Biblioll College’s Monthly Miscellany No. 12
Notes and highlights from February 2026
“In March the earth remembers its own name.
Everywhere the plates of snow are cracking.
The rivers begin to sing. In the sky
the winter stars are sliding away; new stars
appear as, later, small blades of grain
will shine in the dark fields.
And the name of every place
is joyful.”
~ “Worm Moon,” by Mary Oliver
Happy March, friends!
This month, on the 9th, we celebrate the first anniversary of Dispatches from Biblioll College! We are so excited and grateful to have had a full year of this celebration of autodidactism, lifelong learning, and books.
February was our eleventh full month & we’re so thankful to our subscribers, free and paid. We truly appreciate all of our fellow literature nerds & everyone who has been following, liking, commenting, or sharing our posts. Your support and comments are always enlightening, encouraging, and just so fun to read. Thank you for reading along with us!
Looking back on February 2026…
Boze really delved into the world of folklore and legend (see The Shadow Canon, below), while reminding us of the dangers of unending distraction and entertainment—including by exchanging our curiosity and ability to read for such instant gratifications and distractions.
Other autodidact posts include the latest in the Classical Music History series and Dickens’s experience of the year 1839 based on his letters. Rach is still reading Herodotus and will make one final post on books 4-9 this month.
Arts & Culture / Great Books
From current things of interest in pop culture, to our favorites of classic literature, this section is for some of our random, unexpected posts.
February posts in the series:
· “A Light to Lighten the Gentiles”: My Latest Essay for Plough (Boze)
· Our Addiction to Entertainment is Killing Us (Boze)
· The World is Aflame Because People Have Stopped Reading (Boze)
· The Men Who Want a World Stripped of Nature, Books, Beauty & Dreams (Boze)
Great Books / The St. John’s College Great Books Challenge
We are hugely grateful for those who have been reading along with us as part of our St. John’s College Great Books Challenge which started on March 9th, 2025. This month, we read Books 4-6 of The Histories by Herodotus. Rachel, however, has been distracted by the letters of Charles Dickens, and so her final post on books 4-9 of Herodotus’s Histories will come all in one post later in March. Boze, however, made a plea to his fellow fans of old—especially Victorian—books to recommend new works/authors who feel as though they are writing from another age.
February post in the series:
· Looking for Recent Books That Feel Like Old Books (Boze)
The Shadow Canon
Boze’s Shadow Canon series continues with our exploration of the weird and wonderful works of literature from mythology to folklore to the relatively strange or neglected gems that don’t typically make it onto the standard “Great Books” lists.
February posts from The Shadow Canon:
· The Lappland Magician & the Spanish Nun Who Traveled the World—Without Leaving Their Rooms (Boze)
· The Curious Persistence of Faerie Encounters (Boze)
· Nine Folklore Books That Will Remind You of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Boze)
Library-Educated / Dispatches from Dickens Series
This month we finished Volume One of the Pilgrim Edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens, journeying with him through the year 1839.
February post in the series:
· Dispatches from Dickens No. 11: Dickens in 1839 (Rach)
This month, Rach will be posting on Dickens in 1840, as he begins Master Humphrey’s Clock and The Old Curiosity Shop. She has been so engrossed in this volume again that she might even get through 1841 before March is over.
Don Carlo & the Seamstress
We’re continuing the Classical Music History Series that we’d initially started over at Don Carlo & the Seamstress!
February post in the series:
· Classical Music History Post 06: Entering Into the Sixteenth Century (Rach)
What We’re Reading, Watching, and Pondering
Rach
Speaking of authors who write as though from—or immersed in—another age, Rach is currently hooked on A.S. Byatt’s Possession, and it is hard to put down. (She recalls seeing the movie many years back, but it didn’t make much of an impression.) She is fascinated by Byatt’s ability to create a rich world, layered and immense, surrounding two fictional Victorian poets as they interact with known figures and in a familiar setting. Rach has also thoroughly enjoyed finishing H.V. Morton’s In Search of England & the first volume of the Pilgrim edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens, among others. She is currently rereading Les Misérables and in the middle of several Trollope novels.
As Rach continues her caregiving work (and after a delightful week of the long-awaited snow in the valley), she had a big weekend as the owner of the pet products business which Rach has been sewing for three years visited from San Francisco, delivering inventory and supplies for the business that Rachel will take over the day-to-day operations of. It’s an exciting prospect! In the learning process, Rach learned to assemble a number of different wool pet toys and crochet pet beds of various sizes. The whole thing required a big reorganizing of the sewing room, but everything is now looking shipshape & Bristol fashion.
Boze
Boze had a busy month. In addition to his various posts for Plough and substack, he wrote five thousand words of his mystery-novel-in-progress (bringing the total close to 40,000 of a projected 100,000). He’s experimenting with a new method in which he writes fragments of scenes in no particular order and then stitches them together. This has had the unexpected effect of actually getting much of the book written. One of the several chapters he’s currently writing has involved a considerable amount of worldbuilding, and he’s taken tremendous joy in inventing names for fictional folklorists, scholars and antiquarians.
Some additional joys of the past several weeks: we found a complete set of the Everyman’s Library edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in pristine condition in a local little free library. We’ve been watching Better Call Saul with Rach’s parents (just started season three) and have been analyzing its near-perfect characterization and storytelling. We discovered A. S. Byatt. We bought all four volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time at a library sale. We stumbled into an antique bookshop that had somehow escaped our notice, which felt a bit like stepping through a portal. Boze read Early Irish Myths and Sagas, Popular Magic: Cunning Folk in English History and a number of Claude LeCouteux folklore books. It snowed one week and then rained the next. The hellebores and crocuses are blooming. Spring, alas, is near.
Thank you again for journeying with us, friends. We are so grateful for all of our subscribers and would love to hear your thoughts about what you are reading, watching, and learning, and what kind of content you would love to see here. Happy Spring, & stay curious!
Spring, alas, is near?