A record

This afternoon, I downloaded the largest file that I have ever seem on a PC - probably excluding the quite possibly huge files which support Windows and Office but which are barely visible to me - with this one weighing in at 260,143 kilobytes. Rather more than a quarter of a gigabyte. Maybe films and music come in at this sort of weight, but I don't do either so I don't know about them.

In the Hathi viewer

The file being a scanned image of a book first published 1499, with this copy now held by the Getty Research Institute and delivered to me via the Hathi Trust digital library and the Digital Public Library of America. The book being described at reference 1 and brought to my attention by reference 2 - this last being a bit off my beaten track and to which I shall return in due course.

In the Acrobat viewer

Turned up by Bing

A book for the erudite, perhaps the sort of thing that James Joyce would have liked and could presumably have read in the original - more doubtful whether he could have afforded one - but livened up with a good dose of mild pornography and a large number of woodcuts. Which last caught my eye, as both my father and his woodcutting brother-in-law were rather fond of both schoolboy smut and Rabelais, by whom the present book is noticed. Perhaps it was not readily available in English in their time, so it passed them by.

But luckily for me, it is now, so a nearly new copy is on its way from somewhere in Germany for a couple of tenners or so.

Title page

Reference 1: La Hypnerotomachia di Poliphilo: cioè pugna d'amore in sogno, dou'egli mostra, che tutte le cose humane non sono altro che sogno, & doue narra molt'altre cose degne di cognitione - Colonna, Francesco - 1527. Or perhaps 1545 - with Bing claiming that MDXXXXV should really be MDXLV.

Reference 2: The ruins lesson: meaning and material in Western culture - Susan Stewart - 2020.

Reference 3: https://www.getty.edu/research/.

Reference 4: https://dp.la/.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnerotomachia_Poliphili.