Responding to our conversation about the curses medieval scribes wrote in books to prevent their theft, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst emails a modern-day book curse from the instructional manual Beginning Glassblowing by Edward T. Schmid. Glassblowers, by the way, call themselves gaffers. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Beginning Glassblowing Curse”
Grant, you remember our conversation about medieval book curses?
Yeah.
When medieval scribes would sometimes actually put curses in the books.
To stop people from stealing the books.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, that prompted a wonderful email from Justin Furman.
He’s a professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
He does glassblowing on the side, and he sent a copy of a page from the great glassblowing classic, Beginning Glassblowing, by Edward Schmidt, which includes a curse because it was a handwritten book early on.
And the curse goes, may all your glass check.
That means may all your glass crack.
May you suffer from inexplicable minor burns and cuts,
And may all of your creative juices dry up like the Mojave Desert,
Should you copy or reproduce this book in any fashion without the written consent of the author.
Oh, wow. Yeah. Check. So check to crack.
Yeah. Isn’t that interesting?
Yeah. And I also didn’t realize that glass blowers are called gaffers.
Gaffers.
Yeah. So if you’re a gaffer and you photocopy that book,
You’re probably going to be dropping glass on the floor.
I wonder why they’re called gaffers.
A gaffer in other fields is someone who has things on the end of a long stick.
I wonder if it’s because they have their blob of glass on the end of a stick when they put it into the kiln.
