If you were here, and if you cared to hear, I could tell you about what I learned today about hand-press (as opposed to machine-press) books, about chain lines and wire lines on laid paper, about how difficult it can be to determine the format of a book printed on wove paper with no watermark, and about the different ways of producing a duodecimo (or twelvemo) gathering. It has, in other words, been a day of intellectual ferment, one of those days when I actually had to create a tiny octavo gathering in order to understand what an instructional video was trying to tell me about how that format's pagination works. Now I'm on to reading about type--how it's cast, how it's put together, how it's described.

Now, the waning moon is rising yellowly over the fields, into the clear sky that has somehow followed a sweltering, blue-hot day. And because I'm not writing much to you this evening, I'll give you two images, one for decoration and one for amusement. Tomorrow, more.