It’s already a week ago that I held a lec­ture at the Boston Pub­lic Library. It was the 34^th. William A. Dwig­gins Lec­ture. As lec­tures go, it wasn’t all that spe­cial (apart from it being a great hon­our to be asked to speak in front of all those dig­ni­fied print­ers and his­to­ri­ans), but it was the first time that I had a lec­ture inter­rupted by a fire alarm. I just had the first slide up (see small pic­ture) when the alarm went off.

We actu­ally all had to move out into the street. There was the usual dis­play of emer­gency hard­ware (I always find that on those occa­sions in the US they really like to show every­thing they have) – big trucks with and with­out lad­ders, ambu­lances, patrol cars, dozens of fire­men (who like to be called Fire­fight­ers these days) with hel­mets and axes – until it tran­spired that it had only been a mal­func­tion­ing microwave some­where that caused all this fuss!

Nick Sher­man had the pres­ence of mind to film the moment when the alarm went off. He also took the lit­tle pic­ture here that I just down­loaded from his flickr site. I designed a poster and an invi­ta­tion for the evening. The card is shown below.

I’ve also added a down­load for the pdf that was sent to the print­ers: dwiggins_sheet.pdf.