When I first heard about the task to become friends with a book I was astonished. How can you become friends with a book? Not to mention that my book is 424 years older than me and written in French. I have to admit that I am not very good at French which doesn’t help much. I then heard that we don’t need to read the whole book so I was relieved. But again, how do you become friends with a book you don’t understand? It took me some time to adapt to the concept but I eventually got used to it. My goal was to become friends with “Leçon de perspective positive” within the timespan of a year.
The first task helped to get a basic understanding of the book. We got to know the author, time and place the book was written in and where you can find it today. What I didn’t like was, that this all happened online and I didn’t have a face to my book. I would call it the smalltalk-task even tough it was a pretty one-sided conversation. I had to ask all the questions and only got short and scanty answers in return. It felt like my book was a little shy in the beginning. But I put in some effort and made the first step towards a friendship.
With the second task and after giving my book some time, “Leçon de perspective positive” was finally ready to open up (literally). After some struggles to find a date, because we had to plan it in advanced through the e-rara library, we finally got to meet in person, or in book, or however you want to call it. It was then, when I realised that “Leçon de perspective positive” wasn’t just a book like any other book that I’m friends with. What impressed me the most, was the age and all the stories it brought with it. Even though we only spent 20 minutes together, it was enough to flip through all the content. I saw the thoroughly drawn illustrations and how much thought Jaques Androuet du Cerceau put into “Leçon de perspective positive”. The language barrier seemed secondary because the appearance of my new friend was so impressive.
Compared to the second task, the third one was sobering. I couldn’t finde any translation, abridgement, reedition or reprint of this book before 1800. At first I was disappointed, but then I realised that this just made “Leçon de perspective positive” even more unique.
When “Leçon de perspective positive” and I got to meet for a fourth time but this time online again, I was slightly bored. The conversation seemed very repetitive and I couldn’t get many new information. It was more like I was reciting the things I already knew from our second encounter.
Now we have already arrived at the fifth and last task. It was a long way to getting to know “Leçon de perspective positive” with some ups and downs. Sometimes I was very motivated to get to know my book better, sometimes not at all. Overall I would say that I succeeded in my goal to become old friends with my book.