nawl

I made the acquaintance of Leo, the owner of a local antiques shop, at tango class. He invited me to come see his store. And so it was that I peeked my head inside The Gilded Lion this afternoon.

The place is a delightful clutter. Where there aren't old things, there are piles of Sotheby's catalogs.

A pre-Boehm (no mechanism other than an Eb key) flute and piccolo sat on a harpsichord. He said I was welcome to try the flute, but there was a crack in the headjoint and I could only get a tone out when covering it up with one hand. Apparently the traditional way to fix such things is to drive in pins and break off the tips--resin is modern, even if it would look better.

There was a skull mounted on a stand. "Is it real?" he asked. "I don't know," I said. So we investigated, pulling off the lower jaw and peering at the underside. There was certainly a lot of staining and patterns that looked organic, but the teeth seemed really well attached into the jaw, and the lower jaw had what looked like marks from another mounting method.

Either way, I've never held a skull before.

These are plates from Diderot's encyclopedia. The detail is incredible. Hundreds and hundreds of pages of machinery and tools illustrated, operated by placid figures in quaint hats.

I've linked to larger versions of everything. Unfortunately, the detail passed the limits of my camera.

"Marli, Vue perspective et Geometrale du Metier a Marli"

"Soierie, Ourdissage et Relevage sur l'Ourdissoir long."

I sat on a Chippendale chair as he handed me piles of pages of medieval manuscripts. There were pages from a pocket-sized bible, about the size of a Gideon bible, dating from the start of the first universities, when students would need a handy portable reference copy of the bible to cart around, and large-sized pages in a slightly different script.

Between paragraphs in black there were sentences inscribed in red, the "rubric" (coming from the Latin word for red), which were instructions on how or when to read each passage.

I don't remember what this is, but check out that S. It's amazing.

This is from the "Spanish forger", a late 19th century forger of medieval manuscripts who would scrape off the original illustrations from parchment and paint his own better ones. In this case the words and music are original, but the illustrations are forgeries. The forgeries were discovered by J.P. Morgan's librarian who became suspicious of some Spanish manuscripts in his collection, but the forger himself is anonymous.

This is a silk-bound book from the 19th century on the history of the Miao people in China, originally bought in New Hampshire as a Japanese manuscript. I don't remember any Chinese, but the words for "man" and "woman" appeared on every page.

This is a 16th(?) century copy of the Persian Book of Kings. It's written in rhyming couplets which you read across the page, one in each column. On this page, one of the previous owners of the book has scratched off the face of the white devil in the illustration.

After a lifetime of museums, where everything is off limits, it's amazing to be encouraged to touch real parchment, and peer at the notes someone scribbled in their book 400 years ago, and take apart the old microscope to see how it's built, and sit down casually at furniture that's hundreds of years old.