Wizards and more old books

We show-goers (what I've dubbed Marlo, Lara, Tim, & I after our adventures in London...and those to come in Stratford this week) finished out last week in true Oxfordian form: catching the new Harry Potter movie. After forcing Lara to stuff my gummy worms in her coat pocket to avoid the leering eyes of the ticket collectors (I, alas, was pocket-less), we made our way to the theater--albeit amidst swarms of pre-teens and their parents. But that's not the point. Wizardry and horcruxes and such. That's what it's all about. Well, that and the gummy worms.


Quite a fun show, and well-worth the ridicule we faced from our peers the next day at breakfast. Friday brought us to our last library tour at St. John's College, and, to drop a total cliche, one worth the wait. Jim Bracken, one of the seminar leaders and Assistant Director of Libraries at Ohio State, organized a fabulous exhibit of a range of early printed books and manuscripts, including William Caxton's (the first printer in England) 1483 copy of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and John Eliot's so-called 1663 "Indian" Bible (translated into a Native American language). We even got our first, and probably last, group shot and had time to dig into the books resting in their almost-authentically-early-modern library stalls. Most important of all, though, were the many individual "reading Chaucer" pictures taken that day.