Craig Kaplan wrote to tell me about some newly available high-res scans of seven complete works of (my hero/obsession) Athanasius Kircher, made available by the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbuttel. UPDATE: I’ve corrected the above since my first post. The Bibliothek site is posting seven complete works, not just the illustrations excerpted on the bibliodyssey blog. […]

I’m still working on making artificial yet authentic 17th century vocal music, so I thought I’d provide some MP3 samples to listen to, and give capsule reviews of a few of the different software packages I am using, in particular, Flinger, and Tracktion. If you haven’t read my previous post about this project, check it […]

Here is a screenshot I took while I was working recently, to document a fascinating project. The project involves resurrecting a bit of technology from the 1600s. In the screen snapshot, I am entering numbers into a text file. I am copying the numbers, as you can see, from a digital facsimile of an old […]

I’ve been a little obsessed with cuckoo clocks for the past few weeks, and here are a few cuckoo-related oddments. A friend of mine gave me an unwanted cuckoo clock, and I repaired it and hung it on a wall at home. Every time the cuckoo chime goes off, it makes me giggle. Sadly, most […]

The Jesuit Polymath Athanasius Kircher is a personal hero of mine. I constructed this Kircherian coverpop, which contains a collection of images from his books, which covered such varied subjects as geology, magnetism, architecture, music, egypt, and china. Stanford University Library’s Department of Special Collections has graciously granted me permission to use these images. The […]