Joanna and I had an idea for the illustrations to open each chapter. I'm going to do a simple collage for each one, featuring Queen Victoria and something related to that chapter. For instance she'll be surrounded by the suit symbols for the chapter on minors; standing with two figures from the trumps for the chapter on majors; etc.
I can't do these collages the usual way -- with scissors and photocopies -- because they need really clean images for the book. So, yesterday I packed up the scanner and Georg's laptop, and back to the Duke library I went.
I didn't get there until 11:30, and I was a little concerned that the library would be crowded. I needn't have worried. I saw only two people on the entire floor until about 4:30. Apparently one thing hasn't changed about Duke in the past ten years: students do not study on weekends.
After about seven hours, I had made almost 50 scans from 21 volumes, which took up almost 400 Mb on the laptop. Hauling around all those oversized book and inhaling hundred year old dust left me tired, stuffed up, sore, and happy. I got a lot of great scans, even finding a couple of images I hadn't seen before. (I passed the time browsing while the scanner was running.)
I also went back to the illustration of the Javanese dancers, who show up on the 3 of Cups. This time I read the article, not just the caption. It had some great information about them for the "Notes on Sources." Best of all, there was a tiny sketch of the dancers walking to the theater in the rain. It isn't any use for the deck, but it was wonderful just to see it. It made me feel like I knew a little something about those beautiful girls. They must have found the rain in Paris to be a miserable experience, coming from a tropical climate.
Another great score was a portrait of a little girl looking at a stack of photographs. Because of the shape of the photos, she almost looks like she's holding a deck of Tarot cards! The engraving is extremely fine, so it may not be printable the book. But I'd sure love to use her in one of the chapter opening collages.
In any case, it was a successful day spent blissfully alone, with my scanner and those wonderful books for company. It's such a feeling to hold a hundred year old newspaper in my hands, and read about history -- Kaiser Wilhelm II's coronation, for example, or "The Importance of Being Earnest"s opening night -- from people for whom it wasn't history, but the news of the day. I can't even describe it.
Then Georg picked me up and told me that we'd been bombing Afganistan all day.
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