Desperately seeking Bischoff
This quarter at Drexel, the class I’m excited to be taking is History of the Book. I’m already generating paper
topics. (I want to use the paper to explore one of my nebulous
future project ideas. Representations of opera in 18th century British
engravings? Maps in books? Stages in the development of indices and
tables of contents? I kind of want to dig up a topic on the Florentine Camerata, but I won’t know how feasible that’ll be from a book-history perspective until I do a little exploratory research.)
Anyway, one of our first readings, for next week, is a big chunk of
Bernhard Bischoff’s Latin Palaeography. It’s one of four books supposedly at the Drexel bookstore, but only three are on the shelves.
Guess which one is missing? And guess which one is checked out at
Drexel and Bryn Mawr, doesn’t circulate from Penn, and takes 1-3 weeks
to ship from Amazon? ABE Books looks better in terms of shipping times,
but I still can’t get it by Tuesday.
So my options for this weekend are: 1) brandish my non-Penn-student Penn library card and hope they’ll let me look at the
reserve copies, or 2) try to read the required 70 pages by fiddling
about with Amazon Book Search. The moral: Every so often, having access to the holdings of six libraries isn’t enough.
[Update: Ordered it from Alibris. Got the confirmation e-mail and everything. But then Alibris discovered that the book was "unavailable" and cancelled my frakking order — so Amazon it is, then. The textbook gods, they are laughing gleefully.]
Oooh, Love Bischoff. I’ve never had any troubles using stuff at Penn, being a non-Penn student.
Can I look at yr syllabus!!?!?!?!?!?!??!?
SO JEALOUS!!
Sh-t, mine is missing in the black hole where I assume my Gaskell went as well. But there’s a copy in our library — would you like me to scan it for you? (the 70 pages, I mean)
Jane, I think I can make do with Penn’s copies for the time being, but thank you for offering!
Jeannette, yes, absolutely — let’s have coffee again and I’ll bring my already-growing sheaf of History of the Book stuff.