I picked up the most beautiful book at Barnes & Noble on Saturday, Mapping the World by Michael Swift.

This sizeable book is a trove of world-building inspiration, beginning with an introduction to cartography, major figures of the history of mapmaking, and types of maps. Then come the maps themselves, in chronological order from the medieval Mappa Mundi to maps of the nineteenth century, each page revealing another brilliant jewel fashioned by a master of cartography.

Just flipping through this book makes my inner subcreator want to start doodling. My particular favourite map is the late medieval map of Iceland, volcanos exploding inland, sea monsters raging in the deep around the continent. Imagine waking up each day in a world like that, where you rise in the cold of morning knowing leviathan is real.

Reading through a rather older article by Tara Maginnis at Costumer’s Manifesto on researching historical costume at libraries, I found something that I think bears reprinting here:

Before everyone crucifies me for encouraging the deforestation of the planet through copious Xeroxing, please let me tell you about another endangered resource: research material itself. It is an unfortunate fact that nearly all paper made and used for books and magazines from about 1820-1990 was acid based paper. This means nearly every book, newspaper and magazine produced during that time is on paper that ultimately self destructs, like a time bomb. The libraries of the world are in a crisis over what is to be done to save these resources. To save the information on this paper requires highly expensive de-acidification or moderately expensive copying, or comparatively inexpensive microfilming. The simple economics of library funding means that libraries will mostly use microfilm, (which is troublesome for costumers), as well as have to pick and choose which books and magazines are “important” enough to go to the expense of copying. I need hardly tell you where items like Turn of the Century tailoring and millinery manuals will rate in this lifeboat situation. Therefore, for the good of future costumers, including one’s self, we each need to notice when books like this are on the shelf of our local library falling apart. A book that is coming apart is a book whose days are numbered, soon to be thrown out. In the case of some pre 1910 catalogs, and drafting and sewing manuals, you may be looking at the last one of it’s kind. The libraries can’t afford to save all of them, so, you need to grab these books, before they are gone, plain paper copy them onto an acid free paper like Copysource, and bind up the copies, so they can replace the originals.

I think this applies to all books historical and domestic in nature, like cookery, sewing, and how-to’s of any kind. Most people don’t understand the importance of these kinds of documents, but to historical authors they can turn out to be indespensible. They contain information that may not be found anywhere else, that may even answer important questions about the past. Sure, the average person may not be missing much if that little piece of info isn’t in your book and is forgotten forever, but in my experience, you never know which tiny fragment of text will shine a bright light on one of the questions of history. And besides, if we don’t have to lose it, why should we? Why should the bottom line decide which details of the past are important? It’s certainly something to think about.

More evidence that pre-modern people were not the stinking cesspits we’ve been repeatedly told they were: Irish bog bodies help unlock secrets of the Iron Age.

“I think the message I’m getting is that although they were living in a different time, a different culture, eating different things, living in a different way, people are people — they’re the same in their thinking,” said Rolly Read, head of conservation at the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin.

*dramatic gasp* No, really?! Go figure! They keep discovering this kind of thing, and they are always amazed. I guess that’s good though, because it keeps it newsworthy, and hopefully the public can stop being deceived by the couple hundred years of judgemental, ignorant assumptions made about medieval and pre-medieval people (excluding the Romans, of course, who were Paragons of Everything Neat) since about the Enlightenment, and possibly even as far back as the Renaissance.

I shouldn’t be sarcastic, I guess. After all, historians used to think medieval people didn’t care about their own children or think of them as children at all, a theory disproved by the discovery of child education manuals like The Babee’s Book, a book of manners for pages. We’ve come a long way since then.

As for the article above, pretty fascinating stuff. I don’t know if it’s fair to call the goop in the Clonycavan Man’s hair “gel”, since he’d be hard-pressed to wash out pine resin every night before bed. I’d call it, well, “resin” I guess. Also, I think the sacrifice idea is tenuous at best; it smacks too much of Frazer’s The Golden Bough with all the business about year kings and fertility rites, which to me says the researchers might be approaching it from the wrong direction (interpreting historical fact through Frazer instead of letting the finds speak for themselves as much as possible). Personally, I prefer the Tacitus theory, if only because we’ve got some contemporary documentation to back it up. Anyway, shedding light on the past—when done carefully and with as little modern bias as possible—is always good.