JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This fine illustration with the wonderful helmet does look like some sort of 19th century robot, but seeing the little sign at the pinnacle–“Dr. Aktenstaub”–identifies this as an antiquarian antiquarian being shielded from the dust of accumulated and lonely wisdom. “Aktenstaub” is a wonderful word which identifies the smallest bits of existence: dust.  But “dust” is much more poet and involved than that, with this “aktenstaub” relating to the old dust of old books, and so the helmet protects the reader from the weight of dusty ages.  The horizon for the idea of dust is far and wide, though, as a walk through the Oxford English Dictionary attests.  Describing dust seems more varied than the description of a book itself, or the identities of snow…the dust of organ pipes being different from that of wooden floorboards or corn husks or weary dust of travel on a long duster the dust of the cosmos; it describes a condition of humiliation, cash, disturbances of different sorts, and of course the “mortal frame of man”, and seems to have a seat at a very long table of possibility, which is remarkable for such a small and unassuming word. The entry for dust is quite long and involved, and is followed by a longer list of dust-compounds, where things get really interesting.  Dust-blister, dust-core, and dust-spawn are good examples of the long road of dust-possibilities.  And so far as “aktenstaub” goes, it gives the idea of antiquarian book dust a personality as vibrant as fairy-dust, and so is perfectly fine with me–it is hard to go wrong, sometimes, with definitions of words that enrich the imagination more so than limit it.