Left Amsterdam for the Bourgogne via Sophie Calle in the De Pont Museum in Tilburg. A callous goodbye email, the last sentence being: Prenez soin de vous. Reflections, dissections, annotations by 107 women. Email-marginalia.
The last 300 kilometers through hilly country sunlight. Will start reading William Sherman's Used Books tomorrow. Sherman's work was kindly recommended to me some time ago and I was happily surprised to find a second hand copy in an  antiquarian bookstore nearby. The description on internet said: 'with pencil markings'. I found myself not liking the idea of someone else's markings. Strange, here I am, studying 16th/17th century marginalia while annotations by what is almost sure to be a peer might put me off? I decided to give the pencil marked book a chance. Tomorrow the proof of the pudding.

Ten days and twenty books since I started getting into the real stuff. Spent most of my time in the library,  drowning in letters. Twenty books is nothing compared to the thousands and thousands studied by marginalia-scholars, but, even so, I am pleased with the findings and looking forward to continuing in a next library stretch. For now there is a lot of material to be processed and will have plenty of time to do so since another visit to Bourgogne is forthcoming. But before 'internetless in Bourgogne' still time for a couple of days of internet activity. I must plan them well.

And they did not disappoint me

 

 With what seem to be contemporary manuscript entries throughout. 

Taranta, Practica. Lugduni: Johanem Trechsel, 1490. Title page and verso of title page. 
U.v.A. call number OTM: Inc 388.

Two incunabula waiting for me at Special Collections. It feels like my birthday!

A blog is a building. Writing and adding and changing. The ideal medium for a perfectionist.

Marginalia-criminal?

Liber I of Casavboni, Animadversionvm. Lvgdvni 1600, full of blue pencil margin markings. What a horrible sight. Seemingly meaningless dashes and crosses. Well of course not really meaningless as someone took the trouble to place them and the fact that they are only placed in Liber I must mean something. When were the markings placed? They do not seem comtemporary.
It seems too much honor to even make pictures of them, but of course I did for completeness.

The circle on the page above particularly hideous in its supposed uselessness. Maybe a child took it's chance?

I felt a little like this:

Casavboni, Animadversionvm. Lvgdvni: Antonium de Harsy, 1600. p. 1
U.v.A. call number OTM: 63-847

so to cheer myself up also took some pictures of a few of the numerous intricately decorated initials, head and tailpieces.

The marginalia hunt has started

Started out with the most recent and surely the most corpulent title of the corpus: Corpvs Ivris Civilis,  Lvgduni 1600 (symptomatic or sympathetic echo's of corpus?), a particularly voluminous set of four volumes on law with printed glosses by Accursius. Systematically leaved through thousands+ pages of text. With the exception of two 20th century library stamps, no ownership marks or marginalia to be found. Pristine pages! Wonder if anyone has ever set eyes on this text and thinking about content versus form. Printed in red and black, decorative initials, head and tailpieces throughout, inserts, different lettertypes for glosses, foot and sidenotes etc., clearly based on the layout of the manuscripts of the middle ages.

The structure is inviting, icons and colours; the content is defeating, considering the absence of marginalia, maybe also for contemporary readers.
Developing a fast way of going through the pages, but don't want to miss even one meaningful trace of use. Checking the first volume went painstakingly slow, by the fourth volume speed picked up.
Two more marginalia-less books leave me somewhat dissapointed, but as all three titles were printed in 1600 and therefore are part of the end of my timeline, their lack of marginalia does not discourage me. The library stamps found in the books could be a reason for their virginity. Libraries do not like to have 'sullied' books in their collections.
Time to start asking for some earlier titles.

Am having a hard time getting a grip on the U.v.A. search machine which produces confusing results to my queries. 'Lyon' as place of imprint results in only one hit, whereas 'Lugduni' produces non at all. Putting 'Lyon' and 'Lugduni' (excluding 'Batavorum') in the space 'any words' and specifying '1470-1600',  results in 323 records. Leaving out the exclusion of 'Batavorum' does NOT include an overwhelming amount of Leiden imprints, but does seem to produce MORE Lyon titles!? Putting 'Lyon' or 'Lugduni' in other keywords options produces yet different results. Which only goes to show that one cannot fully depend on a computer, or maybe I need to extend my knowledge of search machine psychology. Keeping both options in mind, I will be using various search words until I am satisfied to have smoked out all 16th century Lyon imprints in possession of the U.v.A.

Finally found out how to reduce the size of Ten Packages from 188MB to 2,5MB and have posted a link to the Pdf in the Bibliography of Secondary Works.

Some welcome advice from P.D.: start alternating secondary reading with the real stuff! Requested a  first book at Special Collections, but with one eye full of stitches no reading for the next couple of days. 

Searching online for an audio book to keep me busy. And thank god for blind typing!