Last night we were happy to host Michelangelo Zaccarello (Università di Verona), a philologist and expert on book history, who held a two-hour “master class” seminar on several early printed books from Italy in the Watkinson’s collection.

Professor Dario Del Puppo brought the group together, which included students from both Trinity and UConn.  Michelangelo provided a narrative about the history of each book (which included our copy of Galileo’s Diologo (1632),  and why he chose these in particular. He also emphasized the book market in Italy in the Renaissance and Early Modern period, and spoke with knowledge about the market conditions for these rarities today.

Here is a fun little nugget we just acquired by Connecticut author/bookseller Edwin Valentine Mitchell (1890-1960), published in 1930.  “This year,” says the dust-jacket blurb, “may be said to mark the centennial of the beard in the United States.  One hundred years ago Joseph Palmer, a friend of Emerson and Bronson Alcott, was flung into jail in Worcester, Massachusetts, as a result of his refusal to shave.  To commemorate this event the author has written a history of beards from the earliest times down to the present day, with descriptions of the world’s most famous beards, real, false, and coloured.  Many strange and obscure volumes have been delved into for material, and some strange and amusing anecdotes have been retrieved.”

“The notes of this little bird render it more conspicuous than most of its genus, for although they cannot be called very musical, they are far from being unpleasant, and are uttered so frequently during the day, that one, in walking along the briary ranges of the fences, is almost necessarily brought to listen to its whitititee, repeated three or four times every five or six minutes, the bird seldom stopping expressly to perform its music, but merely uttering the notes after it has picked an insect from amongst the leaves of the low bushes which it usually inhabits.  It then hops a step or two up or down, and begins again.

Although timid, it seldom flies far off at the approach of man, but instantly dives into the thickest parts of its favorite bushes and high grass, where it continues searching for food either along the twigs, or among the dried leaves on the ground, and renews its little song when only a few feet distant.

Its nest is one of those which the Cow Bunting (Icterus pecoris) selects, in which to deposit one of its eggs, to be hatched by the owners, that bird being similar in this respect to the European Cuckoo.  The nest, which is placed on the ground, and partly sunk in it, is now and then covered over in the form of an oven, from which circumstance children name this warbler the Oven-bird . . . it does not chase insects by flying after them, but secures them by surprise.  Caterpillars and spiders form its principal food.”

–J. J. Audubon, Ornithological Biography, I (1831), 121.