Margarita Nafpaktitis

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98 Posts
Librarian, seamster, cocktailian. Believer in inclusive, radical, canon-busting, genre-jumping, disciplinarily fluid, multi-lingual, empathy-inducing, curiosity-inspiring humanities out in the world.
Right after I agreed with the students that I was very lucky to have such a great job we discovered a live bug that I had to scoop up and save for the Preservation Librarian and I heard one of them say “I knew there had to be a catch.”

About forgetting or losing your eyeglasses in early modern Europe: Poor thing, have you lost your glasses again? Have you checked the book you were reading? Most often, when you forgot where you put your eyeglasses to, someone found them between the pages...

The history of reading had a chapter about forgetting eyeglasses in books, and about historians and librarians finding traces of these lost eyeglasses.

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#HowToDoWithGlassesInThePast

I wish I could find a better picture of this than this tiny one I saw on Tumblr, but every librarian and conservator is nodding their heads hard right now. https://www.tumblr.com/conservethis/724460576135413760?source=share
Well-Meaning Interventions

Here are some frequently encountered DIY repairs that, while well-meaning, are, alas, misguided interventions that exacerbate damage and some alternative approaches that better promote ongoing usabil…

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Medieval cut-and-paste: the rubricator put the red and blue section number "XLVIII" in the wrong place, so the owner of the book cut it out and stuck it in the correct place, lower down the same margin:

(Oxford, University College, MS 55 https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_13037)

University College MS. 55 - Medieval Manuscripts

Super cool. Generate 3D printable, tactile map tiles https://touch-mapper.org/en/
Tactile Maps Easily | Touch Mapper

Tactile maps easily for any address. 3D-print them yourself or order.

Touch Mapper - Tactile Maps for the Visually Impaired

The secret to comedy is timing, and I just got the payoff to a hundred year old joke. I was listening to the Blank Check podcast on Buster Keaton, which mentioned that the title of his short “One Week” was a play on “Three Weeks” a scandalous 1907 erotic novel.

We have a novelty fake book called “Four Weeks: A Loud Book” with a cap gun mechanism inside, and when you open it, the cap fires. The joke is that you were trying to steal a look at a sexy book and got very dramatically caught.

Huzzah for Stanford Graduate Workers Union (SGWU) publicly launching a unionization campaign! Grad students unionized while I was in the PhD program at the U of Michigan, and I immediately saw improvements in my quality of life: an aaaaaaalmost-liveable stipend (instead of not-at-all-really-liveable) and better health insurance that included domestic partners.
I look forward to Luxe Libris by @internetstine every month, a joyful romp through one fashionable library/book-adjacent person's style and favorite things. This month's interview with Lauren Cerand was a delight: https://luxelibris.substack.com/p/the-april-issue-lauren-cerand #fashion #textiles
The April Issue: Lauren Cerand

+Fashion is Spinach, the Dutch Textile Trade, and Law Roach's retirement

Luxe Libris
“There must be some mistake, my app said it wasn’t raining.”—me going outside.
It's sweet when people try to reassure me that things I've done haven't failed after I've declared them failures, but there's really no need! Failures happen; unless the failure involves something ethically dubious, there's no reason to feel terrible about it. Better to just acknowledge the situation for what it is and move on. #DigitalHumanities #failure