Last night I won something on ebay which totally made me squee. An unusual and beautiful thing–a perfect present for someone. Something that should have cost four or five times the amount it did. I’m over the moon. A hardback copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, c1918, with 12 tipped-in colour plates, with tissue guards–illustrations by Edmund Dulac.
This is the actual book I won. It’s generally worth $130-$150 USD. I got it for approx $40 USD. Bargain. There is another version of around the same date with 20 illustration plates but it’s worth $600-700.
The illustrations are here. Edmund Dulac is one of the illustrators from the Golden Age of Illustration along with Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen (oh how beautiful his are) and others.
This is going to be hard to gift I tell you 
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I’m feeling the urge to use my hands again in ‘feminine pastimes’. It might be shocking (*gasp*) to learn that I actually do things like knitting, and embroidery. And making jewellery – I particularly like wire wrapping (google it). For all I say I’m not girly. This time last year I started work on a bag I just HAD to make, even though I am very much a novice knitter (you see–here’s another girly admission–I have a TOTAL handbag fetish). The picture below is how it is supposed to look when it’s finished lol. It’s made out of denim cotton with hundreds of glass beads, which have to be pre-strung onto each ball of cotton before you start knitting. It’s not as bad as it looks really–it just entails lots of careful counting (sigh). I’m thinking it’s time I finished the thing off.
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“We thought of life via an analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get at that end — success or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you’re dead.
But, we missed the point the whole way along….
It was a musical thing — and you were supposed to sing, or dance, while the music was being played.”
~ Alan Watts
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And of course the Daily Nin:
“I stand before each new world, new person, new country, hesitant, unsure, hating new obstacles, new mysteries, new possibilities of pain, of blunders from lack of courage. Fear, lack of confidence, has narrowed my world, limited the people I have known intimately. The difficulty of communion. Je vous présente mes hommages, Madam. Politeness like a shield. Culture is a shield.”