Shiny distractions

So, ran across a link to Medieval Rings which is the part of an auction house selling very nice looking medieval rings which has photos of the rings along "with professional description and photographs of each ring. Descriptions include comparisons with other rings, suggestions for further reading, historical background, and information about sizing." eg Ottonian Cloisonné Ring (assuming the search link works).

Then chased up to their parent company, especially their Text manuscript collection - of which they have some photos of original bindings (you can search on that specifically, amongst other things such as the topics of music or science) eg this 13th century Psalter They do photos of front and inside various bits, but unfortunately not the edge binding...

They also have a site for Books of Hours...

And then followed a link and was distracted by The Roman de la Rose Digital Library the goal of which is to "create a digital library of all known manuscript copies of the Roman de la Rose, which number around 300". And if you go to the narrative sections and pick a section, they will show you thumbnails of all the pages of the different manuscripts that they have scanned in so far and you can load and page through... and you can zoom in to your hearts content. Somewhat image and therefore bandwidth intensive but just WOW...

Should stop drooling and head off to bed.

But before I go, some non-medieval pretty pictures Snowflakes and grains of sand

I'll sleep now, you have fun looking at the pretty pictures :)