The recollection of this story  cannot possobily communicate the thrill of the event itself. Here goes anyway.

At the Mark Samuels Lasner symposium on March  18, one of the speakers was Mark Dimunation, Chief of Rare Books and Special Collections at the Library of Congress. Mark told excellent book collecting stories, and you can imagine there are a few good stories from the Library of Congress.

One, in particular, was about the LoC’s interest in obtaining a copy of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger), a short astronomical treatise published in New Latin by  Galileo Galilei, published in 1610 and not very easy to come across—especially a proof copy.

One day Dimunation gets a  message,

“Mark, we have your Galileo.”

A couple of days later, Ray Nichols and Jill Cypher are at the Library of Congress for an APHA monthly meeting looking at “block books” from the collection, and an idea occurs to Ray. Wouldn’t it be nice if he was sitting in the Rare Book Reading Room and someone called over and said, 

“Ray, we have your Galileo.”

So they joined with a couple of other friends and ordered up Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius. It usually takes a bit of time for the books to be brought up, so we asked if it would be OK to go to lunch in the LoC’s cafeteria first and come back to see the books. “Sure. That would be fine.”

We were let into the Reading Room and settled into our chairs when we got back. A lady from behind the counter announced…

“Ray, we have your Galileo.”

Apparently, our friend, Eric, who works in the Library, had passed along my little story. Damn, it felt good to hear it called out.

Ray’s hands are looking at “his copy of Starry Messenger. After all, a couple of years ago, Mark Dimunation told him personally that this was his library.

Wouldn’t you love to see the lockup on this page? Probably (?) it was a woodcut.

Ray thinks this would be a good “Afternoon Diversion” poster to make with just the layout of stars and a block of type describing this story. And as a lockup and not a woodcut. You can plan on it.

I’d like to know who wrote this. Probably just a note to remind the owner that inside is a booklet by Galileo. You wouldn’t want it mixed in with all the other booklets.

Title page.

Page with Galileo’s name.

Just a great sheet of paper. You get the sense that this is proof as the two images overlap. Perhaps they just threw in a second print to slightly pull the images apart.

This copy of Starry Messenger is proof. It isn’t hard to dream a little and wonder whose handprint is on this page.

You might as well throw in the second book we went to see simultaneously. This was Cranach Press’ edition of Hamlet.

We were specifically interested in connecting with the “lined blocks” used in the illustrations, so we asked for the deluxe copy. After we were done with it, Mark Dimunation, who walked in just as we were finishing with our Hamlet connecting, told us there was a deluxe copy that they had, which included page proofs of the book. We decided to save that for next time.

If you follow our work, you may see this idea of using some common visual element in a repeating fashion come up sometime in a future piece of ours.

It is interesting to compare the blacks in Hamlet versus the blacks in another book like the Golden Cockerell edition of The Four Gospels. In The Four Gospels, the blacks are COMPLETELY black. In Hamlet,  the wood grain is very evident.

A killer initial cap.

Now starting a series of images showing some different uses of the line blocks.

One of the boxes of line blocks. It was surprising that a number of the blocks had not been printed.

This is the only illustration using color.

A little hard not to include this illustration.

What a fantastic way to spend a day.

It is worth noting that the people that work in the Library are amazingly helpful. They should have a tip jar on the counter.