At the beginning when I first heard about the friends with an old book task I was kind of confused and I doubted that I could get any benefits from this task. I was confronted with Johann Heinrich von Landsbergs „Nouvelle maniere de fortifier les places“ a book that is approximately 300 years old and has a title who is four lines longer than the short version I mentioned. In addition it is written in French, a language I’m kind of traumatized of. So I was happy when it turned out that we don’t have to read the book but just have a closer look at the structure and form of the book.
It was kind of hard to communicate with my new friend. It was hard to find informations about the book. A reason for that was also the fact that there is some kind of „older brother“ of my book, from a different author with a quite similar title. This book seems much more popular than mine and dominated the hits of my own research. Maybe my research skills weren’t enough to get in touch with my book. At some point I lost the interest in my book, because of the quite one-sided friendship that united us. I always asked questions, but my friend never seemed to answer.
The highlight within my friendship was the moment I visited my friend at the Werner Oechslin library in Einsiedeln. I never got in touch with this kind of libraries and I would never have gone there without this task. For me it was impressive to see how many old valuable books there are and to meet the people who work hard to protect them.
During the third task I totally lost the connection. I don’t know if I wasn’t insisting enough for an answer or my book wasn’t cooperative at all but at this moment we nearly broke up. For the other tasks I tried to get as much information as possible from the few pictures I took at the visit in the Oechslin library to be able to show others how my book looks like.
At one of my online researches my entries in that blog where one of the first hits to my book. At that point I thought we could both achieve a benefit of this task. My book showed me the world of the old books and in exchange I helped my book to get a bit more popular.
In conclusion it was an up and down within that friendship. But to be honest me and my book didn’t become more than acquaintance during that year. Nevertheless I learned much about my book and how to get in touch with other old books. Furthermore I understood that you don’t have to read a book in total to get in touch with it.