Last week’s crocodile mystery may have been a bit too mysterious, but I hope that today’s post will inspire you to look for similar mysteries on your own. Here’s a close-up detail of what I was asking about: As with nearly all photographs shared on this blog, if you click the image, a larger version will open in a new window. What might have looked like a smudge if you hadn’t enlarged the image, is now clearly a smudge worth paying attention to! More specifically, it’s a smudge made up of individual lines and whorls, a smudge made by an inky printer’s fingers. One of the reasons that I didn’t share only this detail in last week’s post is that I wanted the whole context for the fingerprint to be visible. The assistants in a print shop have long been known as printer’s devils, a name assumed to stem from…
Month: May 2012
“What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?”: May edition
First, my thanks to all of you who suggested new names for this series on identifying objects in our collection. The best suggestion came from Jeremy Dibbell, on twitter, who found this perfect moment in Antony and Cleopatra: LEPIDUS: What manner o’ thing is your crocodile? ANTONY: It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with it own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates. LEPIDUS: What color is it of? ANTONY: Of it own color, too. LEPIDUS: ’Tis a strange serpent. ANTONY: ’Tis so, and the tears of it are wet. (2.7.43-52) ((New Folger Shakespeare Library, eds Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, New York: Washington Square Press, 1999.)) There are many things to love about this passage. But for my purposes here,…