PBS: it's got some good stuff.

I watched a couple of nifty PBS shows over the last couple of nights. The first one was, admittedly, another in the long line of "rehashing the amazing work of Robert Ballard" shows that are always on PBS or Discovery; this one was called "Lost Liners" and was about, well, lost ocean liners. The show culminated, of course, in Ballard's discovery of the Titanic wreck site, and there was the usual synopsis of the ship's final hours, intercut with interviews with survivors (usually elderly people who were children at the time, and who remember hugging their fathers for the last time) and footage of the expedition that found the ship. It's all very familiar, but I'm damned if the whole thing still isn't incredibly fascinating.

The other show I watched was simply amazing. It was about a project, sponsored by a Minnesota church and abbey, to produce the first fully hand-written, illuminated Bible in centuries. I did a little web digging and found this site devoted to the project. This show was captivating on several levels. First, there was the simple focus on the craftsmanship of the project. The vellum parchment has to be treated and prepared before it is ready to be written on, for example; and as a longtime advocate of the fountain pen, I was enchanted by the calligrapher's description of how goosefeather quills are prepared. We have an image on men writing with these large, poofy feathers, courtesy Hollywood, but this turns out to not be the case: the plumage is largely trimmed away, the "tip" has to be hardened by being soaked and then treated with sand, and then it has to be extensively trimmed with a blade to form a nib with which to write. No less fascinating was the preparation of inks, which are also hand-made.

More than this focus on craftsmanship -- itself invaluable, as scholars have little knowledge of the methods used by medieval scribes -- was the artistry in servitude to spiritualism. The calligrapher isn't simply trying to update the Book of Kells, but create a twenty-first century work of art. One of his illuminations includes a tiny homage to the World Trade Center, and modern typefaces and coloring effects are put to extensive use:



There was a particularly striking device illustrating the genealogy of Jesus, in the shape of a menorah. One of the goals was to depict the Bible in a "multicultural" context, which struck me as an interesting choice given the state of the world today.

The show was simply titled "The Illuminated Bible". Check your listings; if it's on in your neck of the woods, don't miss it.