The friendship with my old book Porte d’architettura rustica is a story of many ups and downs. The first little steps in research about the book were not very successful: no online version of the book, no information about the content, no place of publication. And on top of that, the book was located at the Werner Oechslin Bibliothek in Einsiedeln, which meant that I had to travel through almost half of Switzerland to get in touch with it.
But this trip to Einsiedeln for the task Contact then turned out to be my favourite part of the whole exercise. Being able to look at this very old book in this fascinating library was a great thing for all of the lucky ones who had their books located in Einsiedeln, I think. The librarian working in Einsiedeln had great knowledge about all the books and was able to share many interesting stories, also about my book and it’s history. I then found out, that my book is part of a miscellany because the former owner decided to bring it together with other old books about doorways. Furthermore, I was able to contribute a little part to the „future history“ of my book because it only consists of illustrations and has no more than 20 pages in total which made it possible for me to create a digital version of it and post it on the blog.
The next task about the lineage of the book was a little bit senseless in my case, because my friend only consists of unique etchings/illustrations. As far as I found out, there are no other versions of this book available.
Because my book-friend doesn’t really contain text, I unfortunately wasn’t able to create a proper text file for the libraries in the last task, wich is why I suddenly got a new friend for the last few weeks. This was a bit sad, because in combination with the lectures of Architectural History I slowly started to understand the topic of rustication and with that the content and historic context of my book started to make sense.
It was also a bit difficult to do the last task, because I had to get in touch with a whole new book very quickly, whereas most of the others could use all the knowledge they had gained about their friends throughout these two semesters. So for the next time: If you know that the text of the books is going to be relevant for some of the tasks, mabye only choose books which contain text. This would make it possible for all of the students to really develop an intense friendship with their book and profit from all the tasks and the knowledge they gain within the whole exercise.
But getting a new book for the last task wasn’t only a disadvatage – I was also able to get an idea of the topics of my new friend and was even amazed, how quickly I developed a „small new friendship“ with it.