Philobiblon

If you saw the standard bay tree and the Salix caprea walking up the stairs at Euston Square Tube this afternoon I hope you didn’t get too much of a shock – it was just me spending the Homebase vouchers acquired during last year’s DIY frenzy before they ran out.

Having got them out without home without too much damage to the skin of my hands (standard trees not being well-balanced for long-distance carrying), I decided before setting them in place on the balcony it really was time to clean the windows – which is pretty well what counts as spring cleaning as Chez Natalie.

So I guess you could say spring is sprung …

… if this blog is shaking slightly, and making a loud, dentist-drill-style noise. That’s the council workmen downstairs making a thorough meal of demolishing a brick wall that is about 6m long and less than 2m high. Five of them, in a whole day yesterday, managed to demolish about a third of it, using a jackhammer with a brick-bolster-style attachment. Or at least one of them used that, one picked up each brick as it came off, and the others stood around and stereotypically leant on their brooms. It is windier today, so they are leaning into the doorways for shelter instead.

Give me a mid-size sledgehammer and crowbar and I’d have done it single-handed in a day. (OK, I’d be sore after, but then I spend most of my day swinging a keyboard.)

Council workmen are easy targets to take a swing at, and generally I try not to do that, but watching it at close hand is painful. (Not to mention in this case hard on the ears.)

Miss Frances Williams Wynn, my 19th-century blogger, is getting back into the Gothic tale again. At least the the old woman of Delamere forest heads in that direction. It starts as the tale of an educated, independent woman who decides to make an independent life on waste land for herself and her daughter, whom she is “homeschooling”.

It is quite a tale – and I promise to post the denouncement later today….

I can almost never remember my dreams, which I consider to be a very good thing, but for some reason I woke up remembering a stupid, annoying one this morning – “got out of the wrong side of the bed” is the traditional phrase – so if I’m a bit grumpy today, forgive me.

But my day wasn’t improved by reading about the latest shooting atrocity in America: a 15-year-old boy gunned down with a shotgun – shot by his neighbour then “finished off” at close range. His crime? Running on the lawn. The context?

A child is killed by a gun every three hours in America. According to the latest statistics, nearly 1,000 children under 19 are shot dead every year. Another 800 use guns to commit suicide, and more than 160 die in firearm accidents.
Forty per cent of American households own guns, but those guns are 22 times more likely to be involved in an accidental shooting, or 11 times more likely to be used in a suicide, than in self-defence. On average, more than 80 Americans are killed by gunfire every day.

But, as the story makes clear, gun control has entirely disappeared from the American agenda – indeed controls are being relaxed. So this killer, who his neighbours knew to be unbalanced, was allowed to have a lethal weapon that could be casually unleashed on a child.

Then in Britain, the number of 16-year-olds not in any form of training has risen, from 9.4 to 12.6 per cent. This is the “underclass”, and they’ll stay that way unless they can somehow be lured back into education.

The figures come in the wake of a report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development which showed that the UK was 27th out of 29 industrialised nations in terms of the percentage of youngsters staying on after 16. Those figures were described as a “scandal” by David Miliband, who was Schools minister at the time – but today’s report shows the percentage who go straight from school either on to the streets or unskilled employment is growing.

Now just about everyone I know is saying, “next weekend, next weekend” life will feel better. It is almost a mantra. That’s because we’ll suddenly get another hour of daylight when the clocks go forward. Why we are deprived of it all winter in Britain is one of those great little mysteries. But there is a Bill (albeit a private members’ bill with almost no hope of passing) now in the Lords to give us that extra daylight.

Either way, I promise to get some more cheerful stories soon….

… and it is, as ever, a spectacular collection. Please help to spread the word…

Among the posts that took my fancy are one about how humour in the form of insults isn’t humour at all on Sivacracy.net. (Oddly enough my post on patriarchy over at Blogcritics has been attracting a whole lot of commenters notable for their lack of a sense of humour …)

There are several enormously powerful posts from America on the threats to the rights to abortion and contraception, while the UK bloggers are focusing on issues of rape and sexual assault.

But the highlight of those I’ve read so far is that by Mega on Days In a Wanna Be Punk’s Life. She addresses a commenter who called her a “female chauvinist” and thanks him for his concern about her underwear and her menstrual status.

But I won’t point you to any others – please do go and read a great selection on Angry for a Reason, who has done a great job!

William Caxton started printing in England, then his sidekick De Worde took over, and whosh, next thing you know you are drowning in a sea of Elizabethan pamphlets, nearly all printed by men, with the odd widow thrown in. That’s right, isn’t it?

Well oddly enough, it seems there are some unmarried women in the tale, but, surprise, surprise, they’ve disappeared…

“Single-leaf prints were multiple reproductions of the same image, often accmpanied by xylographic text, that is, with text produced in relief print from a wood-block, painstakingly cut letter by letter …”

On the Continent the Bridgettine order was well-known for producing these for devotional purposes, with many surviving example being associated with a general chapter held in 1487 at Gnadenberg in the Upper Palatine. There are also a number of English examples, probably printed at the rich and important Syon abbey, in Isleworth (up the Thames from London).

Block books, “printed from wood-blocks, were once thought to represent an interim stage between single-;eaf prints and books printed with moveable type. Paper analysis has shown, however, that block books cannot be dated any earlier than 1460-1470, post-dating the invention of printing with moveable type for at least a ecade. .. generally considered a more primtive technology, but it may not have been so regarded when both were new ad existed side by side.”

From: Driver, M.W. The Image in Print: Book Illustration in Late MedievaL England and its Sources, The British Library, 2004.

(Although I suppose to fair, gender issues aren’t the only thing at work here; they were on the “wrong” side, religious-wise.)