Incunabula and Archivists

Yesterday I had a run in at the National Archives with the smuggest, most pompous shit of a librarian I have ever had the misfortune to meet. Ponytailed Trekkie-style and paunchy, he peered over his glasses while he preceded to complicate my simple photographic order as much as he possibly could... insisted on telling me how much it would cost, despite the fact I told him at least twice that I didn't care, and spent half the time flustering about in the back office and confusing his workmates. So much anger I felt after dealing with this dreadful man that it kicked my Newspaper archives sleepiness firmly in the ass - sleepiness that had lead earlier to a self-diagnosis of embryonic narcolepsy. I'm not so sure about the narcolepsy now, but I am suspecting that my habit of reading medical dictionaries is not necessarily productive... may be encouraging me in hypochondria in fact. Today I saw a lecture about incunabula at the Nat Lib... I was the youngest person there by something like fifty years... one old man with those gloriously huge, spongy and hairy old-man-ears kept craning over his shoulder to examine me and look at me pointedly as if to say What Are You Doing Here? I like bindings and brass clips and vellum and vegetable tanning and illuminated letters and recycled manuscripts in the bindings and nineteenth century acquisition notes and collectors, modern and otherwise, who like nothing more than to talk about their collections as much as possible.