionary) and turn the data into a searchable database, but alas, I have not enough time and too many projects.

At a second glance, it looks like someone’s already done it (there’s a search link on the site), but the page returns a 404. Oh well. ~sigh~

This afternoon I settled upon a name for my new virtual press: Riverglen Press. (The website’s not up yet, though — give me a few more days.) Quire Press was a nice name but people would have problems spelling it, and “Riverglen” has a British feel to it.

Printing seems to be in my blood. In my History of the Book class, I’ve been reading about all the old printers (Gutenberg, Caxton, Aldus Manutius, Ben Franklin, etc.) and it’s like eating dessert. Recently I’ve decided that I was named after Ben Franklin, in fact. I have no idea if that’s actually the case (I suppose I ought to ask my parents…), but I claim him as my printerly predecessor, at any rate. And reading about William Morris founding Kelmscott Press has been a great inspiration. I can’t describe this compulsion to print and make books (and charts and documents and other printed material), but it’s real and it’s strong. And deeply satisfying.

For the C.S. Lewis Society meeting this past Monday, we finished reading Surprised by Joy. Here are some of the quotes I liked:

I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.

Yum. That’s what I want my house to be like someday…

What drove me to write was the extreme manual clumsiness from which I have always suffered…. I longed to make things, ships, houses, engines. Many sheets of cardboard and pairs of scissors I spoiled, only to turn from my hopeless failures in tears. As a last resource, as a pis aller, I was driven to write stories instead; little dreaming to what a world of happiness I was being admitted. You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.

And this one:

All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still “about to be.”

(For what he means by “joy,” you’ll have to read the book. )

Nothing, I suspect, is more astonishing in any man’s life than the discovery that there do exist people very, very like himself.

The parts that got me interested in studying Latin and Greek when I was younger were those about Kirk (”the Great Knock”):

We opened our books at Iliad, Book I. Without a word of introduction Knock read aloud the first twenty lines or so in the “new” pronunciation, which I had never heard before. Like Smewgy, he was a chanter; less mellow in voice, yet full gutturals and rolling r’s and more varied vowels seemed to suit the Bronze Age epic as well as Smewgy’s honey tongue had suited Horace…. He then translated, with a few, a very few explanations, about a hundred lines. I had never seen a classical author taken in such large gulps before. When he had finished he handed me over Crusius’ Lexicon and, having told me to go through again as much as I could of what he had done, left the room. It seems an odd method of teaching, but it worked. At first I could travel only a very short way along the trail he had blazed, but every day I could travel further. Presently I could travel the whole way. Then I could go a line or two beyond his furthest North. Then it became a kind of game to see how far beyond. He appeared at this stage to value speed more than absolute accuracy.

The great gain was that I very soon became able to understand a great deal without (even mentally) translating it. I was beginning to think in Greek. That is the great Rubicon to cross in learning any language. Those in whom the Greek word lives only while they are hunting for it in the lexicon, and who then substitute the English word for it, are not reading the Greek at all; they are only solving a puzzle. The very formula, “Naus means a ship,” is wrong. Naus and ship both mean a thing, they do not mean one another. Behind Naus, as behind navis or naca, we want to have a picture of a dark, slender mass with sail or oars, climbing the ridges, with no officious English word intruding….

Later in my career we branched out into German and Italian. Here [Kirk’s] methods were the same. After the very briefest contacts with Grammars and Exercises I was plunged into Faust and the Inferno. In Italian we succeeded. In German I have little doubt that we should equally have succeeded if I had stayed with him a little longer. But I left too soon and my German has remained all my life that of a schoolboy.

Good stuff. A little bit later on, Lewis talkes about his friend Arthur’s word “Homeliness,” by which he meant “the rooted quality which attaches them [’the good, solid old books,’ the classic English novelists] to all our simple experiences, to weather, food, the family, the neighborhood.” I’ve really started noticing that quality this past year — it’s the joy one gets when peeling potatoes, for example. Sure, the joys of the romantic (in the broad sense) are there, but there’s so much that is wonderful to be found in the day-to-day activities that many call monotonous or drudgery. Familiarity can be just as beautiful as mystery.

Oh, I got elected president of the club, by the way.