You Will Read a Dark Stranger: How We Read Today and Yesterday
The change from scroll to codex (aka “Book”) must have been a bit by bit business. At first, only Christians had codices for their “gospels.” Then, as…
Dusty Old Books
Above the staff computers in the fourth floor workroom, which is on the 1st floor and has been for months and months – the library has contractors –…
The Pleasures of Isaiah and Yea Even Also Thereto the Frustrations
Can it be that by looking very hard at something, we sometimes miss what we are staring at? The prophet Isaiah comes into the gospels and the Christian…
From the Fourth Floor of Toronto’s Library
Your essayist has a new job on the fourth floor of Toronto’s reference library, working in languages and literature. Hence, the new title of this feature. Also,…
G.K. Chesterton: It’s the First Principles, Stupid
In what we have written here over the months about G.K. Chesterton, we have gone on and on about Chesterton the essayist and about Chesterton the newspaper…
Basil Willey and the Terrible, Awful, No-Good Seventeenth Century
. . . the changes of this modern climate ever since the seventeenth century have become the subject of Basil Willey’s perceptive and extensive Background studies, beginning…
With Borges Through Wyoming
In early summer 1976, we took a train from Oakland California to Detroit, a trip lasting a couple of days. It was a time of stress and doubt, but of…
Reading Proust Aloud
What? All of it? For a long time ( longtemps, if you will ) reading aloud had been a custom in our home. This had begun with…
The Man Who Read The O.E.D.
A few years ago, an American author named Ammon Shea undertook a project admirable, in part, and in part puzzling.Mr. Shea had always been fond of dictionaries.…
True Grit or Phronesis and the Happy Ending
Sometime after the Civil War, likely in 1875, an Arkansas girl of 14 hires a US Marshal to pursue one Tom Chaney, the man who murdered her…
The Inkling Who Wasn’t There: Dorothy L. Sayers
Let us sprinkle a little laudation over Dorothy L. Sayers. A thorough thinker, and a careful writer, she is now mostly remembered for her detective novels, and…
The Poetic Core of Eric Voegelin
It is a good thing, when launching a war, to be clear as to what you are fighting for. Don’t gamble unless you know how much is…
Languages Dead and Languages Never Alive: The Yiddish Impulse
For the past few months, we have been dabbling in two very different languages, one earthy, intimate, and famous, the other without country, without history, without color.In…
The Glamour of Scholarship
Two or three weeks ago, we found ourselves holding a modest volume from 2001 entitled Hebrew Scholarship in the Medieval World and feeling a little surprised.The volume…
On the Picket Line
Several weeks ago, as a result of certain . . . misunderstandings, your columnist and about twenty three hundred of his co-workers found themselves on strike, rather…