I finally got my birthday Kindle in the mail yesterday. Hooray!
I didn’t realize it until I got one, but when Kindles go into sleep mode, they display one of twenty-five preloaded screensaver images. And the first one mine showed me? Behold:
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| The two greatest innovations in publishing this year. |
A black and white reproduction of the first page of the gospel of John from the Lindisfarne Gospels. Here’s a much bigger and colorer copy of the same:
As the tag at the bottom of the digital reproduction indicates, this end of the 7th-/beginning of the 8th-century masterpiece is currently held by the British Library. You can see further selections in the library’s “Turning the Pages” online exhibit.
And those of you not fully up to speed on your Hiberno-Saxon decorative script, the text reads:
In principio erat verbum, et verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus…
or
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God…
I hope Amazon has it rigged so that’s the first sleep screen shown to all Kindlites. So appropriately suggestive of new digital worlds where words are once more disconnected from merely physical instantiation…
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P.S. Poking around today looking for a good image of a Kindle I discovered it’s fairly easy to hack the Kindle to replace the default screensaver with your own images. So I think I might throw together a collection of 24 additional medieval images to join Lindisfarne on my Kindle, and when I do, I’ll post it here so others can download it as well. Check back later this week.