English Country Garden

I got email (eek, mass noun) today about The Mills Experiments, enquiring in conjunction with information from Swhack of 2006-04-05 about certain details therein. I'm really pleased that documenting things up to the minute proved to be useful, especially since at the time I got the email I was actually working on my ignis fatuus article. John Cowan told me today that fatuus "originally meant 'inspired', from the highly archaic and defective verb for 'speak, prophesize, sing'", and that the "meanings 'foolish, silly' come later".

I also spoke with him a little bit about mobled, on which probably more to come. But today I've also been thinking about large pieces of writing that I could be working on, and I'd like to do something about the English countryside, or rather, the countryside of Great Britain. I have a nice quote from Geoffrey of Monmouth that I can use. One of the first things to do, of course, would be to try to set down what the countryside is, what the history of it is, and the encroachment of creeping urbanisation upon its fringes. The Campaign to Protect Rural England do some nice work in that area: they are "people who care passionately about our countryside and campaign for it to be protected and enhanced for the benefit of everyone". One of their biggest campaigns is about light pollution, which also fits in nicely with my occasional ramblings about astronomy.

Were I to write something large enough, I could possibly use Lulu as a distribution mechanism (cf. the recent ramble about that), but I'd also like to try my hand at getting the Voynich Manuscript, for example, properly published if the images are public domain now. Sadly though, colour pages are very expensive, so it might have to be a black and white (hopefully that means greyscale!) version. I'd also want to get an ISBN for it, which means about £30 extra (which is £15 more than what an ISBN really costs, but you have to buy them in sets of ten), and to recoup that loss I'd probably look to add a fair bit of extra commission on it. Plus it would be a bit of a low interest book, unless I could get lots of Swhackers to be all rah-rah about it, and perhaps the Voynich Lists. Mainly I just want it for myself, but that'd probably be something like £60 overall, which is a bit steep.

At least the fonts would be to my liking, which is to say ITC Galliard. When you look at Galliard closely it doesn't seem all that quirky or outstanding, but as a body of text it has a wonderful texture. Mainly I'd want it for a short history section about the Voynich Manuscript, which I'd write myself.