jaeleslie

Just to get in the swing of the continuing festivities, I have looked in on some of the last week's journals that I had missed, and promptly started feeling a bit of a sore throat coming on. No matter, must carry on.

( Read more... )The Friday when I met brisingamen at the Victoria & Albert, that was the errand on Regent Street that made me slightly late meeting her at the front steps. Just a little bit of Liberty's was quite enough for me as I am not much of a shopper at that sort of place. (I am much happier combing through resale and charity shops to pick up the same stuff.)

We started at the V&A with a very long gossipy chat in the coffee shop, before a very long trundle around the Gothic exhibit. It turns out that quite a few of the surviving treasures of the Gothic period are manuscripts, so while the arms & armor held less interest for me I had to look at every single thing in the cases. It was a fine assortment of northern French, Flemish, British, and some Italian manuscript work of the 15th-16th C., including some early printing with woodcut illustrations; a period when a secretary hand was in use for proclamations and such, alongside the decorative manuscript hands that were shifting from a sort of vertically compressed pointy style to the rounder bookhand style which we now find more legible as the basis of modern type design. And then the type of illos were shifting too. brisingamen and I were particularly admiring the borders that were not stylized twining italianate vines but realistic close-up illustration of natural objects. How moderne.

We were on our feet for far too long with that, and then after I had purchased every postcard in the exhibition shop we had another coffee break, I had the opportunity to purchase every postcard in the main shop, and then we were off to meet PK for dinner. Which is another story.