Who doesn't love a beautiful old book?

So yesterday was a lot of tracking down books, requesting them, waiting for them, and copying the articles or pages I needed. Today was a lot of the same. It was a bit boring. But I can't get my hands on these books in the states, so I've gotta collect them while I can.

Lots of fichas rosas

Research clutter - nabbed a few more dissertation sources!

But then at the end of the day yesterday, I requested a book that really excited me. It was one I'd seen bits of it online before. It's not impossible to find in the States, but I wasn't able to get ahold of via ILL in the past since it is old and fragile, and mostly online. But not old and fragile enough to not be in the BNE's general collection of books you can just request and have at your desk in 15 minutes. SO I DID, because why not? 

I very much enjoyed leafing through Celestino Schiaparelli's 1871 Vocabulista in arabico. It's a printed edition of a thirteenth century Arabic-Latin dictionary which has been attributed to Marti. The manuscript is in Florence and has been published twice. The later was in 1989 I got to see both editions in one day :-)

Very much enjoying this beautiful 140+ year old book! 

I'm certain the binding is relatively new, but that aside, the original portions of the book were all in WAY better shape than the entire 20-something-years-old book I also had on my desk (the other edition of the Vocabulista). 1871, but it looks like it was printed yesterday on bright clean paper. It is definitely a tribute to the value of acid-free paper and quality printing. Plus it smelled amazing.  

Here are some of the beautiful details:

Lovely frontispiece with images from the MS

Intricate printing for section headings. 

I just love the texture of pages that were actually pressed when printed. Here's the raised texture of the text from the previous page. Feels neat.

Complete with a perfectly medieval explicit on the last page. This entertained me greatly. 

Seeing this beautiful book at the end of the day was the perfect way to get me excited about my research. I've been doing a lot of hunting and copying relatively rare secondary sources, which will be SO helpful for my dissertation, but I also need to make time to see some beautiful manuscripts or lovely early modern books! Because those will really excite me, much in the way this pretty old(ish) book did.