It sounds so official and important. It's a word that feels large and all-encompassing to me. Ironic seeing as how it's really just a pompous way of saying brief, or concise. But it's perfectly fitting for this beautiful, crumbling old Latin Dictionary I found one afternoon picking through a junque store. I just love it. There's no cover, just a title page which reads: A Compendious Dictionary of the Latin Tongue: for the use of Public Seminaries and of Private Students - 1805. The pages are falling out all over the place and it's perfectly grimy and lovely. It doesn't even matter that every time I open it, the cells in my body immediately release an army of histamine and leukotrienes.
I've been using some of the pages that have fallen out completely in collages and they look amazing with resin soaked through them and beeswax absorbed into them. I'll never use them all, and since I've been sadly neglecting my tiny Etsy shop, I decided to make up a few packages of these yellowed pages along with some old arithmetic workbook pages and a few French Dictionary pages. It made my heart happy to wrap them up in tissue and some pretty satin & sheet music.
