After what feels like a long absence from bookmaking, I’ve gotten back into it and have a new release: Historia Calamitatum, available as a PDF.
The book is a medieval autobiography by Peter Abélard, a Catholic philosopher who lived in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in France.
Some notes on the making, for those who like that sort of thing:
I used paged.js for the typesetting, so I was editing HTML and CSS files instead of wrangling InDesign or Affinity Publisher or LaTeX. It’s a different workflow, to be sure (lots of reloading in Chrome and then finding my spot again), but overall I love having the source files be plain text.
The line-breaking algorithm isn’t as nice as InDesign’s. Had to finagle the word-spacing and letter-spacing properties a bit to fix some more egregious spots. (At the same time, I wasn’t fixated on making the spacing perfect. Nor did I fix the hyphenation stacks, because they don’t bother me. I’m clearly becoming a bit more relaxed about typesetting rules as I get older.)
For the typeface I went with IM Fell DW Pica, which is no doubt anachronistic but I like the feeling it gives the book.
I proofed the PDFs in the Documents app on my iPad. Much nicer than printing the whole thing out (which I used to do, years ago).
I made the cover using Cirque with textures applied in Affinity Photo.
Tauri looks like an interesting lightweight alternative to Electron. Quill is the only Electron app I’m still actively using, but it’d still be nice to reduce its footprint a bit.
Ada Palmer on the Renaissance. Better than the Middle Ages? Doubtful. (Also, there was so much more plague over the centuries than I’d realized. Goodness.)
Robin Rendle on redesigning his personal site. The latter half of the post is what resonated most with me. Sometimes I feel like my site has gotten perhaps a bit too focused on smoothly delivering projects, at the cost of some character. I hope to restore some of that character over the next year.
Donald G. McNeil, Jr., on the end of Covid. A fairly measured take, I thought. My wife and I are both fully vaccinated now, by the way, but we can’t unquarantine until the kids get their shots (mid-to-late fall is our current loose expectation on that).
I just finished reading Life in a Medieval City, by Joseph and Frances Gies, and in the notes on page 236 I found this interesting list of occupations taken from the Paris tax list of 1292:
366 shoemakers
214 furriers
199 maidservants
197 tailors
151 barbers
131 jewelers
130 restaurateurs
121 old-clothes dealers
106 pastrycooks
104 masons
95 carpenters
86 weavers
71 chandlers
70 mercers
70 coopers
62 bakers
58 water carriers
58 scabbard makers
56 wine sellers
54 hatmakers
51 saddlers
51 chicken butchers
45 purse makers
43 laundresses
43 oil merchants
42 porters
42 meat butchers
41 fish merchants
37 beer sellers
36 buckle makers
36 plasterers
35 spice merchants
34 blacksmiths
33 painters
29 doctors
28 roofers
27 locksmiths
26 bathers
26 ropemakers
24 innkeepers
24 tanners
24 copyists
24 sculptors
24 rugmakers
24 harness makers
23 bleachers
22 hay merchants
22 cutlers
21 glovemakers
21 wood sellers
21 woodcarvers
The Society of Creative Anachronism has a more detailed page listing the French occupation names and a breakdown by gender. For example, there was one male hangman (bourriau), one female mole trapper (taupiere), four male pike-makers (piqueeur), one female tart seller (tartriere), one male log floater (atireeur de busche), etc. Fascinating stuff.
The tax list was published by Hercule Géraud in 1837 in Paris sous Philippe-le-Bel, which is conveniently on Google Books (the list itself, “Le livre de la taille de Paris pour l’an 1292,” is a bit later in the book).
