I cannot speak for others, but I find the single-most difficult element of packing–whether for a holiday, work, or (in this case) house sitting–is always the selecting of books to be lugged hither and thither. I imagine everyone has their general parameters for the process. Mine are:

1. Some poetry
2. Some Old English (or Middle English)
3. Some history
4. A novel or two
5. Whatever is required for projects on the go

I know what you’re thinking. “Get a damned Kindle, Kobo, or some such, you troglodytic whinger. Take the whole library with you and shut up about it already.”

I prefer ‘antediluvian’.  I believe I am at least that evolved. Moreover, I am contemplating, not whinging. Furthermore, for the record, I did attempt to join the 21st century by purchasing one of those aforementioned gadgets a few years ago. I made certain it was one of the good ones, supposedly easy on the eyes (in the sense of eye-fatigue and not in the Richard Armitage sense) and all that.  There was only one word for the thing: anathema.

No smell of ink. No texture under the fingertips. No sliding whisper of turning leaves. The thing had no heft (which I know is one of its supposed virtues) and it felt utterly artificial. Most importantly, there was no way to make notes in the margins, so that later one might flip rapidly through and find the bits marked for particularly beautiful passages, bits where one suspected the author had lost her/his mind, bits that onenever wanted to forget but knew one’s memory would mangle within 30 pages or so, bits that one would give somebody else’s kidney to have written, and so on. Before that Kindle/Kobo disaster,  I knew I was a habitual marginalia-ist, but I had no idea how crucial even the possibility of scribbling was to the very act of reading. I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

Dear Reader, I returned it.

Consequently, I  will happily dedicate a portion of my luggage to books or carry a spine-collapsing backpack, so long as I can have real books with me.  And that returns us to the quagmire of the selection process because those categories cited above are terribly, terribly broad.  I mean, poetry alone takes quite a while. Milton or Tranströmer? Rilke or Stevens? Carson or Moore? Armitage (Simon, that is) or Jennings? What if you’re sacked out on the road somewhere contemplating some singular prospect and decide you need Hopkins and you’ve brought Hill? That’s the stuff of deep, deep dissatisfaction, that is.

Dithering aside, the one advantage of this occasional, excruciating scrutinizing of the bookshelves is the rediscovery of a book that has slipped from conscious memory. This go round, I found Malcolm Hislop’s How to Read Castles: a crash course in understanding fortifications (Bloomsbury). I’d picked up Hislop in Limerick, Ireland more as a reminder of the visit than anything else. I most certainly did not need another book on the types, elements, or history of castles. I believe I spent a happy hour with it in a tea shop, fell asleep over it on the plane, only to completely forget about it after shelving it once I got home. It got lost among counterparts like H. W. Kaufman’s The Medieval fortress: castles, forts and walled cities of the Middle Ages (Da Capo Press), Otto Stimson’s ubiquitous Gothic Cathedrals (Princeton UP), R. A. Stalley’s very useful Early Medieval Architecture (Oxford UP), and then one of my favorites, S. Gardener’s out-of-print  A Guide to English Architecture (Cambridge UP) which I rescued from the bin into which it had been scandalously deaccessioned by a local library. (Such is my affection for this book–particularly Arnold Mitchell’s illustrations–that I am slowly copying it–word and image–by hand.)

Needing an architectural reference for castles for this last trip, I decided to bring Hislop’s  How to read Castles. Its snack-sized entries seemed like perfect porch reading – not exhaustive, but fine details so far as they went. It was an solid pick unlike the New York Times bestseller which I took with me and which I heartlessly abandoned at a local Starbucks. (25 pages of that damage was enough for me. It’s not often I bail, but I bailed. Hype or no hype.)

Once settled with the guide and a G&T on the porch, I remembered why I’d bought Hislop’s guide in the first place. It’s a sweet little encyclopedic thing that begins with the “Grammar” of the Castle, the relationship between function and form, and the general history of these sort of fortifications. No, there’s nothing earth-shattering or new here, but it is tidily brought together. I appreciate that Hislop touches lightly on non-Western European castle building to provide a different angle on roles castles could play in expansion and in warfare, providing a useful (albeit fleeting) reminder that Western Europe didn’t have any corner on the fortification market either in terms of innovation or rigorous application of the technology’s possibilities.

From there, the book provides a fine visual guide into the details of castles. Ever wonder what the name is for the sloping base of a fortified wall? Wonder no more. If the walls have an angle that A) exposes to hot oil from above any nincompoop with the temerity to scale it, or B) defies the use of battering rams, digging works, and whatnot, then it’s a batter or talus. If it’s just straight up and down and sends out engraved invitations with “Scale me” on them, it’s a curtain wall. Yes, yes. That’s an gross oversimplification, but you get the idea.

Want to distinguish your machiolated turret from your corbelled turret? Of course you do.

 

When playing Scrabble have you ever put down the word ‘bartizan‘ with the ‘Z’ on the triple letter, only to falter when challenged so that you gave the definition of a ‘barbican‘ by accident? Did the execrable blighter against whom you were playing refuse to give you the points because the word you put down was not the word you defined, despite the fact ‘bartizan’ is STILL A WORD?  Well, don’t make that mistake again. Study the figures below and win that damn game of Scrabble.

Bartizan.

Barbican.All straight? Good. This is more important knowledge than you can imagine.

The battlefield of Scrabble aside, Hislop’s book offers practical guidance for those starting their love affair with fortifications, an architectural kama sutra, of sorts. Even if you’re just having a passing holiday fling, you’ll find it useful for getting a sense of practical details that will enable you to “read” the structure at which you’re looking.

Take windows, for example. Beyond the mere the change of shape from the semi-circular Romanesque to the lancet shapes of the Gothic and the various foils—tresfoil and cinquefoil–Hislop provides hints to how the shape and tracery details of windows may reflect the purpose of the rooms which they illuminated. So, groups of arches were often the “hallmarks” of important chambers like the great hall and chapel. Similarly, while lancet windows were the province of churches in the thirteenth century their use proliferated to castles in the fourteenth. Who doesn’t want to know this while toddling about ruins and such?

Then, for geeks such as myself (because everything written hitherto is without doubt of general interest to everyone) Hislop provides details about stonemasonry and variations on a theme in loopholes. Oh, frabjous day!

The splayed foot. The cross slit. The oillet.

 

You are, I know, a happier person for that knowledge.

You’re welcome.

 

Malcolm Hislop, How to Read Castles: A crash course in understanding fortifications. Bloomsbury Visual Arts, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. London, 2016.

 

 

 

 

 

I expect that for many people, libraries serve as a favorite ‘second home.’ For some, that home may be the tried and true library of one’s academic institution. For others, it will be the library that houses the particular book or item that is the current object of desire. [Scribal rant: For crying out loud Northshore Interlibrary Loan, you told me I was third in the queue for series one of The Good Place in January. January! It’s June!] And yes, dear reader, that momentary rant means that I do not “do” Netflix, Hulu, or any such. I’ll pay for books, but I will not pay for TV, and that brings us back to the subject at hand. Books, books, books, and the purchase thereof.

Being generally curious as well as thoroughly acquisitive where books are concerned, I have a fairly eclectic personal library. From books on the medieval and renaissance spice trade to guides on the flora and fauna of the Alps, from Ottoman poetry to the geology of caves, from books on the history of the peony to histories of typefaces, my natural profligacy is contained by two things alone: budget and space. I’m currently working on insulating my bedroom with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. I’ll let everyone know how it works out next winter.

Some of my favorites books are catalogues from museum exhibitions.  The best catalogues distill a remarkable amount of scholarship about the objects’ or artists’ period and importance, and they do it with pictures! Or more correctly, for the pedants among you, plates. There are a few museums that I cannot seem to visit without leaving loaded down by new treasures (all legally acquired from the bookstore). The Musée de Cluny in Paris, for example, has dented my wallet repeatedly.  Another is the Cloisters in New York City.

Timothy B Husband’s catalogue The World in Play: Luxury Cards 1430-1540 from a 2-15-15 exhibition at the Cloisters is one such treasure from the Cloisters. Did I need a book examining the evolution of playing cards as the late middle ages slipped toward the early modern? Mmmm-yeeeees. When I purchased this catalogue, I was thinking it would give me the lay of the land regarding the style and production of cards of this time and maybe some of the games.

Style? Check.

Production methods? Check.

Games? Alack and alas, no.

Still, the catalogue more than made up for that infelicity. Perhaps this is common knowledge for others, but I did not know that playing cards (like so much else) were a legacy of cultural intersection from this age of exploration. They were introduced to the West, Husband writes, “about the middle of the fourteenth century, probably from the Near East via Venice or from the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt, through southern Italy, Sicily or even Spain” (p. 13). Since one of the foci of the novels upon which I’m working is the intersection of Christian West and Muslim East, I felt that little tidbit more than made up for the fact that, apparently, the games of the day are a mystery.

That mystery becomes apparent when one scans the richness and diversity of the few extant decks from the period. Admittedly, the variety of suits is not so important as their number, and there are consistently four.  Early variety gives way to certain norms. Where the French would eventually settle upon cups, batons, swords, and coins for their suits, the Germans had Acorns, Leaves, Hearts, and Bells, but that was the mid-fifteenth century.  Before that, you’ll get falcons, deer, hounds, and herons like the elegant bird below.

Of course, you and I will “get” nothing of the sort as such elegant, hand-painted cards as these have mostly gone the way of all things fragile and well used. As Husband writes, “Inevitably, cards are lost, torn, worn out, and the entire deck thrown out. Cards are fundamentally fugitive. But they are also ubiquitous” (ibid). The remains from that fugitive lot that Husband analyzes are certainly tantalizing. But where the suits can be made sense of, the multiplicity and variation of the face cards utterly confounds me. Where we today have limited face cards in our decks, the decks that Husband analyzes don’t stop at kings and queens, jacks and so on.  Take, for example, this potter who might be the inspiration for Demi Moore’s character in Ghost.

The suits of what is referred to as the Courtly Household cards are the countries of Germany, Hungary, Bohemia, and France. This sample from the colored woodblock prints is rather remarkable in its details. (The tile floor!) The above female potter is an example of one of the many functionaries who populate the deck in addition to the king and queen. Additionally, one finds ladies-in-waiting, marshals, chamberlains, chancellors, messengers, heralds, knights, crossbowmen (below), hunters, trumpeters, masters of the households, barbers, fishmongers, and fools. Maybe people who play complex card games can see their way through this and imagine possibilities, but as Canasta is the most complex thing I ever mastered (and promptly forgot), I’m stumped.

Where the charming Courtly Household cards above, illustrate the various functionaries found within the world of the elites, a century later, we see another artist reflecting quite differently, even critically upon the world before him. The kings of the deck in particular reflect the reality of an expanding world, as with the King of Bells card below.

The kings of this deck by Peter Flötner are not solitary, posed men, but men of action. As with the non-European King of Bells who towers over the tiny (exotic) elephant and the instrument of exploration ship at his feet, the other kings tower over their landscapes. Another, dressed a bit like an Ottoman, raises his scepter over prone infants (looking, as Husband points out, uncomfortably like Herod surveying the slaughter of the innocents); yet another, this time very European king stands before a pikeman, clearly directing the actions of a great empire.

From the kings, the deck runs down the social scale. Yet, interestinly repulsive as an Under Knave with a conspicuously dripping nose may be, it’s the thematic representations on the pip cards that are the real innovation here. The acorn suit is bedecked with greedy boars; the leaf by peasants occupied variously; hearts by lovers in scenes from the tender to the profane; and bells by scenes of folly in all its various forms. In a move that joins together entertainment and commentary, the artist portrays what he saw and knew from a world stage where great men toyed with the lives of others to humbler scenes of courtship, from greedy consumption to the unmasking of deceit.

Now all I need is for someone to reproduce one of these decks and invent the games to go with it. Surely, that’s not asking too much.