ip-id

Her self-assigned task, supported by a traveling scholarship from the Welsh Livery Guild, was to study The Budget’s transition to the Internet and the willingness of the Amish to accept that transition.[...]

[Welsh Livery Guild!]

There was the Amish man where she was a houseguest who asked her what an “ip-id” was. “He had read about an iPod,” she explained. “I wish I had had mine with me to show him.”

Her experiences taught her a general rule: “it is difficult to explain a Web site to someone who hasn’t seen one.”

[...]

The national edition of The Budget, now available in print only, is largely composed of submissions from hundreds of volunteer “scribes” from across the country. Typically, a scribe talks about the weather and segues into the goings-on in the local community. Around 500 scribe letters a week take up roughly 50 pages....

In a letter dated Sept. 3, a scribe from Camden, Ind., told how a great-uncle, Owen, had the family over to “cut down a big tree in the front yard and turn it into firewood. Uncle Owen cut it down while his sons stopped traffic as they had to throw it on the road. He got tired out, but at 89 I think that is doing quite well.”

—Selections from "Exploring News by the Online Amish," NYT

Diary of a nobody

A hundred examples of these dryly detailed, unintentionally revealing manuscripts came up for sale last week at Horst Auction Center in Ephrata, Pa., just north of Lancaster. A dozen bidders, mostly Amish, spent about $3,000 for all the lots, which ranged from 1850s daybooks and medicine and dessert recipes by one Christian Lantz Fisher ($130) to Sarah King’s 1930s-1990s annotations ($25) that the Horst catalog summarizes as “weather, company for supper, visiting, quilting, baking, household chores, stitching rose chair cushions, painting door stops.”

Clarence E. Spohn, the cataloguer for the Horst sale, said in a telephone interview: “We could find no precedent for any collection like this previously being auctioned. It’s not common at all for this material to surface on the market. Much of it was lost or destroyed by the families.” The consigner, Mr. Spohn added, is “an Ohio collector who is not Amish but has had a strong interest in Amish culture for decades. He’s now downsizing.” (The sale, on Jan. 30, also included 70 scholarly books with titles like “Mennonite Attire Through Four Centuries” and “Plain and Amish: An Alternative to Modern Pessimism.”)

—NYT

(From Dzyd Bill)