Cortically Magnified

Collection of Sand is a collection of book reviews, exhibition reviews and travelogues that Italo Calvino wrote in the 70’s and 80’s. The quality varies. The best of them are unsurprisingly ekphrastic essays where Calvino described gardens, historical sites, and paintings in exquisite details. Those where he tried to regurgitate scientific or historical knowledge from academic books are less inspiring. But still, it is the variety of things that Calvino cared to write about that charms.

I saw this book in the Melbourne Rare Book Fair. To anyone who can read Chinese, this looks like the practice book of a young child starting to learn to write. The characters are intelligible, but the writer clearly has not mastered the basic principles. If Chinese characters are people, these little guys are seriously deformed. Some have really big heads, some have tiny feet, most of them look like zombies walking with their body parts dangling, ready to fall off.

Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization opens with the poetic imagery of Ship of Fools. But what is the ship of fools? Apparently it all started with this book. I saw it in an exhibition of books sharing the theme of traveling at the library of Monash University. This is the latin edition of Ship of Fools by German humanist Sebastian Brant, published in 1497. The illustrations are by Albretch Durer (!

This is the famous world map by the 15th century monk Fra Mauro. I saw it in Museo Galileo in Florence. Unfortunately it was a replica. The real thing is in Venice. I found it very difficult to recognize landmarks on the map because the orientation is very different from our modern convention. North is down. South is up. Here’s a puzzle: What’s this?