What's Ticking in The Walls

1. Paperback House

This month is the fiftieth anniversary of the Dell Yearling paperback edition of The House with a Clock in its Walls. David Stone (1922-2001) painted the cover image of Lewis staring at the strange green clock face appearing on the outside of his house, and it was this edition readers likely came across well into the mid-1980s. We've seen images of an eighteenth printing, though these later editions don't provide the actual date. Nothing beats the original 1974 price, though: $1.25.

2. Library Questions

I found a site highlighting some interesting questions in the New York Public Library's reference section between 1944 and 1979, and it reminded me of Anthony Monday's work as a library page in Hoosac. The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn (1978) notes some of the questions he's asked, but I don't think they are as "interesting" as these:

• What percent of All The bathtubs in the World Are in the U.S.?
• What is the natural enemy of a duck?
• Why do 18th century English paintings have so many squirrels in them, and how did they tame them so that they wouldn’t bite the painter?

Wait - what?

3. Thrice the Bridled Nuns Hath Mew'd

Well, not really, but it does make an interesting headline. Bellairs's friend Alfred Myers said he and John were both "attracted to the rogues, eccentrics, and general foul balls of the papacy than the much more numerous austere, competent, and virtuous examples" - as Bellaris's Saint Fidgeta and Other Parodies (1966) shows. That attitude extends to other areas of the Catholic Church, and whenever I find some historical curiosity, I like to think Bellairs would have gotten a chuckle out of it as well. For example:

One day a nun living in a convent in France, sometime during the medieval period, began to meow like a cat. After a brief time, other nuns in convent began to meow with her in unison. The nuns were so loud that the sound carried to the town below, disturbing the residents with the bizarre sounds coming from the normally peaceful convent. After continuing for a number of days, police were brought in to cease the bizarre orchestra and were only able to do so by threatening to whip the offending nuns. The reason the first nun began to meow and why the other nuns decided to join remains a mystery.

The Curious Archive blog has more to the story.

4. Latin Mortuus est?

Readers have likely learned a little Latin from Bellairs’s books. Dies Irae, M. Childermass fecit, and lumen christi are a few examples that come to mind - plus scads more throughout Saint Fidgets and Other Parodies (1966). Some often refer to Latin as a dead language. But just how dead is it?  I found a rather dated article from Dylan Lyons on the Babbel blog saying that while Latin may be dead, there are benefits to learning it.

The legal field is another where Latin is extremely prevalent. Habeas corpus, amicus curiae, ex post facto. You probably recognize these phrases from reading about court cases or watching them on TV, or from working in a legal profession. Even the word “jury” comes from the Latin jurare, which means “swear.”

Studying Latin can also help you learn other languages, especially Romance languages. A ton of prefixes, suffixes and even full vocabulary words in English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian derive from Latin, so learning Latin can make studying these languages easier.

5. My Aim is True

I'm always curious what sort of things Johnny, Fergie, and Professor Childermass would have seen during their visit to Constantinople in the hours before the 1453 siege and fall of the city - as told in The Trolley to Yesterday (1989). I wonder if they crossed paths with aiming stones (Turkish: nişan taşı), erected in the Ottoman age to mark a record in archery (and later rifle or other weapons) shooting. While about three hundred such stelae existed in Istanbul at the end of the Ottoman Empire, only about 40 are still extant today.

6. Fun with Voynich

Bellairs and Strickland each made reference to the enigmatic Voynich manuscript in their writings: Bellairs indirectly with Melichus reading a book with strange flowers in The Face in the Frost (1969), and Johnny Dixon learning about how the Voynich M.S. is similar to a book he finds in during the events of The Wrath of the Grinning Ghost (1999). But there's one thing you can't do with these fictional books. Multispectral imaging. But someone scanned the Voynich manuscript, and the results are now available, according to Ars Technica:

About 10 years ago, several folios of the mysterious Voynich manuscript were scanned using multispectral imaging. Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, has analyzed those scans and just posted the results, along with a downloadable set of images, to her blog, Manuscript Road Trip. Among the chief findings: Three columns of lettering have been added to the opening folio that could be an early attempt to decode the script. And while questions have long swirled about whether the manuscript is authentic or a clever forgery, Fagin Davis concluded that it's unlikely to be a forgery and is a genuine medieval document.

#