After her father’s death, Helen Macdonald decided to train a goshawk. MARZENA POGORZALY
Falconry is one of the few occupations more archaic than bookselling.
The heyday of the bookshop, depending on who you ask, was in the 1610s, or the 1950s, or in some year defined as n-30, in which n is the year during which you pen your lament, but surely we can all agree that the golden age of training a vicious bird to sit on your fist until it swoops down to shred its prey with hooked beak and talons occurred centuries ago, perhaps under the great Mongolian Khans, or during the 1240s, when Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, the Holy Roman Emperor, unveiled his treatise, De arte venandi cum avibus…