art for art's sake

There were a couple dozen students out on the lawn outside the campus center, all looking West-Northwest and mostly in a line. I looked over that direction and couldn't see anything. I asked the closest person what was up; is it that pole rising from the ground? There was a pole over on the hill that way that I didn't remember. She said that they were doing a mile-long line and looking at the other folks, over there, across the valley. I asked "Guinness book of world records?" She replied "art." Probably Freshman Foundation. Sheila Pepe was the visiting artist for the first week of classes and they knitted up a storm, the unknitting of which may find its way into scarves.

(this is not the Pepe project at Alfred which was in a more cramped space in Harder Hall; this is a photo from the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum site)

sunshine and cancer

"Frank C. Garland, an epidemiologist whose work helped establish a link between vitamin D deficiency and some cancers, including colon and breast cancer, died on Aug. 17 in the La Jolla section of San Diego. He was 60 and lived in San Diego." Dr Garland's research seems to show that exposure to sunlight's vitamin D lessens the likelihood of colon and breast cancer. Ironically, he died of cancer of the esophageal junction and had lived in a place with considerable sunshine.

In late 1997 and early 1998 when I was having a nose reconstruction because of basal cell cancer, my mother was dying of colon cancer. We don't know how we'll go but go we will and this conjunction of sun and cancer is especially compelling for me.

ode to the well-placed comma

The elegance of the hedgehog by Muriel Barbery is beautifully written, originally in French and translated by Alison Anderson. There are two main characters and the chapters are written in the voice of one or the other. The older of the main characters is the widowed concierge "at a bourgeois building in a posh Parisian neighborhood." She mostly plays the stereotype of slump and TV-watcher for the benefit of others; she really is entranced by art and cultural things. She is also quite a reader.

When one of the tenants dies and wilts her camellias, the concierge Renée Michel gets a note from another tenant that includes this sentence: Would you be so kind as, to sign for the packages from the dry cleaner's this afternoon?

For the next couple pages, we are in Mme Michel's thoughts as she contemplates the misplaced comma after "as." Barbery fills these two pages with incredible sentences of dependent and independent clauses, modifying descriptions, and other complex construction that result in a beautiful tribute to the correct use of the comma.

I'm not much past this passage which appears on pages 108-110 of the paperback edition. Materfamilias Reads has also blogged this matter and has typed in a good portion of the section I'm talking about. cf http://materfamiliasreads.blogspot.com/2009/04/muriel-barberys-elegance-of-hedgehog.html Materfamilias has only selected and typed one paragraph but it's the whole two pages that just fills me with delight but then, like Materfamilias, I'm probably a punctuation pedant. I should probably look up the French original; though my French is not great, I'd probably be able to work my way through this section.

The Clark(e)s of Cooperstown

Hyde Hall has long been one of my favorite Palladian houses in the United States. Perhaps nothing compares to Monticello for Palladianism but Hyde Hall, designed by Philip Hooker and built between 1817 and 1833, is wonderful. It is set on the northern end of Otsego Lake, not too far from Cooperstown. It probably is relevant that the builder was George Clarke but, alas, there is no reason to think that he is even a distant relative of mine. His family came to the United States through New York City and my Clarkes were Rhode Islanders before moving to western New York State. Still, it's nice to have the nominal connection.

At the other end of Otsego Lake, one finds a good deal of influence from a different family of Clarks. Sterling and Francine Clark are perhaps best known these days as the founding patrons of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. I've visited the museum several times, most recently last October when the regional chapters of ARLIS/NA and VRA held a joint meeting there.

My family gathered (as you may know from the last entry here or from Facebook) at a KOA campground near Herkimer over the July 4th weekend. One of the field trips was to Hyde Hall with my sisters Cathy and Carol, and another field trip was to Cooperstown with a couple carloads. Everyone else went to the Baseball Hall of Fame and I went to see the Sargent show at the Fenimore Art Museum. One of my brother's pictures from Cooperstown was of a sign which read "Estates of Edward Clark and Alfred Corning Clark" (grandfather and father of Sterling Clark). The Clarks summered in Cooperstown and were great patrons of a variety of activities, including sports and art.

For years, I've been meaning to read The Clarks of Cooperstown by Nicholas Fox Weber and the visit to Cooperstown certainly raised it on the list even though the reviews on Amazon are not so positive. Sure, it probably could use some editorial tightening but I'm learning a lot and enjoying it.

Edward Clark was an associate of Isaac Merritt Singer of sewing machine fame. Clark and Singer together dreamed up the monthly payment scheme and everybody could then afford to have a sewing machine at home. Clark was the business side of things and owned or controlled significantly more than half of the company. He left an estate to Alfred Corning Clark that Weber says was relatively bigger than that left some years later by J.P. Morgan.

In addition to his life as a rich American businessman, Alfred was also a great patron of tenor Lorentz Severin Skougaard (known professionally as Skougaard-Severini), sculptor George Grey Barnard, and other artists. Alfred's relationship with Skougaard was intimate and he summered with Skougaard's family in Norway. One is generally reluctant to apply late 20th-century interpretations of homosexual relationships but Weber does include information about their activities that provide a rich history of Alfred's parallel lives with his family in the United States and his "artistic" life in Europe.

One of Alfred's paintings was "The Snake Charmer" by Jean-Léon Gérôme:


Weber talks about how we, the audience, see the naked backside of the charmer while the men in the painting are getting a front-on view. Alfred's widow sold the painting after his death but it was repurchased by Sterling and Francine and is now in the collection of the Clark Art Institute. The description on the institute's website does not mention this interesting bit of provenance. (When I wrote this post in 2010, the website description did not include this part of the provenance but it now does in December 2017: http://www.clarkart.edu/Collection/559.)

Alfred's relationship with Barnard was perhaps more complicated since Barnard sublimated his sexual urges in exchange for creative energy. He did marry a woman later but, in Weber's telling, it was a sublimation of his attraction to men. While this may have been frustrating to Alfred, it did lead to some powerful homoerotic sculpture, e.g., Brotherly Love (a memorial to Skougaard), The Struggle of the Two Natures of Man (stood for years in the Great Court at the Metropolitan). When I was at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester last weekend for Rochester Pride, I noticed a wonderful bust of Lincoln which was dramatically illuminated. It was a work by George Gray Barnard!

Alfred Clark also served as champion of Frederick Bourne whom he had met at the all-male Mendelssohn Glee Club, for which Alfred commissioned a concert hall and clubhouse (since demolished). Bourne became president of Singer & Company and was responsible for commissioning the Singer Building from architect Ernest Flagg. It was briefly the tallest building in America and demolished, sadly, in the 1960s.


Singer Building, New York
(Completed 1908, demolished 1968)
(from wirednewyork.com)

Flagg was also commissioned by Mrs. Alfred Clark, after Alfred's death, to build a mansion on Riverside Drive. Weber describes it as "Neo-Palladian" but it is a far cry from the severe Palladianism of Hyde Hall. The illustration in the book shows it to be something like the Carnegie Mansion that has become the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. Yes, it has classical detailing but it's more like Newport than Chiswick. I could not find a picture of the exterior on the web but this drawing from the American architect and building news (Dec. 1900) shows the progression of orders around the windows and other detailing which grew from the same roots as Palladio.


In an interesting twist, the caption for this illustration on the St. Croix Architecture site (where it's available as a poster) misspells "Clark" as "Clarke."

That's probably a sign that this Clarke should stop trying to summarize the book and go back to reading it. It has been quite an interesting ride so far, resonating beyond the history of the Clarks of Cooperstown.

carpenter italianate

We drove through Mt. Vision, New York on the way home from the family gathering at the KOA campground in Herkimer. Mt. Vision is along Route 205 on the western side of Otsego Lake, near Cooperstown. I noticed three houses that looked like siblings as we passed through the village. Each was a tripartite Italianate house with six windows on the front. The center section sticks out a foot or so in front of the rest of the facade, making a simple but lovely and classic composition. Perhaps I'd had too rich a diet of Palladianism at Hyde Hall in Glimmerglass State Park, also on Otsego Lake.

The Italianate detailing was fairly light in these houses: flat roof, simple bracketing under roofline, balanced fenestration, no columned porch. I think of my house in Alfred as carpenter Italianate. It was built by my great-great-grandfather, Martin W. Babcock, and my great-grandfather, Alpheus Burdick Kenyon. They may have used a plan book but mostly it's a cube with sheds appended out back: big cube, little cube, littler cube. The front side is basically tripartite though the porch lightens the verticality and the door is on the side rather than central as in the Mt. Vision houses. Nonetheless, they seemed to be carpenter Italianate like my house, just the work of someone building houses in a small town in the years after the American Civil War.

An added treat was a fancier version on the southern edge of town. The scale was slightly bigger but it still didn't have the porch in the example at the top of this entry. All four of the houses had closed louvers on the upper middle window. And, then, as we drove out of town, there was another bigger one. Its roof had been augmented by a hip roof: practical in snow country but it rather ruins the Italianate feel. I saw quite a few Italianate buildings with such augmented roofs as we drove around central New York State.

Since I wasn't in the driver's seat and we were anxious to get home, I didn't request that we turn around and go back so I could take pictures. The house illustrated above, found by googling "italianate houses" for images, is the Coite-Hubbard House (1856) which I thought gave an idea of the houses in Mt. Vision. The picture comes from Historic Buildings of Connecticut where it is described as: The building which now serves as Wesleyan’s President's House was originally built in 1856 for Gabriel Coite, who became a state senator in 1860 and moved to Hartford in 1862, when he became the State Treasurer. In 1863, his Italianate house on High Street in Middletown was sold to Mrs. Jane Miles Hubbard, the widow of Samuel Hubbard, who had been a US Postmaster General. Wesleyan University acquired the Coite-Hubbard House from her heirs in 1904 to become the new President's House, replacing the first building used for that purpose. [It amuses me that this example is an official residence since that is one of my postcard categories. When Judith Holliday was collecting libraries, I decided I needed a building type to collect and picked official residences. I also did an LCSH subject proposal for "Official residences" which was accepted by LC. They improved it by adding a see-also reference: See also |i subdivision |a Dwellings |i under classes of government or other officials, e.g. |a Governors--Dwellings.]

glimmers of hope

Lots of interesting stuff during ALA and I'm still processing it. Ronald Murray presented his work on a "FRBR paper tool" which, as someone said after he presented at CC:DA, was either exhilarating, exhausting, or terrifying, or all of the above. What was exciting for me was that it seemed to move us beyond some of my concerns about FRBR. That is, people seemed to be chasing Work, Expression, Manifestation, and Item to the detriment of moving forward toward a response that built a richer as well as collocated response to a query. Murray's networks of bibliographic relationships allow a system to build trees that can use the building blocks. Not only did it seem promising for texts but he also momentarily had a parallel 4-layer context for archives: fonds, series, folders, items (I think that was it). I wonder if there's a similar hierarchy for visual materials and cultural objects which will make sense. A starting point into the web stuff on Murray's work can be found at http://dltj.org/article/frbr-paper-tool-presentation/ (first hit when you google "frbr paper tool" -- the report on a November 2009 presentation at the Library of Congress).

Oh ... and his charts were beautiful. As I was looking at them, I was thinking of hiring a silversmith to turn one into a necklace. Or maybe a knit version? If it was macramé, it would probably work for philodendron.

Later that morning, I went to an OCLC program entitled "Cataloging alchemy: making your data work harder" which included Rich Greene talking about GLIMIR (Global Library Manifestation Identifier). They've focused so far on parallel-record and reproduction identifiers which will help them pull together editions/printings/records for closely-related resources. Rich indicated that they might be able to do some enhancing of the resulting cluster, e.g., access points at the cluster level. I'm dreaming of enhanced subject access because of this, or more contents analysis because one edition has a contents note. Hmm, enhanced RLIN clusters. The basis for GLIMIR building is the new version of the duplicate detection report which OCLC has started using. This will help match and merge simple vendor records with fuller ones, both in batch-loading and already in the database. They plan on working their way through the 195 million records in the OCLC database.

There were other exciting things at ALA Annual, that was just on Monday. I'll work on my ALA report as soon as I can. Meanwhile, it's still a couple hours to Binghamton and then three hours to Alfred. Buses with wireless internet access are pretty nice but it's a little cramped for spreading out your ALA notes.

books and zines

Pretty exciting. I got to meet my closest parallel book collector in LibraryThing: Paul Ranogajec, a doctoral student in American architectural history. cf. paulranogajec.com He's a buddy of Roberto Ferrari, art librarian and now doctoral student himself, both of them at the CUNY Grad Center. Roberto is Paul's closest LT parallel, or is it the other way around? Anyway, we had a good time talking about our collections and art/architecture interests over a nice brunch in the garden at Bacchus on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. I'm not sure that Paul is convinced yet that he should go to library school but we'll keep working on him. After brunch, we went to a couple nearby used bookshops. I escaped without buying any books at either shop or elsewhere today.

On the way to the subway to go to the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), I ran into Bill Jones, former colleague at NYU Libraries. That was fun.

The main reason I was running off to MAD was a panel on "Gay print/queer zines" with Scott Hug of K48, Tony Arena of Anonymous boy collection and other titles, Michael Bullock of BUTT, Jason Lamphier and Noah Michelson of Out, and Dan Avery of NEXT, moderated by someone whose name I didn't catch. Each of them described their magazine or project and then they talked amongst themselves and with us in the audience. I had expected that the hall would be jammed to the rafters but it was fairly sparsely populated. I loved the way Tony Arena talked about his desire for the informal and chaotic. The fellows from Out had some interesting things to say about being fairly mainstream, dealing with print versus web capacity and timing. And almost all of them talked about community as part of their mission. I was intrigued to learn that the founders/editors of BUTT started Fantastic man because they didn't want BUTT to have to go commercial, having started it as a cross between S.T.H. and Index. And the first issue of Gentle woman just came out so there was teasing about covering all the ground now.


This is all fine and dandy but I'm really enjoying the book I've just started: In spite of the gods: the rise of modern India by Edward Luce (Anchor Books, 2008) and I think I'm going to go back to that. I did go read for a while in Prospect Park after discovering and climbing Lookout Hill. The sunset was only just beginning and there weren't enough clouds to really light up the sky with color.

"closed": too early, soccer

It took me quite a while to get going yesterday but I still made it to downtown Manhattan too early for galleries to be open. They mostly open at noon. And ApexArt was playing the Slovenia-U.S.A. soccer game so I didn't go in to see the "Men with balls" show. Artists Space was closed for installation but I did finally get into Leslie/Lohman for "The great LGBTQ photo show" but didn't see any photos that really knocked my socks off. Oh, it's worth visiting.

On to Mercer Street Books, a fine used bookstore near NYU. Getting a bit hungry, I went for the extravagance of a crepe and glass of pinot noir at Shade, a very satisfying lunch. I did hear the guys next to me speculating on the referee in the Slovenia-U.S.A. game. If it wasn't too late or installation, it was soccer but the day was fine altogether.

The Lil Picard show at Grey Art Gallery was on the list so I stopped in. I wasn't familiar with her work and the show is a trip down memory lane, with early postwar and work from into the 1990s. The brochure or wall text included some interesting words about her attempts to be part of the scene but finding the Cedar Bar boys not at all congenial. That is, they just wanted pretty young things, not thinking and acting women. Reminds me of Jo Schaffer's description of visits when she was an art student at Brooklyn College; the girls got to sit in the back row and observe but mostly weren't part of that scene. Thank heavens, we've mostly changed.

It was also interesting to see the drawings of Picard's husband on his death bed in Saint Vincent's Hospital. The last dated drawing in the set was dated June 14th, almost the anniversary.

I ran a couple more errands in the neighborhood and then took off for MoMA PS1 for the "Greater NY" show. Perhaps my favorite moment was the performance in the basement where the artist was putting gold foil on the boiler, using his sweat as adhesive. He was passively standing, brush in hand, on a ladder doing something on a palette. He passed the brush over his neck and then picked up a piece of foil with the brush and applied it to the boiler. Rhythmic and slow-moving. The piece was called "Skewed lies/central governor: a collaborative performance with Saul Melman" by Aki Sasamoto. Among the other works that I liked were Leidy Churchman's paintings, Conrad Ventur's video installation with disco ball, Bruce High Quality Foundation's pedestal exchange, and "Let's face it; we're all queer" (one of the images in A.L. Steiner's "Angry, articulate, inevitable"). Ismail Randall made some interesting mountains out of magazines (sculpted stacks of Vanity fair) in a piece addressing the U.S./Mexico border. Michele Abeles's fine photos had great titles, e.g., "Man, shadow, table, fan, rock" and "Number, fabric, man, hand, rock, icons, cardboard, potatoes."

After I'd done about enough art in GNY, I went to the bookstore and then ordered a cafe au lait. Then, I checked the watch: it was almost 5:30 and I was supposed to be in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn by 6:30. Well, the coffee got drunk more quickly and with less reading than it might have been. Good old 7 to Q however did get me to Cortelyou on the same train that Heidi was on. We went to The Farm on Adderley for some yummy food, with their specialty being local and small-farm stuff. The service and setting were too Manhattan (pretentious) for Heidi's taste but the food was good.

I definitely am of the "eat to live" rather than "live to eat" school but have noticed that these NYC posts from the last few days have all talked about food. The restaurant options in Alfred and environs are definitely thinner than in New York City but the Collegiate Restaurant which has been closed since last fall's fire in the Alfred business district should be open in its new space by the time I get home. Not fine dining, but darn fine food in a friendly atmosphere. When Heidi visits Alfred, she will probably be satisfied that the food and service are a good match.

West Chelsea gallery hopping

These home-made pencils are only one small bit of a platform with many objects by Ben Gocker in his show at P.P.O.W. Gallery on West 25th Street in New York City. I have been especially enamored of pencils since working at the Amon Carter Museum. There, Paula Stewart and I exchanged pencils as a token gift from our travels. She acquired the habit when she had worked in the photo department before becoming the archivist. Now, I just buy more museum pencils than I can use.

Today's adventures centered on West Chelsea. It started with lunch with Ann Morrell who works at the American Friends Service Committee. Ann and her husband Bill moved earlier this year to the ILGWU apartments on Eighth Avenue. They have a sunny living room with bookcases under the windows. Bright and cheerful. We ate at Le Grainne Cafe, a charming French bistro that used to be Le Gamin. My crepe with turkey, goat cheese, and ratatouille was magnificent.

Food's fine but then we went gallery hopping. Ann joined me for the late Monet show at Gagosian Gallery. As we neared the gallery, we ran into Barbara Reed. Retirement allows one to go gallery hopping on weekdays. It's nice to avoid the crazy West Chelsea weekend crowds.

Ann split after Monet and I crossed 20th Street to Tanya Bonakdar Gallery where Uta Barth and Ian Kiaer were on view. The Barths were especially rich, one with feet on the beach. I am looking forward to going to Fire Island one of the days I'm here in the city. From Bonakdar, I stopped in at Casey Kaplan Gallery and found the Trisha Donnelly sculptures interesting. Donnelly carves big blocks of stone with quite refined parallel lines. Then I went to Printed Matter and actually escaped without buying anything.

Sticking to my list of galleries to visit, I next went to Tracy Williams on 23rd Street to see the Barbara Bloom show entitled "Present" ... as in gift. Great work and Bloom arranged for each of us visitors to get a CD. Haven't played it yet but it is apparently the CD used in the piece with a rug of plans of Steinway pianos. Another piece in the show was a table of glasses with a sound board in the tabletop so that it made sounds as you put your hand over the glasses. This was my first visit to the new Tracy Williams space; they used to be in a rowhouse basement on West 4th Street, an awkward but intimate space. They are working at keeping the intimacy in the new space, partly by interacting with the visitors.

Deborah Bell had a couple dozen photographs from America illustrated by George W. Gardner. Fine photographs. One was of "Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Crumb, Marathon, New York" (1975); I can't wait to get back upstate and ask my sister's partner Barb Crumb if she had relatives in the Marathon area. Another photograph -- "Langhorne, Pennsylvania" (1965) -- included the sign for Flannery's Restaurant along with other roadside stuff. Having just finished reading The violent bear it away by Flannery O'Connor, I was easily finding parallels between O'Connor's characters and the "real" Americans and Americana in Gardner's photographs.

On to the Gocker show entitled "There is really no single poem." Gocker graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is now a librarian at Brooklyn Public Library. Lots of his works resonated with my librarian brain: pencils, words, letters.

I stopped in at Mitchell Algus Gallery and found him packing up to move his space to Morton Street in the West Village. The mean economic times make for even more volatility in the gallerist's life than usual.

Further West on 25th Street, I stopped at ClampArt to see the "Jesse Burke: intertidal" show. I'd first run across Burke at the New York Art Book Fair last fall. Really love the photos. And Brian Clamp had one of my favorite John Arsenault photos in the back "alley" of the gallery: "Getting it in Italy" (2000). I just have to get me one of those John Arsensault photos someday. Have to quit buying so many books (but I did do some freelance cataloging before I blogged). As much as I like the sexy Burkes and Arsenaults, the prints by Stuart Allan were really fine, the varying light of different hours of the day. Reminded me of Spencer Finch's work on the High Line.

On to Galerie Lelong for the Andy Goldsworthy show: "New York dirt water light" with ephemeral "sculptures" on the sidewalks of NYC which faded with traffic. And next door was the William Pope L. show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. This last show opened with a print which had the word "melan-colicky" across the middle. Just cruising, not feeling very melancholy at all.

I've spared you some of the parallels drawn from the gallery visits, e.g., Barbara Bloom's adopted Chinese daughter (think Karen Muller), the new assistant librarian at Bard's Center for Curatorial Studies who is also a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop as is Flannery O'Connor, the whole O'Connor connection to Debra Kruse's art ... well, I HAD spared you those parallels.

uptown

I don't consider myself religious but I am certainly moved by religious art. I'm in New York City for a week or so before going to the ALA conference in Washington. Diana Mitrano is letting me stay at her Brooklyn apartment while she's in Hong Kong. As I left her apartment yesterday thinking about the day's adventures, I decided to go up to the Cloisters, partly to see if I could find Building the medieval art in the bookshop. Being in that space with the fine art is always very moving for me. The view above is of the apse from the Church of Saint Martin in Fuentidueña, Spain with a crucifix from Palencia. Romanesque and Ottonian are probably my favorite medieval periods.

I'm not really sure where the love of medieval art comes from. My 12th-grade art teacher was fond of Romanesque Catalonian frescoes, or at least I got the small books on them that were a couple of my first art books about then. Them, along with the facsimile of the Hours of Catherine of Cleves.

Whatever, I found myself tearing up several times in the Cloisters: for the love of the art, for the joy of being in its company.

From Fort Tryon Park, I took the bus down to the Hispanic Society where I was delighted to find that the Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster show was still on view (closes June 27th so get there soon). She created three dioramas with books as the object in the landscape. There's a wonderful wall of quotations too. Since my last visit to the Hispanic Society, the Sorolla murals have been rehung in the room now called the Sala Bancaja. And it's never a problem to visit the collection of Goya, Velazquez, El Greco, and others.

I didn't have a guidebook with me but realized that the Morris-Jumel Mansion wasn't far away. I was too far South and missed it but did visit the hole where the Alexander Hamilton house used to be, crowded between a church and an apartment building just North of City College of New York. It's hard to believe that the house fit in the space, the hole doesn't look near big enough.

They picked the house up and moved it around the corner. It isn't open again yet but the setting is certainly more gracious and spacious.

Since I was there at CCNY, I figured I'd go say hi to the librarian, Judy Connorton, and see the new space. The architecture library has way more space, as does the school. Part of the library is double-height with stacks mostly on a mezzanine over the offices. The roof is open for visiting and there is a funky yellow amphitheater which also serves as the sunshield for the skylight over the central atrium. The end-of-year projects were up on the walls so there were some fun projects to look at. There were also some models of buildings by Palladio, Neutra, and others.

On to the Studio Museum which is showing highlights from its collection. Lots of good stuff. They have a print version of the Lorna Simpson video "15 mouths" which I first saw at Sean Kelly Gallery a few days after 9/11. The video is a grid of mouths quietly humming. It was mesmerizing and soothing in the days just after the World Trade Center attacks. The print version is quieter, just still prints of the mouths with a CD of the humming barely audible.

Supper was at Chennai Garden on East 27th Street, with John Maier, Elizabeth Lilker, and Dan Lipcan. We shared three of the combination platters and barely made it through them. The food was incredibly tasty. John and I walked down to Union Square and I figured I might as well as well veer off to the Strand and St. Mark's bookshops before leaving the neighborhood. I did find Building the medieval world at the Strand. It wasn't the fabulous study of architecture in medieval manuscripts that I'd hoped for, more of a general picture book with mediocre illustrations. Nonetheless, I figured that I'd just regret it if I didn't buy it ... and the price was down from retail.

Thinking about buying books obsessively, I am thrilled that I'll get to meet my closest LibraryThing parallel on Saturday. Paul Ranogajec is a grad student at the CUNY Grad Center and a friend of Roberto Ferrari's. We're getting together for brunch on Saturday. We get to talk books, books, books until the cows come home or we decide to go to the panel on queer zines, 3 pm at the Museum of Art and Design.