Works and Days

An amusing detail from an interesting article:

Books also give off special smells. According to a recent survey of French students, 43 percent consider smell to be one of the most important qualities of printed books—so important that they resist buying odorless electronic books. CaféScribe, a French on-line publisher, is trying to counteract that reaction by giving its customers a sticker that will give off a fusty, bookish smell when it is attached to their computers.

The Library in the New Age
(via Arts and Letters Daily)

Pontem perpetui mansuram in saecula mundi.

Caius Julius Lacer, engineer of the Puente Romano de Alcantara.

1870— Joseph B. Strauss—1938
“The Man who Built the Bridge.”
Here at the Golden Gate is the
Eternal Rainbow that he conceived
And set to form, a promise indeed
That the race of man shall
Endure unto the Ages.

Chief Engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge 1929-1937

Inscription below the statue of Joseph Strauss near the Golden Gate bridge.

The tradition is dead; our task is to revivify life that has passed away. We know that ghosts cannot speak until they have drunk blood; and the spirits which we evoke demand the blood of our hearts. We give it to them gladly; but if they then abide our question, something from us has entered into them; something alien, that must be cast out, cast out in the name of truth!

Wilamowitz, lecture given at Oxford on June 3 1908, quoted in Lee T. Pearcy, The Grammar of Our Civility

Especially since it is so hard to understand how scandal could come from this person, so unromantic, fat, an slow, who at school took notes in silence, looked as if he weren’t understanding anything, and was teased by his companions. And, in the monastery, when he sat at the table on his double stool (they had to saw off the central arm to make room for him) the playful monks shouted to him that outside there was an ass flying and he ran to see, while the others split their sides (mendicant friars, as is well known, have simple tastes); and then Thomas (who was no fool) said that to him a flying ass had seemed more likely than a monk who would tell a falsehood, and the other friars were insulted.

Umberto Eco, “Travels in Hyperreality”