Word: antiquarians
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Laurence Witten, an obscure antiquarian bookseller in New Haven, unearthed a 15th century European map that compels a reappraisal of the entire age of New World exploration and is rated by the Yale Library as its "most exciting single acquisition in modern times." See BOOKS...
...related by Thomas E. Marston, Yale University Library's curator of medieval and Renaissance literature, in the gruffly deprecatory language of scholarship, the discovery of the map is quite a dramatic yarn in itself. It began in October 1957, when a New Haven antiquarian bookseller, Laurence Witten, dropped by the Yale Library to show Marston and Map Curator Alexander O. Victor a slim volume that Witten had acquired from a private collection in Europe. The book included the map and 21 pages of text, which were a transcription of an account of the expedition led by Friar John...
Contemptuous Enclave. The Finzi-Continis are proud, pretentious, cultivated Jews, living in world-weary isolation behind the walls of their vast estate, which survives like a verdant enclave in the provincial city of Ferrara. Father Ermanno is an aging scholar-gentleman who has passed his life in obscure antiquarian studies, and who regards the Fascists with courtly contempt. Mother Olga is an aristocratic wraith who lives only to mourn the death of her six-year-old child. Son Alberto is a languid dilettante. Daughter Micol is a beautiful, spirited intellectual who cannot bring herself to escape the family...
That mellow old glow of mantled gas is bathing the front walks and herbaceous borders of thousands of ranchstyles, split-levels, Cape Cod saltboxes and California moderns-lending what their owners hope is a touch of antiquarian distinction in a fluorescent world. In 1914, before the miracle of cheap electricity made them obsolete, some 290,000 gas lamps illuminated U.S. streets. Today there are no fewer than...
Glow of Happiness. Typically, Waugh "follows the old fashion" of autobiography and begins not with himself but his ancestors. With warmth, wit and antiquarian zeal he traces them through four generations of the solid, comfortably moneyed professional class that saw the flowering of the British Empire. Waugh himself was born near London in 1903, given the name Evelyn "from a whim of my mother's. I have never liked the name." He borrows an anecdote from much later in life to illustrate why: "Once during the Italian-Abyssinian war I went to a military post many miles from...