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Message: <blockquote data-quote="bruin" data-source="post: 1059808" data-attributes="member: 12587">OODM: I'm posting whatever research Jens does after meeting up with Neal and the others.  Feel free to insert the meeting below if you wanted, or you can just assume you had it.  Jens can learn from Neal, whenever and wherever they end up meeting, all the information Neal was able to scrounge up on Pickman earlier.  A subsequent check yields no further information.IDM:  Looking into some books on the early history of printing, Jens learns that Venice became the preeminent city of printers in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.  While the majority of materials printed at this time were religious texts in Latin, there was a preeminent press that specialized entirely in reprinting Ancient Greek texts from manuscript.  The owner of this press, Giovanni Batistelli, was eventually executed for some sort of involvement in the occult, but the books Jens is looking at don't have any details on precisely what this involvement was.  It does mention that the Batistelli was executed in the midst of the Roman Inquisition, shortly after Pope Paul IV detailed his "Index of Forbidden Books" in 1559.  The only modern reprint of this text at BPL is checked out, but a 19th century reprint is available in the Rare Books & Manuscripts section, which unfortunately closed at 5.Jens can find no specific information about the symbol he saw on the book.  He looks into the history of the pentagram and discovers that historically, up until the 19th century, the pentagram generally had positive connatations and was appropriated by a variety of belief systems, including Christianity at times.  It was only later that the pentagram, especially the upside down pentagram, began to be associated with witchcraft and satanism.OODM: The plans for the cemetary can be accessed from the city archives during business hours.  It would probably be a good idea for Neal and Jens to meet up at closing time to share notes, especially if Jens can't follow up on some of the leads himself.</blockquote>

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