Day 12: Manuscript Photography Day 2 and the Awesome Bookstore

Previous Posts in the series:

1. Getting Ready
2. Day 1: Traveling
3. Day 2: Manuscript Business
4. Day 3: The Paleographer
5. Day 4: Catalog Day
6. Days 5 and 6: General Work Days
7. Day 7: Road Trip to Sounion!
8. Day 8: Easter
9. Days 9 and 10: General Work Days Part 2
10. Day 11: Manuscript Photography Day 1

Photography

Today began as day two of the manuscript shoot. We finished up the manuscript of Revelation that we began yesterday, me at the computer and Garrett positioning the manuscript. After about an hour Dan took over the computer and I set to the task of verifying that the images we had taken were all in focus, no text was cut off, etc.

Most of my verification time was spent on the very late manuscript of Matthew that we had photographed on day 1. The manuscript includes commentary. Some of it (perhaps all...I did very little reading of the actual text today) was in the margins, which ended up causing problems. Since its original creation it had been rebound, and some of the text that was in the margin was now in the binding itself (not too uncommon), making the text of some commentary impossible to read without disassembling the volume, which we did not do. So along with verifying the clarity of the images, I also had to mark down images that were missing commentary due to this later rebinding. Not terribly exciting work though important.

After the manuscript of Revelation, Dan and Garrett began on an 11th century copy of the gospels. This has turned out to be our most difficult to photograph so far as the text is older and the pages are very warped. Over half the manuscript was finished today and the rest will be completed tomorrow. I expect to spend my time converting images from raw to tiff to jpeg, verifying images and burning dvd’s.

The Totally Awesome Bookstore

One of my favorite hobbies is to explore bookstores. Today I was in my favorite bookstore, in terms of coolness of layout, by far. This was a pretty large bookstore compared to the other two I had been in since I arrived in Greece. Both of the others were small and contained two floors. This one was a little larger on each floor except that, if you count the Mezzanine, it had 10 floors. Seriously. It totally rocked. The nice Greek booksellers were nice enough to let me snap a picture of one of their level maps (though I think they were very confused by the request):

There was one book in particular that was interesting. It was 85 euro and weighed probably 20 pounds so it would have been a pain to get back to the states, but it looks awesome. It is a book, in Greek, that is a history of ancient Greek literature from Homer to around the time of Constantine. I wanted it so BADLY! I’m planning on going back tomorrow to get the ISBN number so I can keep a record of what it is. For now I think I’m going to wait to buy it since my modern Greek is rather lacking. I think the deal I’m going to make with myself is that by the next time I come (September time frame -- on vacation with the wife), I will need to have gone through a basic modern Greek course and must have read a number of the children’s books I have purchased. By then I will be far from a fluent speaker or reader, but I would expect that I could actually read it slowly, dictionary in hand. I SO want that book...

The Intertubes Think I’m Greek

I believe I’m mentioned before that Google search is convinced that I’m Greek. I haven’t figured out how to get them to show their search interface and results in English. I noticed another site today that also thinks I’m Greek, and that’s Facebook.

Facebook, I can help translate your interface into Koine Greek, but you better not enlist my help for modern.