when the poet gives empty leaves

Abstract

In the right light, blank pages in renaissance books routinely reveal legible  impressions of uninked typeface, especially interesting when these frisket-  hidden texts are intertextual, as when typeface from Aldo Manuzio’s April  1501 Vergil prints blind in his May 1501 Horace (that’s the past tucked into the future) or when some of his August 1502 Dante appears blind in the same  Vergil (now the future’s in the past). And there’s offsetting too, as illustrated in the 1732 edition of Paradise Lost: here and there, reprinting itself remotely en miroir, this text, confounding first and last things, creates an apocolapse. Read this way with me, and watch the library become a librarynth.