Full circle

When I was seven or so we got a book out from the library that was illustrated in the style of an illuminated manuscript. It was the first time I'd ever seen that art style, and I became obsessed with it.  Compared to all the other illustrated books I'd read it was like seeing in colour for the first time; it satisfied a need for order and complexity and beauty that I hadn't realised I had.

The notes on the illustrations mentioned books of hours and the Book of Kells. I had no idea what a book of hours was, but 'Book of Kells' sounded enough like a specific title that I asked a librarian at my tiny local branch if they had or could get a copy. She told me that it lived at Oxford (good guess, it's at Trinity College) and that only researchers and doctors were allowed to touch it; a colour reproduction of anything but the Chi Rho page was similarly out of reach.

So I decided that I had to get a doctorate so they'd let me visit the book. And over the years I collected books on illumination and celtic knotwork, learned calligraphy and got to hold a book of hours, but the want never went away: I must get a degree; I must get to read the Book of Kells. It was a low-level obsession, but it was indeed an obsession.

Last year Dave and I went to Dublin for our first anniversary, and we took an afternoon to wander slowly through the exhibition on the book, how it was made and who had made it and what had happened to it afterwards. And I finally got to see it: the four gospels, each open. They were under glass, and I figured that was the closest I'd ever get to my desire to look at every single page.

Then Trinity College digitised it. All of it. Even the backs of the decorated pages so you can see how the colours bled through the vellum and the words on the facing page transferred over.

So I've spent today flicking back and forth between my doctoral thesis and the four gospels, working towards the degree that I decided I couldn't live without because I thought it was the only way to see the book that I can now spend as much time as I want paging through without leaving my desk. It's been twenty years. The satisfaction is unspeakable.

From Trinity College's Digital Collections