Saint Valentine's Day

St Valentine's Day is not far away.

Libre Livre stocks a small range of exclusive hand- made Valentine's cards and other items calculated to make your heart pound, without emptying your purse..

The picture to the left (well, it was left when I typed it in, now it's above) shows some of our Valentine booklets - blank for your own thoughts, verses and desires. Contact us via our website for more details.

All Souls

A few days ago I attended a talk in All Souls College, Oxford. What a splendid location and what an excellent talk. Dr Paul Nash, a letterpress printer, and resident printing expert at the Bodleian.

He explained how type is cast - and anybody interested may enjoy some brilliant videos on this subject. One on typecasting, produced by Stanley Nelson of the Nelson Atelier, can be found here , and another, showing Stan assembling a mould can be found here

In an interesting question session after the talk, the use of 5 point (yes, 5 point) type was discussed: and it was agreed that composing must have been a nightmare - Dr Nash suggested that tweezers provide the only practical method; and it seems, the value of the the paper being saved must have justified such agonising work.

Somebody raised the issue of hwo the early type-founders knew how many of each letter to cast into a fount: and made a comparison to the skills of a cryptographer in terms of analysing the frequency with which each letter is used. Of course, the numbers could just have been arrived at by trial and error.

Tea break

At Libre Livre we work hard, play hard and enjoy our tea-breaks. One of our minor pleasures is the lunch time edition of the Archers, except now they've gone and ruined it.

Here's a blog that will tell you more about what's going on: Archers

Get weaving folks

Just a quick reminder that our Seasonal competition, click Challenge if you need a reminder, is open until the end of January. We've had one or two brilliant entries already, but the prize is still anybody's, as yet.

Happy New Year

Here we go: first blog entry of 2011.

Professor Michelle Brown is a paleographer and an expert in ancient manuscripts of the British Isles (called 'Insular' to those in the know). As such she is not necessarily somebody you would expect to find gracing the Economist magazine.

And how wrong you'd be: in the Christmas issue is a fascinating article discussing research by Michelle and others into the links between Celtic and Middle Eastern cultures in the early years of Christianity. The article discusses the wonderful library of St Catherine's monastery on mount Sinai, which houses a vast horde of ancient documents. Scientific advances mean that work can now be done on investigating the 'lost' documents that lie beneath later - it seems, it's not only computers that keep hidden records of what went before.

To my mind one of the most astonishing links between ancient cultures, is traces of papyrus that were found in an ancient psalter which had lain in an Irish bog for over 1,000 years.

Libre Livre Blog tries to keep our customers appraised (whoops, we appraise our staff and apprise our customers: drat that Titivillus) of news, views and clues from the world of books. It is updated regularly, so keep visiting to see the latest entries. And don't forget our current competition runs until the end of January, but be warned; it ain't as easy as it looks.

That's it for now, but best wishes for the New Year to all our customers, past present and future.