Oxford Tuesday - Reading, Eating, Exploring, and Gaming

Normally if you get me near a bookstore I am sucked in as if it has the gravitational pull of a black hole - especially such a bookstore as the eminently distinguished Blackwell's in Oxford, but my place was next door in the Mackerras Reading Room at the Bodleian's Weston Library.

Bodleian's Weston even has a Girolamo Cardano quote on the window!

Photos above and below are of the lobby of the Weston entered through the main doors on Broad Street, but I enter through a side-door on Parks Road.

Here goes!!

Opening the clasps of this book was like opening the lid of a treasure chest!  I didn't know what to expect in each book I opened (despite the one line topic given in the Summary Catalogue and the paragraph in the Catalogus references that I poured through yesterday).  I looked first through Ashmole 1788, and it was VERY interesting, but it was works of Dee hand copied by Ashmole - good stuff, but I was eager to move on.  Next was Ashmole 1789, which turned out to be almost entirely items in Dee's own hand.  First there was a poem to Lord Burghley, the Lord Treasurer of England  .  .  .

  .  .  .  and then I turned the page  .  .  .

  .  .  .   where I'd been expecting text I saw an explosion of color.  The pictures do not do this justice.  This image is so bright, and there is gold text on the blue around the edges.  There is detail everywhere.  I'd seen Dee's marginalia in books of others that he owned, but this is a book he wrote, which includes not only his own handwriting but also his drawings.  This was treasure indeed!

This is the frontispiece to his work on calendar reform: "A plain discourse and humble advise, for our gracious Queen Elizabeth her most excellent Majesty to peruse, and consider: as concerning the needful Reformation of the Vulgar Calendar, for the civil years and days accounting or verifying according to the time truly spent. By Dr. John Dee."  (Again, this is Ashmole 1789, and it is part I.)  I assumed I would not come across anything else as amazing as this, but as I continued to page through I found something at least as amazing, if not more so, and that is the title page of Dee's work on navigation: General and Rare Memorials pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation.

The image drawn by Dee is so full of detail that every time I looked at it I found more to delight in and to wonder at!  His artistry looks to me almost like a piece by Albrecht Durer. There are four languages just on this one page: English, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.

This, again, was from Ashmole 1789 and is section IV.  John Dee coined the term "British Empire," and this is one of the first books in which it is used.

I spent hours pouring over these and other texts and could post dozens more pictures of these documents, but that's probably enough to give the idea.  If you want to seek them out, you know where to find them!

As taken as I was with the reading, and as rare an opportunity is this is for me, at some point I did need to get up and walk for a bit and also get some lunch.  As I walked along Broad Street I noticed a bouquet of dandelions.  My first thought was that a child or the parent of a child had dropped them, but I have learned in my travels never to take something at surface value and to always look up and down and all around.  Upon looking up I found a memorial to Protestant martyrs Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer.  This was not the dropped pickings of a child, this was a remembrance purposely left more than 460 years after these men were martyred.

I was pretty tired and pretty hungry when I came across this, and it took a couple of readings before I caught on that the cross they were referring to was a physical object.  I've seen crossed in most towns here, so I turned, looking for a standing sculpture.  I didn't see one, but I remembered to keep my pace slow and to look more carefully.  It was then that I saw something in the middle of the street that at a glance could have looked like a manhole cover.

I walked out into the street and realized what was meant by the cross.  It was hard not to cry thinking of men being burned to death for their faith on this very spot - especially the story of Cranmer and his multiple recantations and how, when it was finally time for his execution, he put his hand in the fire first to punish it for having signed the recantations.

After walking around a bit more, I made my way to a Pizza Express that was in a building that was initially founded in 1193.

I had what was becoming my usual in Oxford - the Pizza Express Lasagna and a Limonata to drink.  I'm pretty sure the window I was seated by is 16th-century and even more so after asking the waitress if she knew the history of the building.

This day I splurged and had dessert - lots more reading ahead of me - had to keep my energy up.

After eating, I walked down the hallway the waitress had pointed out after letting me know of the history of the building and that the paintings were 16th-century and that Shakespeare had stayed there overnight at times on his way from Stratford-upon-Avon and London.  This was quite a cultural experience to have had at a chain restaurant!

Paintings closer to the floor were sealed behind glass, and there were quite a number of old fireplaces as well.  So, I guess I ate where Shakespeare once ate - though I'm sure the fare was a bit different.

After lunch, it was back to the Bod.

In Ashmole 242 (#44) I cam across an "arithmetical treatise on fractions" by Dee that I'd had no idea existed.  I also read some of the hand-written "actions with angels" undertaken by Dee and Kelley (Ashmole 1790). And I accessed some Richard Napier writings (also an interesting character and a cousin of John Napier).  To round out my comments about my reading, I'm far more impressed with John Dee's ideas for reforming the calendar than what was actually done with the Gregorian Calendar was adopted.

I'm scrolling through my pictures as I create this post on June 6 in order to remember the specifics of May 17, which is 20 days prior to today, and my pictures go on and on, so I'm going to abbreviate the rest of this as best I can.

The reading room I use is very near the Bridge of Sighs, so when I walked past I decided to walk under it and get pictures from the other side - looking back at the Sheldonian.

While doing this, I noticed signs for a famous tavern I'd heard of, so I walked the labyrinthine path to find it - will post just a couple of pictures here and will put up more in a future post when I went back.

No, I didn't stay to get an "education" here  .  .  .

  .  .  .  then again, it's also where Bill Clinton didn't actually inhale  .  .  .

Nope - I made my way back out and walked back to my hotel before my evening plans.

Back past the Bridge of Sighs - 

Back past the Bodleian, Radcliffe Camera, and University Church - 

Into, not past, a used bookstore near my hotel - 

"MORE BOOKS" - my kind of place!

And, after a very light dinner at the hotel (probably a banana and a roll), I made my way to the Thirsty Meeples Café for their Open Gaming night.  Yes, I keep my days very full - very, very full (which puts me to shame when I think about being home, a place where it seems days and days can go by without me really accomplishing anything - how it is that I can do so much here?!).  

Here I met Lesley and Carl, and we decided to play Betrayal at House on the Hill.  Hey, I'm a gamer, if there is gaming action going on in a city I'm in, I'm going to get in on that action!

The decision wasn't easy since this café has even more games in its library than I own!  (which I guess is as it should be  .  .  .)

I had never played this game before, and I will admit to being nervous to playing with people I had never met before and playing a game I had never played before.  It's a game that started out cooperative but led eventually to one player being a betrayer (who then gets extra powers) and the other players working against that person.  I like to play cooperative, and I hate being the bad guy, but as luck would have it, I ended up being the betrayer, a Zombie Lord, and I won!

Carl took off pretty soon after play was over, but Lesley stuck around and talked with me about an upcoming gaming convention and also showed me a game he is developing and all the artwork, which is very impressive anime-type drawing, that he is doing for his game.  But then time came for him to catch his bus too, so off I went back to my hotel - 

 - by way of Christ Church and its impressive Tom Tower.  Since it doesn't get dark here until after 10pm, it was a change to see it lit up a bit after dusk.

Thus ended a full and wonderful day full of treasure and discovery and variety!