the continual discovery of fresh types of nonsense

last one for now, and this one gets to jump the queue because (a) i am just SO PROUD of this and (b) it means i get to use this gif

the absolute worst thing in the world is that ro laren grows up to be helena cain, honey, i’m sorry. i’m sorry. i’m sorry. i should have warned you and i am sorry. but nothing could have prepared you for ro laren. 

sam’s world dot tumblr dot com

OH!!!! yeah! this is also about leos.

5. The largest & the smallest:

The largest book I own is a copy of Charlton Hinman’s facsimile edition of the first folio of Shakespeare. My favorite thing about the Hinman facsimile in general is that despite being a responsible book historian with a brain, he couldn’t stand reproducing any single actual copy of the folio, so he collated many copies in an attempt to achieve a perfect one. A better allegory of the hidden bias in even the most apparently objective editorial work I do not know.

My favorite thing about Hinman himself is that before he was a book historian he analyzed aerial photographs for the RAF. To do this, he used an optical tool to compare the photographs – a ‘before’ and ‘after’ photo arranged on two different slide projectors, projected onto a single screen in order to highlight the differences between them. After the war, he used what he had learned about optics from using that tool to develop what we now call the Hinman collator, indispensable tool of bibliographic analysis used for the same purpose – to highlight small variants between ostensibly identical copies of the same text. Testing the limits of one literary critical view that holds that military institutions are sinisterly embedded in literary ones, one of my favorite scholars concludes that to take such a view to its extreme would be to argue that “Shakespearean textual study is simply war by other means.” This is one of my favorite rhetorical gestures in all of literary criticism.

My favorite thing about my copy of the facsimile is that it was bequeathed to me by my advisor when she retired abruptly and left in her wake an odd assortment of her belongings. I had told her that I didn’t want the facsimile – I’m not a Shakespearean, it’s fucking enormous, and it seemed too good a gift. After she left, I found it waiting for me in her emptied office, which she also left to me for a time. On its front cover was a post-it note in her hand that just said “Trust me.”

The smallest book I own used to be a precious little early-C20 sextodecimo original-spelling edition of Milton’s Areopagitica, which I very foolishly gave away to someone who did not appreciate it. I do not know what the smallest book I currently own is.

17. Book you bought because of the cover design.

I often buy English rather than American trade paperbacks because they are so much more beautifully designed, and I often buy editions of texts I already own because they are beautiful in some way. A recent example is a handful of volumes from Penguin’s Great Ideas series – they are little and sweet and I like the idea of devoting an entire book to one slim essay. The best of these coverwise is probably their take on Walter Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. You can almost see in the photo how the cover is embossed to imitate the texture of a row of spines. 

Here I will also give honorable mention to an excellent specimen of American cover design: this edition of Hilary Mantel’s French Revolution novel, A Place of Greater Safety. Cleverer use of simple geometry I dare you to find.