After a lengthy, unplanned break the blog will be back this weekend. There are a few changes, major and minor.
First, there's a new name - The Magic Mirror in the Palace of Books. The old name is remaining in the subheading to avoid confusion and in case I want to revert at some time.
I had never particularly liked the blunt description of the original name but was never able to come up with anything better. The Magic Mirror in the Palace of Books is one of the English titles of Cefu Yuangui (though apparently not an actual translation) and seemed to fit. Cefu Yuangui is a Chinese leishu, a term often translated as "encyclopedia" though the actual works aren't quite that. They're much closer to enormous anthologies or even small libraries. Roughly what I'd imagine the Britannica would have been like if edited by Edmund Wilson - why shouldn't the entry on Isaac Newton include big chunks of his Principia? Maybe even the entire work? Why write an entry on James II and the Revolution of 1688 when you can just toss in Macaulay?
Next change is posts will be weekly. This had been the original plan but there's so much to cover I instead started with posting every other day. There's no way I could have kept that up - I think the longest stretch was about six weeks. Weekly posts will be more likely to be on time and there's still room for something during the week. (In fact one mid-week post is already scheduled.)
The post formats will be slightly changed. In the past I always used the title of the book as the post title even when that was a bit vague or didn't give a good idea what the post is about. Foolish consistencies, you know? So now more descriptive post titles. Previous posts were also mostly one per book with the occasional associated work. I have at least one compendium post already written.
There's still some cleanup for older posts that may never happen. In particular the image links are broken on several of them but that's very time consuming to fix. Most of the recent posts had direct uploads so that shouldn't be a problem.
