Well now at the end of the year, my friendship with my old book “Thaumaturgus opticus” by Jean François Niceron is going to end. Not that I don’t want to be friends with it anymore, I just think it is time to go on our separate ways. It will connect with new people analog and digital, and I am going to connect with new books. But before the end I want to summarise our good friendship. Every task I had to build the friendship had some influence on it, so I am going to say something to each task.
In task one I researches information about my book, I thought it has a strange title and I was bothered by the fact that it was so rare and only written in Latin. I didn’t like that because how should I ever get to know a book which I can’t read. But I was curious and thought that the author seems to be interesting.
In task two we met, I needed to go to Einsiedeln to see it, which bothered me because I had to give a whole Friday afternoon/evening for the journey and the meeting. But as I arrived in Einsiedeln I was overwhelmed by the beautiful library my book lived in and I was surprised how big this old book was. I appreciated how the book was in a good condition and how nice the drawings were. The book had a lot to narrate though I wasn’t able to read the words. On this event I was really getting friends with “Thaumaturgus opticus”
In the third task I had to find out if my book had any other versions or copies. In this case that was a difficult task because I found several books which are referring on “Thaumaturgus opticus” but they are obviously no copy or another version of it. It confused me and bothered me that I couldn’t read a little bit of them or my book and neither found a good summary or something. It was a big mystery for me if this books really belong to another or not.
The fourth task should be really hard because I had to understand how the book was build up and what the key points are. The book really didn’t make it easy for me. I didn’t understand much and was just guessing some things. But luckily, I remembered that when we met, the book gave me all of this information. And on top of that I took pictures of the little pages which were laying by the book which tell some interesting facts.
At the conclusion I think my friendship with “Thaumaturgus opticus” was guided by our meeting in Einsiedeln, the book wasn’t friendly through digital research, it wanted to be visited. And I think that is also very important to build up the friendship. Of course I didn’t do enough and was easily bored to get the friendship better digitally, but I tried and searched for ways to go around the language barrier.