natasha patrizia

visited my favourite bookstore cat today 🐱📚

[Call for papers] FuMaSt – The Future of Manuscript Studies Fifth edition, Firenze, 5-6 February 2026 (no later than 30 October 2025).
www.irht.cnrs.fr/sites/defaul...

slightly haunted view of my local monastery during my evening walk 🕯️🏰

...I got in!! and ranked quite high!! I'm going to specialize in book history & library studies for the next two years of my life!!

Allie’s hand holding a book in red Morocco, roughly the size of an iPhone +

Allie’s hand holding a small book with a gilt tooled spine, roughly the size of an old iPhone

Allie’s hand holding a tiny little worn out chonky book, roughly the size of an Oreo (if Oreos were square)

Allie’s hand holding the chonky tiny book open to the first page

Sometimes at the end of a long day you need to carve out some time to hang out with tiny books

haven't been very active on here lately but today I passed the written portion of the admissions process of the grad programme I'd like to attend - now for the oral next week 🤞🏻🍀

went in search of the artisanal paper booth (they had Fabriano-made samples) but instead stumbled across this very nifty display at my local medieval fair!

The full LGBTQIA+ Book History Bibliography is here 🏳️‍🌈!!! 650+ items of LGBTQIA+ #BookHistory!!
Check out the intro to see how we made it, the primary bibliography, the article appendix, and the absolutely magnificent zine!!! From monographs to zines, you'll find it here!
sharpweb.org/sharpnews/20...

How to become a printer's apprentice in 1743. A boy is led by Carmenta, a Roman goddess who created the alphabet, up steps of a temple where the goddess Typographia awaits. Each step represents a skill that must be mastered, such as reading, writing, foreign languages, declensions, conjugation. 1/2

Book opened to highly illustrative title page

Close up of highly-illustrative page of text

Close up image of the word "Christ" woven from silk

Close up image of silk fibers forming the letter C

Have you ever seen a book made entirely of silk? One item getting a lot of reading room attention recently is this "Livre de Prières." This book was manufactured with the Jacquard process, which relied on perforated punch cards to operate a loom, and is considered a precursor to early programming.

nothing quite as anxiety-inducing as emailing academic figures you admire for advice

Photograph of lots of old books and a bust.

Library of the Plantin–Moretus Museum in Antwerp. #BookWormSat

Interior of the Bodleian Library, 1675 - I'm afraid the academic looking out of the window on the top right is ... me (Rijksmuseum)

the novel in question, a little worse for wear given how much I've been toting it around in this last week

slowly but surely getting on with my summer study programme 📖

in other news, I have finished my read-through of the first text for grad school admissions (principles and issues in libraries and librarianship) and am close to finishing the second (history of latin script), hoping to begin the third (on the history of national administrations) in the coming days

reading a novel that is a jaw-droppingly satiric and scathing criticism of how humanities faculties function in my home country and unsure if I'm finding it more compelling for how well it's written or horrifying for its plausibilities

No one warns you how much academia is just emailing people you’re scared of

a patron returned this book during my library shift yesterday, how could I not check it out out of curiosity? (the Voynich obsession is real)

How to collate an early printed book This mini series by Dr Sian Witherden (Rare books and manuscripts specialist) explains how to collate early printed books. These blog posts work through several practical examples from the Bodleian…

Ever wished someone would sit down and explain how to collate an early printed book? The marvellous ‪‬@sianwitherden.bsky.social has done exactly that in a brand new series for Teachable Features: teachingthecodex.com/how-to-colla... #bookhistory #incunabula #teachingcodex

🚨Call for Papers: The 18th St Andrews/USTC Book History Conference on 'Print and Education' will take place 18–20 June 2026.

👉 Further details here: www.ustc.ac.uk/conference

📅 Application deadline: 12 December 2025

📖 We look forward to receiving your proposals!

#CfP #bookhistory #skystorians

Francesca Wade · Why waste time hot airing? The Best-Paid Woman in NYC In​ her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene was one of the best-paid women in New York City. As J.P. Morgan’s personal...

‘As J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian, she criss-crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of rare manuscripts to add to his collection, outbidding and outsmarting rivals wherever she went.’

Francesca Wade on Belle da Costa Greene:
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

have signed up for and very much look forward to this but just wanted to point out the typo re: the date/month here!

got momentarily distracted chasing a breadcrumb about Umberto Eco's model reader; note to self: add The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts to my TBR

very grateful for the library's enormous ceiling fans keeping me from melting into a puddle during this study session

went to get myself a library card at a nearby state/research library - one with a really particular manuscript and incunable collection! - and the view from the reading room made my day

one of those cases where this was mentioned in passing in a course or textbook once, buried in some crevice of my memory, and has now been unearthed by a mention in a Petrucci text I'm reading

one of life's great joys is research rabbit holes, and today's adventure brought me to learn that Pascoli wrote a latin poem in 1899 about the Sosii brothers' Roman bookshop in I a.C. described to us by Horace (and bookmarking a bunch of interesting papers interpreting it!)

another day juggling bibliography and the history of the Latin alphabet for my grad admissions exam ft. my Gutenberg Bible pencilcase 📖