In the ongoing pursuit of faster and more efficient ways to communicate, speed often outpaces substance, leaving both content and time in short supply. This blog moves at a different pace. New entries appear as new old books arrive—but only after they have been lived with, examined, and placed in context.
The same principles shape my working space. What follows is a brief virtual visit to my office—the shelves, tables, reference books, and surfaces where these volumes are handled, described, and prepared before they ever appear here. It is a place organized for slowness, comparison, and return.
I begin today with a particularly interesting edition of Livi:
THIS IS MY DESK, the north wall of my office, the physical workspace, where recent arrivals are unboxed, THEN first collated then descriptions are drafted, where measurements are taken and first impressions are recorded. The north wall above it holds reference works I return to daily: bibliographies, palaeography manuals, printing histories, and incunabula checklists — tools for seeing into the past and placing a book in relation to its peers.
The East Wall 15th and 16th century books.
The south wall, English and 17thc.
The west wall and Jacques
1491 Livi nº 671J.
Not all book work happens at a desk. This adjacent room functions as a necessary extension of the office—a place for overflow, rest, and rereading. Books migrate here when they are between states: pulled from the shelves but not yet returned, consulted repeatedly, or simply living for a time outside strict order. It is here that I distance from the work and often clarifies it.
how I deal with all those annotations.
JAMESGRAY2@ME.COM
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