Erasable Books – a personal history

In 2019, freshly home from Pennsic, I went to The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale to look at embroidered book covers. I was looking for an A&S project to dig into for the 2020 season. While I was looking for subjects I noticed something interesting in their online catalog and decided to take a look. Writing tables vvith a kalender for xxij yeares : vvith other necessary rules, the contents therof you shall finde in the other side of this Leafe

I’m not entirely sure what caught my eye, maybe the name, which is quite weird or perhaps it was the size of the book as I was looking for tiny books. (It’s only 10 cm tall) But, without really any plan, I decided to request the book for viewing.

When I arrived, I looked at erasable book first, and I was entranced. Then I looked at the embroidery book and was not excited. I apparently had a new project. My photo album from that day is very illustrative of my thoughts: Yale photo album Looking at it, you see that I want to interrogate the book from every angle. (I didn’t take any pictures of the inside of the book because it is fully digitalized here: Digitalized Yale Erasable Book

I then spent the next few months learning all about this weird object that very few people had ever heard of, I became obsessed. I put together a project for St. Eligus in November. I created my own version of the almanac portion of the book. Here are the internal pages I drafted up for the project. East Kingdom Almanac This took significantly longer than anticipated as I fell down too many rabbit holes trying to come up with a useful book that also emulated the original. I’m glad that I did this part first as now that it’s done, it just requires updating periodically rather than falling back down those rabbit holes each time.

The extant versions also follow this general template. The printers created the base book, and then every reprinting they just updated it with more recent information. One funny thing about the extant versions is that they all start at 1580 and go until 1601, which was a great deal in the beginning, but by the end of the main print runs in 1601, it was very much not.

Now, for the folks at home, reading this in 2026, remember, this is November 2019. I’m trying to create a calendar that will be useful for the next few years, telling when approximately the common events happen in the East. Little did I know that this was going to age as well as raw milk in the coming months.

In December of 2019 I had the opportunity to go to England for a week as my parents were pet sitting for my brother who was stationed there. He had been deployed to Afghanistan for 3 months, and they were to spend those months in his house in Marlow (November through the end of January). As this coincided with my birthday and Christmas, they decided that for my birthday they’d fly me over for the week (Dec. 15 – 22) and I could decide where we’d go. I started to do some research on which libraries had copies of this book, and if I could visit them. (As I said, obsession)

The Cambridge University had one and they had a generous policy of allowing non-affiliated scholars use of their library. So I, of course, decided this would be one of my days. Luckily, they were still open on December 20th, the last day of the term. Cambridge University Album

Once I got home, I got to work on recreating one for A&S champs on Feb 29, 2020. My house is small. My workspace is smaller. Most of this project was done on tv trays in my living room, which is impressive given the amount of mess it involved. The more messy parts were done at the kitchen table, unless they required lead, at which point, the living room was deemed safer. (marginally) Also, our three cats desperately wanted to help. February 2020 process pictures

As with all my projects, I was experiencing scope creep. I had gone from, ‘hey, let’s recreate this thing!’ to ‘How did they make varnish?’ and ‘What is gesso made out of?’ – all great questions but it makes a mess.

Finally, the day had arrived, and it was time to present my project. A&S Champs 2020 documentation I did well. I did not take pictures. It was a great site, and the acoustics were wonderful so I could actually concentrate on what I was saying. I didn’t have the prettiest project, but I had studied the rubric and talked to previous folks who had done well, so I stuck to the scoring points. I made the top 4. I was optimistic about where I could take this project and how I could refine it for presentation at Pennsic.

The next day I went to the grocery store, and I saw some people were panic buying, but I looked at the aisles of toilet paper and said to myself, we have a few packs left, there’s no need to horde. I literally said this to myself, on March 1st, 2020. I should have bought the toilet paper.

I put my project in a plastic tote, all the ingredients, all the papers, all the things, nice and neatly wrapped up so I could get back to work on them in a few months for Pennsic. I helped host a 4-year old’s birthday party at the Discovery Center in Acton MA on March 7th, and then didn’t leave my house for months. Pennsic was obviously cancelled that year.

I spent the pandemic working on the technical side of the SCA, helping with editing ethereal court, listening to our new kingdom’s exchequer (my husband), try to hold all the groups together, helping organize events like embroidery schola, a scribal schola, coronation and then feeder tournaments in ways that the whole kingdom could participate while staying at home. My brain did not want to do creative things. Or things requiring sustained thought, like reading books. I played a lot of animal crossing while on group chats with people. We saw a lot of virtual shooting stars.

As the world started to open up again, I had started a new job based in Princeton NJ. I do not live in Princeton NJ, I live just outside Boston. I spent a lot of 2023 traveling back and forth to Princeton. I spent more than 6 months in NJ that year. I had to file income tax in NJ that year. But, you know what Princeton University has? Erasable books! So one trip I stayed over the weekend and spent my Friday afternoon at the Princeton rare books library looking at erasable books. Princeton University Album

One of the skills I had honed during the pandemic thanks to online events was judging A&S competitions. I had become skilled at giving feedback thanks to years of training in Athena’s thimble, but a few years worth of online rubric judging had made me a very skilled judge. Once we were back to in person events I continued judging at events as I found I really enjoy helping people get the best scores they could get within the rules of the competition. I could help them see how to get more points in the future and how to present objects in the best light. As my background is very much diverse arts, I could be thrown at basically any project, and I have been. We are perpetually short on skilled judges and so I kept using that as an excuse not to enter on myself.

At Pennsic 2025, I watched my friends do very well at the A&S competition and decided that I needed to show that I could also do the thing. So I started to prepare to get a project together for St. Eligus in the fall, but work conspired against me and I ran out of time. But I had at least started, so I used that momentum and kept going and managed to get a project together for A&S Champs 2026 on the history of note taking.

By doing a research paper I could explore more areas and look down more rabbit holes, all within the very small working space that I have in my house. At this point the kitchen table is not available, nor are the tv trays in the living room. I’m down to the space I have on my desk I use for working from home every day. For that project I did finish binding the book that I had made for St. Eligus back in 2019, I used a book I had bound for a class I taught in September 2019 and I made a new wax tablet to show off that style of note taking. This is the paper I turned in for A&S Champs in March 2026 Exploring the Changing Landscape of Taking Note in Europe

I did reasonably well, and volunteered to be on the Pennsic A&S team, and they agreed, provided I did a made object instead of a research paper, which was fine with me as I think the scoring is much easier for the made objects. Here is the paper I turned in for Pennsic A&S champs Erasable Notebooks in Europe

I’m still working on recreating the book again. I’ve updated the almanac for a post pandemic world, and I’ve created the erasable sheets. I now need to print the book and bind the whole thing together. I’ve also tried this year to make the erasable sheets on parchment, though I’m not thrilled with the quality of that experiment. I may end up making two books to show the differences between the parchment and the paper erasable sheets. Both methods were used in the extant examples.

In the process of creating this year’s project, I fell down the rabbit hole of trying to find every extant copy of the book. This involved scouring library catalogs, world cat, the universal short title catalog, and the English short title catalog. I was trying to see if I was right in my boast back in 2020 found more copies than the experts had (and I most certainly did exceed the count I was seeing in the academic papers I was reading). I had actually created a more complete survey of all surviving copies of these calendars, which I included in the appendix of the paper, but that I will link here. Surviving Examples of the writing table books