They were, at least to a five-year-old, simultaneously the most wonderful and the most terrifying experience.

There are times when it is just what needs to be done, but it still takes courage to recognise them. Very best of luck.

Mine arrived yesterday and very good it is too. The local library integration is superb.

A sonnet with the heading SUA MAESTA Mantiene RELIGIOSI NEGLI SPEDALI, Che instruiscano nella FEDE CATTOLICA i Priogioneri di guerrilla Eretici.

Title page of Filippo V. In trono. Sonetti. Milan, Giuseppe Clerici, 1702.

Monks doing their bit to convert Protestant prisoners of war in the early stages of the War of the Spanish Succession, all with the support of Philip V, whose accession to the Duchy of Milan gave rise to this collection of 29 sonnets.

End of days.

Growing up in the 80s, the nuclear dread was to a certain extent tempered (at least as I imagined it) by a sense of symmetry. It may have been illusory but there was a realistic hope that nobody would be stupid enough really to start a nuclear war, and that there were, just about, rules. But now?

Very sorry to hear about this. Even 35 years ago, it felt like a bridge to another (possibly better) world.

Well that is still progress!

Where? Am staring hopefully at a swiftless SE London sky.

Oh that does look good though...

Oh well done. I very much approve of taking two hours for lunch, but not like that.

There is a place in Anerley that is, judging from the queues and the word of mouth, spectacular. Have I ever worked out how it works to the extent of getting a sandwich there? No.

The forlorn snipped corner of the cover of an old UK EU passport.

No pretending any more...

Leo.

Decade 2016-2026?

A heron sits on a roof with a spring evening sky behind.

Herons are taking over Hyde Park.

Superb, multi-layered ABA/IES book collecting seminar this evening with @ceebarnacles.bsky.social. When they are good, they are very good.

And everything in it will be at the California Antiquarian Book Fair in San Francisco from Friday to Sunday - my list for that, with all of the above and more, is at lists.ebrb.co.uk/sf26. Do come along if you're in the neighbo(u)rhood.

The cover of my new catalogue, with a very bulbous fish wondering how it got there.

It's catalogue time! My new list has lots on language-learning in the long 18th century, plus natural history printed as a children's Christmas gift, poems for new nuns, potatoes, advice on letter-writing and farming, Louis XVI and Napoleon, and more. It's at lists.ebrb.co.uk/list6

A pile of lists for the California Book Fair sit on a table

California fair list, fresh from the printers and about to head off to San Francisco.

Oh glorious. If I had a bucket list, Lahore would be very near the top.

It was a pleasant surprise.

I found today, mercifully, that the one trace the author of one book left was... that book, and so the only thing the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani could do was write about the book. Bliss. But otherwise I feel your pain.

But what can you do? I had four offers on my late mother's flat when I came to sell it. The three highest were from property companies. I sold it for the lowest offer to the only person who actually wanted to live in it. Idly looking it up the other day, I saw it was up as a vacation rental.

Our next talk!

Francesca Galligan on 'Sir Christopher Hatton and his books: reconstructing an Elizabethan library.'

How and why do we reconstruct historic libraries?

Thurs 12th February, 5:15 pm T.S. Eliot Theatre, Merton College, Oxford (+ online via Zoom - register secretary@oxbibsoc.org.uk)

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Have never used it, but this looks as though it might do the job? pixxibook.com

You should file a complaint with management.

A broadside with a German poem at the foot and a coloured woodcut of a bell, within which is shown a scene of the crucifixion.

Picked up a couple of these last week - New Year greetings from the bellringers of, in this case, the church of St Mary Magdalen, in 1805. But where? Any thoughts gratefully received.

I am so sorry. He was such a delight even to a random social media observer, so I can't imagine what a loss he is to you both.

It is the "in detail" that intrigues me.