Late last week this arrived in the afternoon mail:

It’s a wonderful feeling to finally hold the Thing Itself in your hand, especially when it is such a pretty little thing. (Though I cannot take credit. The cover photo was a lucky accident with a cheap digital camera in the reading room of the American Antiquarian Society. John Hubbard, a designer whose hand I would like to shake, transformed those pixels into this lovely piece of cover art.)

This, finally, was “Artifact Day.”

The arrival of Artifact Day also reminded me that I needed to hurry up and get more material finalized on this new site of mine. Most pressingly, I was reminded that I needed to get my Sermon Notebooks Online components posted, at least in some kind of Beta format. I’ve long realized that one cannot publish a book emphasizing the importance of reading sermon notebooks in order to understand sermon literature unless one is also willing to try making these quirky and rather inaccessible artifacts more accessible. If you are interested, I hope you will poke around in the Sermon Notebooks Online pages as they develop (and I hope they will be continually in a state of development and expansion). I especially hope you will let me know if you have questions, suggestions, or requests for the site.

Happy Artifact Day, everyone!