incunabula
\ˌin-kyə-ˈna-byə-lə \
\ˌin-kyə-ˈna-byə-lə \
Still on the road this week—Arwulf and I have been visiting college campuses and assorted family members along the East Coast.
The big marble box (Photo: Public Domain) Yesterday we stopped in at Yale, where I showed her several of my former haunts. Most of these were dismissed with a tolerant nod or an eye-roll—until we visited the Beinecke rare book library. This truly remarkable building is essentially a box within a box. The exterior walls are made of thin marble panels that block UV rays but allow some light to filter through. And inside this translucent marble shell is the Holy of Holies: a 6-story glass cube filled with ancient books that seems to float suspended in the space. (In fact, in true sacrosanctal fashion, the glass cube is rigged so that if a fire starts in the stacks the entire space is flooded with halon gas, which will suppress the fire without risking water damage to the books. People in the stacks are advised to get out ASAP if this happens because this system does not care if you live or die. What matters is saving the books.)
The Holy of Holies. (Photo credit: Everett Howe)
This is a place filled to the rafters (if it had rafters) with cool stuff. There are Shakespeare Folios, Gutenberg Bibles, Audubon’s Birds of America (the marvelously-named Double Elephant Folio), and countless maps and illuminated manuscripts. And they let grubby undergraduates handle them! (Well, they do encourage you to wash your hands first.)
In fact Beinecke was a major factor in my own decision to go to Yale way back when. (Other key factors: Yale was far away from my home in Los Angeles, and I got in.) Arwulf, who wants to major in history and is deeply interested in medieval studies (and who, like her mother before her, wants to get the hell out of suburban Southern California) beheld these riches, and a gleam appeared in her eye.
The gleam intensified when our guide told us that the Beinecke library is home to a significant percentage of the world’s incunabula. (Though it turns out Harvard has more, ahem.)
In fact Beinecke was a major factor in my own decision to go to Yale way back when. (Other key factors: Yale was far away from my home in Los Angeles, and I got in.) Arwulf, who wants to major in history and is deeply interested in medieval studies (and who, like her mother before her, wants to get the hell out of suburban Southern California) beheld these riches, and a gleam appeared in her eye.
The gleam intensified when our guide told us that the Beinecke library is home to a significant percentage of the world’s incunabula. (Though it turns out Harvard has more, ahem.)
| I had been vaguely aware that this word had to do with old and rare books. But it actually derives from the Latin word for swaddling clothes--literally, the straps that hold a baby in a cradle (in- plus cūnae, or cradle). So by extension, incunabula refers to the earliest beginnings or first traces of something. Eventually people started using it specifically to refer to the earliest beginnings of print culture; more precisely, to books printed before 1500 and the broad adoption of movable type in Europe. |  Here's an example from 1499: Copulata super tres libros Aristotelis De anima iuxta doctrinam Thomae de Aquino. It may not be quite as dirty as it sounds. (Image from Wikimedia Commons) |
Swaddling has been around a lot longer. It is widely used to calm newborns, and some people recommend keeping it up well into a baby’s first year. Nowadays most people use a blanket of some kind, but classically people used strips of cloth (“swaddling bands”), sometimes for several months, on the theory that restraining a child in this way will help her limbs grow straight and without deformity. (It doesn’t.)
We swaddled Arwulf when she was a tiny infant because it seemed to help her sleep. We called it the Baby Burrito and it was adorable. But soon enough, she grew too active to put up with this treatment and kicked her way out of her wrappings. The waffle-weave blanket we used is still tucked in a drawer, but incredibly, she is about to start her senior year of high school.
There are times I fear she will never be able to live on her own. How on earth could she? She rarely gets out of bed under her own steam; she has been known to skip several meals in a row because she can’t be arsed to get off the computer and look in the fridge; she loses her cell phone in the heaps of laundry piled on the floor of her room. And yet we see the traces of her adult self emerging from the adolescent cocoon: the intellectual fire, the bravery, the focus, the story-teller’s flair.
She gleams as she gazes at the incunabulae: this is her kingdom. She is getting ready to kick through her shell and leave her wrappings behind. Strips of linen heaped on the bedroom floor.
We swaddled Arwulf when she was a tiny infant because it seemed to help her sleep. We called it the Baby Burrito and it was adorable. But soon enough, she grew too active to put up with this treatment and kicked her way out of her wrappings. The waffle-weave blanket we used is still tucked in a drawer, but incredibly, she is about to start her senior year of high school.
There are times I fear she will never be able to live on her own. How on earth could she? She rarely gets out of bed under her own steam; she has been known to skip several meals in a row because she can’t be arsed to get off the computer and look in the fridge; she loses her cell phone in the heaps of laundry piled on the floor of her room. And yet we see the traces of her adult self emerging from the adolescent cocoon: the intellectual fire, the bravery, the focus, the story-teller’s flair.
She gleams as she gazes at the incunabulae: this is her kingdom. She is getting ready to kick through her shell and leave her wrappings behind. Strips of linen heaped on the bedroom floor.
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