TLS

I no longer visit Waitrose to buy cheese as their cheese counter has been discontinued to make more space for fast food, or dates because the branch of Grape Tree opposite is a more reliable source of brick dates, but I do visit to buy my bread flour. And, in the past couple of days, to return shopping trolleys. Sometimes I hit the £10 bar for a free newspaper and pick up a Guardian. Now, it so happens, that for some reason they carry the TLS, so I sometimes pick up one of those too, which is what happened yesterday.

I can now report that, for my £3.50, it contained little of interest to me and no new books have been noted down for possible purchase. But an article about something called the Voynich Manuscript did catch my eye, a manuscript written early in the fifteenth century and probably from somewhere in central Europe. I learn that large amounts of bibliographic and other ink have been spilt on this manuscript, most of it in the absence of much idea what it was about or what it was for. There was text, possibly in a form of abbreviated Latin, lots of pictures of plants, some fold-out pictures to do with the zodiac or something of that sort and rather a lot of rather crude drawings of naked middle aged ladies in baths of one sort or another. Learned opinion seems to be converging on the idea that it was a collection of medical recipes for the use of a rich medieval housewife.

I also found out about a rather nicely presented photographic copy at reference 1, quite nice enough to satisfy the average interest. My only puzzle was that apart from an ambitious mission statement about making all the knowledge of the world available for free, online through the internet, I failed to find out anything about how this online library was funded, staffed or organised.

On the other hand, there was a search button on their home page, so I tried searching for 'dubliners' and it turned up lots of editions of same, including a 1917 edition from Huebsch of New York, also presented in a nicely presented photographic copy. And a 1914 edition from Grant Richards of London, printed in Edinburgh and maybe something close to a first edition, given that these people do indeed seem to be the book's first publisher. See page 363 of reference 4. They also appear to offer download to pdf, kindle and suchlike, although I did not try that.

I wonder what, if any, relation they have to the digital public library people at reference 2? With my own last use of same noticed at reference 3.

That apart, the bottom line is that I am not inclined to renew my TLS subscription, despite the occasional offer of the first 12 issues for next to nothing. In fact, I am even toying with the notion of letting NYRB lapse: unlike the TLS these days, most issues do contain stuff of interest, but life is too short. Far too many unread books with grand titles lying around the house as it is.

Reference 1: https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript.

Reference 2: https://dp.la/.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/sun-dance.html.

Reference 4: James Joyce - Richard Ellman - 1961.