March 03, 2003

Perfection

I must admit, part of what attracted me to Movable Type was the name. Hard to resist for a card-carrying textualist like me. As I tinker with my blog, I often find an hour or two slipping away: having gone in to change just one thing, six or eight rebuilds later I've made any number of tiny alterations. (I know, I know . . . not a good use of an assistant professor's untenured time.)

But there's something I want to share here. On June 15, 2002, Kari and I were married at the Grolier Club in New York City. On the fifth floor, outside the William Morris Room (where we said our vows), the following page of text is displayed alongside the forme of lead type originally used to set it. It's the dedication to The Fine Book: A Symposium, Ed. Porter Garnett (Pittsburgh Laboratory Press, 1934):


TO THOSE
WHO FIND DELIGHT IN THE
CONSIDERED MANIPULATION OF TYPE
AND IN THE CONTEMPLATION OF
THE STUDIOUSLY PRINTED PAGE
TO THOSE
WHO PRACTICE WITH DEVOTION
OR WHO HONOR
THE PRINTER’S CALLING
TO THOSE
WHO KNOWING PERFECTION
TO BE UNATTAINABLE
ARE YET ARDENT FOR PERFECTION
TO THOSE
WHO RESPECT AUTHENTICITY
AND CONTEMN COMPROMISE
THIS DOMICILE
FOR THE THOUGHTS OF
THEIR APOLOGISTS
IS DEDICATED
BY ITS ARCHITECTS AND ITS BUILDERS

Posted by mgk at March 3, 2003 08:23 PM
Comments

Nice.

Hey, next time you're poking around in the weblog config panel, turn on the weblogs.com notification so that those of us using blogrolling.com know when you've updated. :-)

(If you get timeout errors doing that, you can change the default ping timeout length in the mt.cfg file from 15 to something longer.)

Posted by: Liz Lawley at March 4, 2003 08:21 AM | Link to Comment

Done! And thanks--

Posted by: MGK at March 4, 2003 07:22 PM | Link to Comment
Due to the proliferation of comment spam, I've had to close comments on this entry. If you would like to leave comment, please send email to me at mgk =at= umd =dot= edu. Thank you.