Another for Working-days

Last week I told you that I left my copy of Peter Collingwood's The Techniques of Sprang safe in my car while I participated in a demonstration of handspinning and weaving, even though I would have liked to bring the book out in public to show people its content.  Right after, I bought a second copy.

Beatrice: I may sit in a corner, and cry heigh-ho for a husband!
Don Pedro: Lady Beatrice, I will get you one.
Beatrice: I would rather have one of your father's getting.  Hath your grace ne'er a brother like you?  Your father got excellent husbands, if a maid could come by them.
Don Pedro: Will you have me, lady?
Beatrice: No, my lord, unless I might have another for working-days: your grace is too costly to wear every day.  But, I beseech your grace, pardon me: I was born to speak all mirth and no matter.

–Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, Act II, scene I

This out-of-print book can be expensive and I'm fortunate I got a good price.  The price was high enough to make me think hard about it but not as high as the usual price.  I felt a little spendthrift about buying a copy just to bring out and show occasionally to people.  Not like the extra copy of The Family Creative Workshop, Vol 17 on the bottom of the stack in the photo, that was cheap like borscht and easy to justify.

The språng book is stamped withdrawn from a library at, curiously enough, a college in Minnesota with "a Swedish and Lutheran heritage."  That dovetails a bit with a book about a cloth-making technique that was practiced in Sweden.

I can't see any wear on this copy.  There's an interview of Collingwood, in Handwoven and reprinted on the Schatch Spindle blog, where he says his språng book is the one people buy then never seem to use.

Hopefully today it will get a little wear as I go to another handspinning demo with some other guild volunteers.  I've told the market manager I'll show how språng is done.

In the meantime, have a short documentary from Minnesota Original with an interview and charcoal drawings of sheep done by an assistant professor of art and art history from the same college that discarded the språng book.  Kristen Lowe shows drawings of flocks and sheep-shearing, and from the way she talks, she has given thought not only to art but to the relationship between sheep and people.