The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Lisa Spangenberg:

Oak Galls are made by insects. They lay eggs on the leaves and on the bark of the oak. Then the egg sort of swells, under the leaf or bark, and the larva grows, and the gall gets about the size of a medium to large grape. The ones from leaves are not worth picking; you want one that's made on the side of a twig or the bark of a branch or trunk.

Then the catterpillar like thing bores a hole and leaves, sometimes as a fly sometimes as a caterpillar. You want to harvest the gall as soon after that as possible, because the tannin soon decays the gall, and if you do it before, the tannin hasn't accumulated; there's some sort of a tannin exchange biological process that involves the critter, though as yet I've found no good explanation of how/why the tannin that is naturally produced by the oak accumulates in the gall.

The ones from Aleppo seem to be higher in tannin, and it seems to be a product of the oak species, rather than the critter making the gall. They came to Ireland by way of France, and monastaries mostly bought with them with processed hides, ready for vellum manufacture, and with prepared ready-to-use vellum. As yet, we can't or haven't distinguished the kind of gall used based on chemical analyis of the ink, though we have done that with respect to the copper in the ink, and there's been some research into the DNA of the cow or sheep used in the vellum. We know, for instance that more than the Dun Cow was used for the Book of the Dun Cow.

Faren Miller:
"A truly maddening question would be 'Which famous, influential books haven't you got around to reading yet?' (Could be in the field or out of it.)"

In one of Malcolm Bradbury's novels (I'd look it up, except they're packed away...), that very game is played by a college English department.

This is a game known to English department vict . . . inmat . . . ummm . . . people everywhere. It's called Humiliation, and it's been popularized, if not invented, by David Lodge's Changing Places.

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