Back to work! And suddenly what I think of as my real life slows to a crawl…
The proof-reader for the Origen volume is going great guns. He’s picked up a lot of niggles of one sort of another, which won’t take much time to fix but would have looked bad. It was a very good idea to get another pair of eyes on this.
Meanwhile the lady who is typing up al-Makin is also making good progress typing the Arabic text of the second part as printed by Erpenius in 1625. She’s done 30 pages so far (out of 300).
The French National Library have tried to sell me a microfilm – the actual acetate film – of two manuscripts of al-Makin. They got huffy when I queried whether it was an electronic PDF, and didn’t tell me what I should have asked. Hate petty officials. They will sell me a microfilm for 50 euros; a monochrome (!) PDF for 90 euros. They should be ashamed to be doing either. Oh well.
It will be interesting to see if the typist can work with a manuscript image as well as with Erpenius.