notebookism

A million Inaugural invitations and one grateful printing firm.

[Photo: Todd Heisler/The New York Times]

A Brooklyn, NY firm is tasked to print the invites to Barack Obama's inauguration.

"On Thursday, Dec. 11, Jim Donnelly got the call at his office on Jay Street in Dumbo for the biggest job he had ever had. Emmett Beliveau, the executive director of the Presidential Inaugural Committee, told him that Precise Continental, Mr. Donnelly’s 26-year-old printing company, had won the bid to produce one million gold-and-black engraved invitations for the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama.

Mr. Donnelly gathered his staff for the announcement, and a cheer went up. “They were ecstatic,” he said. “They wanted to be a part of history.”

NYT LINK

A Veteran's Notebook

LOMA LINDA, California (CNN) -- Anthony Acevedo thumbs through the worn, yellowed pages of his diary emblazoned with the words "A Wartime Log" on its cover. It's a catalog of deaths and atrocities he says were carried out on U.S. soldiers held by Nazis at a slave labor camp during World War II -- a largely forgotten legacy of the war.Anthony Acevedo served as a medic during World War II. He was captured and sent into a Nazi forced labor camp.

Acevedo pauses when he comes across a soldier with the last name of Vogel.

"He died in my arms. He wouldn't eat. He didn't want to eat," says Acevedo, now 84 years old. "He said, 'I want to die! I want to die! I want to die!' "

The memories are still fresh, some 60 years later. Acevedo keeps reading his entries, scrawled on the pages with a Schaeffer fountain pen he held dear.

Read the rest of the story at CNN

[Thanks to Kolby Kirk]

In Memoriam

Day is done,
gone the sun,
From the hills,
from the lake,
From the skies.
All is well,
safely rest,
God is nigh.

Go to sleep,
peaceful sleep.
May the soldier
or sailor,
God keep.
On the land
or the deep,
Safe in sleep.

Love, good night,
Must thou go,
When the day,
And the night
Need thee so?
All is well.
Speedeth all
To their rest.

TAPS

Veterans Day

Day is done,
gone the sun,
From the hills,
from the lake,
From the skies.
All is well,
safely rest,
God is nigh.

Go to sleep,
peaceful sleep.
May the soldier
or sailor,
God keep.
On the land
or the deep,
Safe in sleep.

Love, good night,
Must thou go,
When the day,
And the night
Need thee so?
All is well.
Speedeth all
To their rest.

TAPS

Veterans Day

Journals in history

A fascinating link from our friend Chris Miesenzahl:

During the early hours of June 17, 1972, Frank Wills was the security guard on duty at the Watergate office complex in Washington, DC.. This log shows that at 1:47 a.m. he called the police, who arrested five burglars inside the Democratic National Committee Headquarters. Investigation into the break-in exposed a trail of abuses that led to the highest levels of the Nixon administration and ultimately to the President himself. President Nixon resigned from office under threat of impeachment on August 9, 1974.

Documents from the National Archives

LINK 

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Darwin's Notebooks

These images of Darwin's notebooks are taken from microfilms; excised pages are taken from a colour microfilm made in 1982 in conjunction with the editing and transcription for the definitive edition.

View the collection

[Thanks Joy!]

Pilgrims, Pen and Paper

A Hindu priest helps trace pilgrim's roots:

"HARIDWAR, India As the sun sets over the banks of the fast-moving Ganges River here in the foothills of the Himalayas, the pilgrims and their priests laze in the 4:30 p.m. twilight. Some sip lime sodas on the windy veranda of the Haveli Hari Ganga, once home to Indian royalty and now a hotel for religious devotees.

"I am here," announces the bearded Ashish Sharma Pawan, a priest who serves as a family record keeper and who arrives holding a thick, 2 1/2-foot-long sheaf of handwritten entries dating back 144 years..."

Read the full article by Emily Wax
The Washington Post
LINK

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Notebook of Love

He was the ultimate Don Juan, but it seems that even Lord Byron needed a bit of help when it came to the language of love.

A handwritten leather-bound phrasebook, filled with expressions of love in Greek, belonging to the poet has come to light. Phrases such as “I love you with all my Heart” were intended to help him to woo women during his first visit to Greece.

The notebook, dating from 1809, has been discovered in the archives of the National Library of Scotland. Experts found it while cataloguing the 10,000 Byron documents in the recently acquired John Murray archive, which includes the poet’s correspondence with his publisher and other related material.

"Why Byron, lord of romance, needed a phrasebook for love"
By Dalya Alberge: Arts Correspondent
Times Online

Read the full article

1924, Through an Ancestor’s Eyes

ON a moonlit spring night in 1913, at a railroad station in a Ukrainian shtetl called Sniatyn, a somber 18-year-old took leave of his parents forever.

“My father went to bid me farewell on my long journey to America,” the son later wrote. “The train is waiting, a long embrace, a kiss, tears streaming down from his eyes. Did he have a premonition that we would see each other no more? The train is moving out slowly, and by the light of the moon I could see through the window in the distance my father, weeping and wiping his tears.”

That passage comes from Harry Scheurman’s diary, a slim volume in which he wrote nearly every day of 1924, when he was a single 29-year-old garment worker and ardent Zionist living in a Lower East Side tenement. Since last January, in an extraordinary act of meta-journaling, Mr. Scheurman’s grandson, a 40-year-old Web production executive named Matt Unger, has begun transcribing, posting and annotating a page of the diary each day at a blog he has created, called Papa’s Diary Project.

1924, Through an Ancestor’s Eyes
By Alex Mindlin
The New York Times
Read the full article [Registration required]

[Thanks to Joy Rothke]

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The Conservation of the Whitman Notebooks

One of the leather-bound notebooks had to be taken apart before the pages could be scanned safely. Typical of Whitman's notebooks, this one had some pages sliced out and others glued in. Some literary detective work will go into reordering some loose pages that were misplaced inside the back cover.

Thomas Harned donated to the Library of Congress a total of forty original Walt Whitman notebooks. There are others in the Feinberg-Whitman collection in the Library of Congress and several each in collections at Duke University, Yale University, New York Public Library, and other public repositories, as well as some which are still in private hands. It is safe to estimate that Whitman created at least one hundred notebooks of greatly varying sizes and descriptions. Some are basically commercial notebooks in which he wrote with any implement at hand (pencil stub, pen, crayon) and which he amended at will by cutting out and replacing pages and pasting in clippings, photographs or scraps of manuscripts. Others are home-made notebooks which he created by folding and/or cutting sheets of paper and fastening with a pin or ribbon. A few come down to us as loose sheets.

In these typical writer's notebooks, Whitman jotted down thoughts in prose and expressions in poetry. The earliest examples include journalistic entries with ideas for articles he might write. His first trial lines for what would soon become part of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass appear in an early notebook (LC #80) which bears an internal date of 1847; it was his habit, however, to use these notebooks over a number of years, filling in blank pages at will, and the remarkable trial flights of verse for "Song of Myself" in it are likely to date closer to 1854.

The Conservation of the Whitman Notebooks
The Library of Congress
LINK

[Thanks Joyce!]

Monastic ink

Cool post about medieval inks at BoingBoing:

"Many mediaeval miniatures of St. John of Patmos demonstrate the importance of ink: they portray the Devil attempting to steal the saint’s precious ink. In the Middle Ages, two kinds of black ink were generally used: carbon ink (a suspension of carbon, water and gum) and iron-gall ink (obtained from oak galls). Carbon ink was used as early as 2500 BC whereas iron-gall ink was used from the 3rd century AD onwards, by individuals such as Leonardo da Vinci, Johann Sebastian Bach, Rembrandt van Rijn and Vincent van Gogh. According to recent research, traces of iron-gall ink have been found on the Dead Sea scrolls and on the lost Gospel of Judasw1.

The reaction that forms the ink pigment was not used in the ancient world to produce ink, but it was known: in his Naturalis Historia (Natural History), Pliny the Elder (23 AD - 79 AD) describes how to distinguish verdigris [Cu(CH3COO)2.2Cu(OH)2], used to process leather, from the cheaper copperas (FeSO4.7H2O) with which it was often adulterated. He writes:

“ …The fraud may be detected using a leaf of papyrus which has been steeped in an infusion of nut-galls: it immediately turns black when adulterated verdigris is applied …”.

Although he could see the transformation, he did not understand it. Now, we know that this ancient test relies on the reaction between the ferrous cation (iron(II)) and gallotannic acid that is at the root of the iron-gall ink preparation."

More at scienceinschool.org

[via Chris M]