While in Venice I went to an exhibit at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the isla San Giorgio Maggiore called ‘Mindful Hands’ which offered up a real feast of medieval manuscripts. If that’s not your thing you may yawn, but those who enjoy these beauties may swoon over the album here. A beautiful day, a beautiful location and such beautiful pages. It’s sad to see pages ripped from their original bindings but it was how they happened to be collected, so what can you do? At least no more violence should be done to them. There was also an excellent film showing how medieval manuscripts were made from goat to binding (:-o) which I thought would be great to show students — well, with some warning about the poor goat. I didn’t even realise how some of the colours were made. Things like lapus lazuli making blue I knew, but burning bones for black was news (oak gall is also used for black ink). So glad I got to see the exhibit: it was much more extensive than I expected.