I was at the Magus Books used book store in University Village today.
It is the English poet, artist, designer and socialist William Morris (1834-1896), famous for his leadership in the British Arts and Crafts Movement.
This is an iconic 1884 portrait of him taken by photographer Frederick Hollyer.
(And what was the British Arts and Crafts Movement about? It was an influential design movement that emerged in Britain around 1880 and lasted through the 1920s as a response to the Industrial Revolution. It rejected mass factory production in favor of handmade quality, original materials and traditional craftsmanship.)
This beautiful and enormous old Chinese-English dictionary was $120, maybe just a little bit too expensive for an impulse buy.
In the top left corner of this page, we can learn how to write ‘China’ in Chinese: 中国 (pronounce zhōng guó).
The characters stand for ‘Middle Kingdom’, a term that dates back to many centuries before BCE. It reflects the belief that China was situated at the center of a vast square Earth, surrounded by the Four Seas, beyond which lay islands inhabited by barbarians.