vivdunstan

Finished reading a new book about the letters of Mary Queen of Scots last night, Captive Queen: The Decrypted History of Mary, Queen of Scots by Jade Scott. Review to follow soon on my academic blog. Meanwhile, and continuing the literary theme, I’ve started reading about a 1930s book forgery case, The Book Forger: The true story of a literary crime that fooled the world by Joseph Hone. Likely to review that book in due course too.

Very happily tonight started browsing Stirling University’s Books and Borrowing 1750-1850 database of Scottish libraries, which is now online, including contributions from me of library borrowing transcripts and databases for Haddington and Selkirk libraries.

P.S. The facts and figures section computing over the underlying databases is hugely impressive. Here are its entries for the libraries in Haddington and Selkirk. Scroll down to the very bottom to see some stunning charts over time.

Both poring over the 400th anniversary British Library facsimile Shakespeare First Folio we bought. It is a very accurate reproduction of an excellent BL copy of the original. And yes we had to look up the bear stage direction. Very nice item to have, large, with sturdy hardback binding in slipcase. Unlike the Norton one it uses just a single copy of the original book as its source. Which may mean it is less clear to read in places. But book historian me - and Martin too! - is a lot happier with this for authenticity and provenance reasons. Now the challenge is where we will shelve it. It's a whopper! 4kg and 35cm x 23 cm x 8 cm.

Goals for this coming week: get some chromatic button accordion practice in, listen to more SHARP book history conference talks, and work on some academic papers. Fingers crossed, in between inevitably much sleep.

Just enjoyed another pair of SHARP book history conference panels. Including a very exciting for me keynote on ebooks versus print books, their readership and perceptions of them. This touched on so many issues important to me, as a reader - and book historian! - who now reads with huge difficulty, and relies on ebooks for gigantic fonts needed for disability reasons. There is so much snobbishness against ebooks, which is also an incredibly ableist perspective. Many of the survey responses discussed in this keynote echoed these exact views, powerfully and clearly. Anyway good stuff. And a fascinating Q&A after.

This is not to say that there aren't problems with ebooks. Academic ebooks for example are a nightmare area in terms of cost and books often suddenly vanishing from those available for students and lecturers to use. There are also big concerns re the dominance of Amazon and their tax dodging habits. But for many disabled readers ebooks are life changing. And it's not surprising many like me get angry when this is so readily overlooked.

Just paid and fully registered for the SHARP book history conference which this year is streaming online via Zoom with recordings and catchup available. So good for chronic illness disabled academic me, who sleeps up to 18 hours a day now from progressive neuro disease. Also great for time zone differences, and zero infection risk. With luck I will be able to watch lots, if not always live.

A little shuffling around, with some fiction out (finally finished Wheel of Time book 4), some in, and a shake up among the non fiction too.

Here are my 6 main books currently on the go.

Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Djinni for the book club of a BookTuber I follow. This is a turn of the century fantasy set in New York. Enjoyable, though it’s arguably overlong, and could have been better tightened up.

Newly started Christopher de Hamel’s Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts, which I’ve been keen to read for ages, no wonder as a book historian. But waited until I nabbed it at a bargain price for the Kindle. The print copy may be better for readers generally in this case, but for me the large font available on my Kindle is essential. I’m not sure yet how well I’ll get on with the illustrations there, and may switch at times to the Kindle app on my iPad.

Still reading David Long’s Lost Britain which is full of lots of short vignettes. Some I’m not interested in, so am skipping those. But most appeal and are being read.

Newly reading Vince Stadon’s Hounded! about life as a Hound of the Baskervilles obsessive. I can relate to that on a lower level of Sherlockian fandom.

Well into Zoe Gilbert’s Mischief Acts, a series of glimpses of Herne the Hunter through time, some narrative, some poems. A very different read, but an enjoyable mix of folklore and history.

And finally still reading Brian Kernighan’s Hello, World! which is a lovely mix of columns about academia, computer science and just stuff. I’m amused when he keeps writing about being a fan of low tech.

Current reading, end of June 2022 edition.

Lud-in-the-Mist, a forgotten fantasy; John Dickson Carr’s Castle Skull; Greg Carpenter’s The British Invasion about comics giants; Keith Houston’s typography book; Gary Goodman’s bookseller’s memoir; and Loren Wiseman’s Traveller RPG musings.

Every time I post about my reading I remember how grateful I was to find such records for readers when doing my PhD on reading habits in Scotland circa 1750-1820. Lists of books read and library borrowing records were especially good! My PhD thesis is online. https://discovery.dundee.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/reading-habits-in-scotland-circa-1750-1820