The Blog

Buonasera. Leggo sempre i miei libri e li commento nella mia bibliografia di astrologia.
Good evening. I usually read my books and I commenred the in my bibliography of astrology.
Leandro Cantamessa

I do not, on the whole, read my antiquarian books - which are not of a literary but of a scientific nature - but I do, from time to time, use them as works of reference.

I've spent more time with my collection lately in light of the COVID-19 lockdown. I look at the illustrations first, but read the works in French and English. I can pick out some words in Italian and Spanish, don't understand the Latin and can't read the German Fraktur at all!

Most of the books in my collection I've read in cheap editions (before purchasing the first editions). I visit the first editions now to review favorite passages or to open up and read selections at random.

I have collected books in optics, ranging from a 1477 printing of a handbooks for preachers based entirely on metaphors and similes of vision and the eye, through Kepler and Newton, up to Einstein's 1905 paper suggesting the particle nature of light. I have read many of theses books, particularly the early ones. I published an English translation of J.H. Lambert's Latin 'Photometria' of 1760. My mother-tongue is English, I read Latin, scientific French (but I would stall out in Montaigne), and though I've learned to 'read' (i.e. decipher) Fraktur what I do can only be described as fighting my way through with a German dictionary at my elbow (well, on my harddrive). My Italian is limited to the recognition of nouns.

For some languages, I have found Google Translator remarkably helpful. Though it is useless for Latin, it seems (just) adequate for many European languages. I wonder what other collectors have found in this regard. I would not call the result "reading" (which connotes other things) but rather something like a slow-study, and you have to treat the results with considerable care since there is no nuance or care in shade of meaning.

For those of us that do, Why do we read our books? My own (technical) education was critically dependent of books and I have always been keen to study those books that served the same purpose in centuries past. Books as instruments of progress -- Lux Mentis. I have little interest in books as objects.

I certainly read my rare books. Indeed, I have acquired most of them for the purposes of reading and studying them, and I have referred to particular copies that I own in several publications. Unlike my avatar, however, I do not dog-ear, or indeed otherwise mark them. This is of course inconsistent, since I far prefer to own books with (contemporary) annotations by named readers to ones that are clean copies.