The sparkle of your China
“Can you show me
The shine of your Japan
The sparkle of your China
Can you show me”
—Steely Dan (Walter Becker and Donald Fagen), Bodhisattva, 1973.
You wouldn’t know a diamond
“You wouldn’t know a diamond
If you held it in your hand
The things you think are precious
I can’t understand”
—Steely Dan (Walter Becker and Donald Fagen), Reelin’ in the Years, 1972.
the diamond with the pearl
“Just by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl
You turned it on the world
That’s when you turned the world around”
—Steely Dan (Walter Becker and Donald Fagen), Kid Charlemagne, 1976.
Daddy Faith
“Perched on the seat of the Cadillac, Daddy Faith was bestowing grace upon the crowd. He was smiling; his face, black as night, was greasy with sweat. He made a wide arc with his hand, half a dozen diamond rings spun and glittered, and his shiny opera hat and diamond stickpin made beautiful flashes above the throng. A sigh, vast and reverential, went up from the crowd—Aaaaah!—and a shower of dollar bills, nickels, dimes and quarters cascaded over Daddy Faith, over the car and onto the ground.”
—William Styron, Lie Down in Darkness, 1951.
the word ‘lectern’
“[M]edieval readers most likely would be uncomfortable reading a book in a flat position, because the way they most often encountered books set out to be read was propped up on another book or on a slanted surface not unlike a modern lectern or music stand. Indeed, the word “lectern” comes from the Latin verb legere, “to read,” and even a modern lectern has a sloped surface to hold books or notes.”
—Hentry Petroski, The Book on the Book Shelf, 1999.
The earliest codices
“The earliest codices . . . apparently date from the early part of the Christian era (about the second century), and it has been speculated that the codex form might have been first adopted when the Christian Bible began to be copied on papyrus and circulated in book as opposed to roll form to distinguish it from the scrolled texts of Judaism and paganism.”
—Hentry Petroski, The Book on the Book Shelf, 1999.
the Greek word for book
“The word [papyrus] is believed to be of Egyptian origin, as is the plant. The Greeks referred to papyrus as byblos, after Byblus, the Phoenician city that was a center of papyrus exportation. Hence we have the Greek word for book, biblion, which in turn gave us the English word “bible,” “The Book.””
—Hentry Petroski, The Book on the Book Shelf, 1999.
The codex
“By the early centuries of the Christian era, bookshelves had to accommodate, in addition to scrolls, a growing number of bound manuscripts, or codices, which in time whould displace scrolls as the preferred format for books. The codex, named for the fact that it was covered with wood (codex means “tree trunk” in Latin), and which led to the term “code” in a legal context, was made by folding over flat sheets of papyrus or parchment and sewing them together into a binding.”
—Hentry Petroski, The Book on the Book Shelf, 1999.
[S]crolling
“In ancient times, books did not exist as we know them today. Roman writings were turned into rolls or scrolls, mostly of papyrus, which were termed volumina. It is from the Latin singular voluminum that our English word “volume” comes. . . .
[S]crolling on the computer screens takes its name from the way scrolls worked, and no matter the manner in which it was read, when a scroll was finished it would have to be rewound to be read again, very much as with a modern videotape after it is viewed.”
—Hentry Petroski, The Book on the Book Shelf, 1999.
foolish and lovely
“She swept back her white hair, pressing it against her head with hands that were pale, nearly translucent. Beneath the shiny skin of her hands the veins were tessellated like a blue mosaic, shining like an intricate blue design captured beneath glass. Now she did something that she had done many times before. She pulled the skin of her face taut over the cheekbones so that the web of lines and wrinkles vanished as if it had been touched by a miraculous and restorative wand; squinting convergently into the glass, she watched the foolish and lovely change: transfigured, she saw smooth skin as glossy white as the petal of gardenia, lips which seemed but sixteen or twenty, and as unblemished by any trouble as those she had held up to another mirror thirty years before, whispering “Dearest” to an invisible and quite imaginary lover.”
—William Styron, Lie Down in Darkness, 1951.