“You never get a second chance to make a first impression.”

There is no definitive origin for this quote. And while that really bothers me, it nevertheless came to mind last night as I read Kim Todd’s biography of Marian Sibyllia Merian entitled Chrysalis.

Merian lived from 1647-1717, merely a hundred years after the printing press was invented and was the daughter of an influential engraver and book publisher in Frankfurt. She grew into an artist like pretty much everyone in her family, but what earned her fame and money was using that gift as a naturalist, traveling to South America to study and capture in print its plant life and insects, especially moths and butterflies. I’m currently completed fascinated with the story of her life, but my thoughts were detoured with this passage:

“The press’s ability to spread information so rapidly made it invaluable but also gave it the taint of subversion. The business depended on the dreaming up of fresh ideas, always a risky endeavor when the only reading material above suspicion was the Bible. Some had doubts about whether anyone by ministers should read even that. A refuge for scientists, religious minorities, and visionaries, a publisher’s workshop drew free thinkers of every stripe. Whether the writers wanted to publicize discoveries about the mechanism of the human heart or incite a religious revolution, they needed the type, the paper, and the press, to have any influence. The astronomer Johannes Kepler, when he wasn’t contemplating the orbits of planets or the movement of the tides, lingered at the printers where his books were in progress, looking over tables and evaluating illustrations. It was a coffee house before anyone in Europe drank coffee, where the heady brew was ink.”

This first use – or impression – of the printing press set the course for books, authors and those who would love them for years to come. Even with the modern resurgence of reading and the Harry Potter and Twilight phenomenon, this quote seems to still hold true. Is it any wonder that modern bookstores have partnered with coffee shops?

Thinking about what I’d like to incite,

Adrienne

p.s. In reading about Maria Sibylla Merian online, I enjoyed this New York Times article a great deal – though the last line seems an unfair and personal opinion, rather unlike the factual nature of the remainder.

Also found a Google timeline on Merian — never seen such a thing before, didn’t know Google did this, but it’s neat. Check it out. Oh my goodness, does this mean that one day they are going to do a timeline on you or me? On this day, so and so tweeted about this. Imagine that!

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blue fingernails for blue flowers.
my aesthetic trade-off.

ruined the former to plant the later,
but oh what a glorious day!

creeping phlox and delphinium
buddleia, perovskia, not to mention hydrangea
i expect full repayment next year.

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Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

~ excerpt from Easter, 1916 by William Butler Yeats

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