I posted on the other thread but am taking the liberty to post here as well.

A new reading The Flea this a.m. and I have to use a word I am careful not to throw out carelessly. Ann Drysdale's Said Yeats’s Bones to Hardy’s Heart... is brilliantly crafted, a joy a read.

If The Flea every goes to print, or is printed as an anthology, it will have to have:
1) real leather bindings
2) the kind of "liver-spotted page" design Richard Wilbur talks about in "A Late Aubade"
3) Eighteenth-Century yellowish paper
4) the kind of lead-words printers used back then--printing the first word of the next page at the bottom of the previous page so they could keep track of the sequence
5) maybe even uncut pages so readers would, like in the old days, have to keep a book knife handy to cut the quartets apart as they made their way through the text

No problem. Just buy this:

http://www.neatorama.com/2009/06/07/...mell-in-a-can/

Odd. I'd have expected this crew to prefer, as do I, the smell of old books, that slightly seedy odor best appreciated in a run-down antiquarian bookshop. I told someone once about the aroma of a old Gibbon I'd found, but he thought I was recommending the tang of a monkey house.

Time now for a madeleine dipped in limeflower tea.

RHE

Ah me! That scent, that amalgam of mold, dust, and the decay of sulfite paper, sets off my allergies and asthma and sends me running for my inhaler! I have to be careful even with my own old books.

Brilliant, Roger! Then if we could devise a system to deliver via one's computer squirts of the fresh-books aroma (as well as an option for essence-of-anitiquarian-book for Richard, allergy-free version for Maryann), along with a tactile simulacra (electronically recreated via the mouse perhaps) of the texture of ancient stiff paper and red-leather bindings for David, plus some kinetic sense of heft and gravitas, and with a background multisensory-track of clinking tankards, Jacobean conversational buzz, a slight alcoholic haze, clay-pipe smoke, bold witty wenches and general Mermaid Tavern roister-doistering — why, if we could deliver all that, we would have online the experience entire!

If you could do all that, you wouldn't even need the poems.

But whatt'n a kind ov fish it was--
An greet big goggle eyes!

Congrats to the bitten Spheroids.

Congrats to all the Sphereans who made it in, with a special wow for "Iconography".

Aw, shucks (blushes)--thank you, Rose! And thanks yet again to Paul.