The «Friendship» started last year in September 2019. I originally had the book Alberti Dureri pictoris et architecti praestantissimi De urbibus by German painter, printmaker and theorist of the German Renaissance Albrecht Dürer. The book was stored in the Werner Oechslin library in Einsiedeln. When we visited the library, they handed me the wrong book. I was handed the book Alberti Dureri clarissimi pictoris et geometræ De sym[m]etria partium in rectis formis hu[m]anorum corporum, libri by the same author. The book was in the same language as the first, namely in Latin. Luckily, I understood the title and there were a lot of illustrations in the book so I could follow the content of the book. Therefore, I had to redo the first task with the new book I got. So that wasn’t really a good start for the friendship.
So, I did the first task again and the following tasks with the new book by Albrecht Dürer. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do task 5, because the book was in Latin and I had some struggles with the computer program. So, I had to do task 5 again with another book, again by the same author Albrecht Dürer. The book called Memoirs of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries. Task 5 was probably the most important task, because the books finally got to interact with each other. Unfortunately, I didn’t know much about the new book, besides that’s about the author’s journey to Venice and the letters he wrote during that time.
Because I had to change books all the time and never got to know one well, I had a pretty hard time becoming friends with an old book. And in general, I have some doubts with this whole concept of getting friends with an old book, because it was rather a forced bond with the book. Some of the tasks were in my opinion not necessary and just time consuming. But maybe that’s just because I was unlucky that I had three books in total instead of just one. However, I liked the visit to the Werner Oechslin library in Einsiedeln because it was the only time where we had physically contact with the book and one could learn the most that day. It was the first time for me in such a library like the Werner Oechslin library. It was also interesting to get some informations about the library itself. I probably would have enjoyed this whole exercise more, if there has been more physical contact instead of just online. In my opinion bonds are built on physical contact and not just online.