A miscellany is a random hodgepodge of things, and knitwear designer (and lawyer) Carol J. Sulcoski's petite volume entitled Knitting Ephemera (recently published by Sixth and Spring) fits the definition well. Be warned: The print is minuscule and packed onto the page, so you may need your magnifiers. And, there is no Table of Contents (there is an Index) or organizing principle, really, other than factoids about knitting (and some about crochet). Disorientation is part of the process, but it's a temporary state, kind of a portal state, really, to render you receptive to the luminous yarn halo of knitting consciousness.
Reading the book is like walking into a messy knitter's house (not yours, of course), that nonetheless feels familiar and comfortable, chaos notwithstanding, because, and only because, you are a heavily-addicted knitter and therefore love anything to do with the craft, and also you have the type of mind that delights in such a random collection of informational tidbits. You are in Knitterland! To mix metaphors somewhat (actually, a lot), the book is like a recipe collection that someone has put together over the years in a folder, a collection that consists of smeary words scribbled onto index cards, recipes ripped from newspapers, or cut off the backs of food boxes. It is very disjointed but you love fooling around in the kitchen, and you love culinary history, and you love deathless volumes like The Joy of Cooking--so you don't care about its disorganized state--in fact, it feels kind of good. You also enjoy books that mimic the conventions of nineteenth-century and even eighteenth-century publishing, and come with lovely red ribbon markers to hold your place. (Again, like The Joy of Cooking.) If you are such a person, my advice is Go for it!, buy this treasury, and also think about giving Knitting Ephemera to the Knitter Who Has Everything, before someone else does. Or before the volume becomes ephemeral.
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I encountered the word "miscellany" as a child, and since I only read it--I think there was a column in Time Magazine of yore entitled "Miscellany"--I thought it was pronounced miss-SELL-a-knee, and for many years I couldn't figure out what it meant. Then, as a graduate student, I encountered Tottel's Miscellany, the first-ever published anthology of poetry in English (1557). Subsequently the term has proved useful.
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Perhaps some of you, gentle knitters, convene occasionally with like-minded souls, for social as well as instructive purposes. My cabal, a group of exemplars styled K4TOG, meets as often as manageable for knitting-centric discussion and edification. Thus we inaugurated our 2016 agenda last week....Here you may observe one of us conscientiously winding yarn and conversing with the other knitters, while admirably ignoring the temptations of alcohol.
