Here is a bit more information about the objects in the scene, and some of the techniques I employed in creating them. This may provide more detail than anyone would ever want to read, but better too much than too little.

In the foreground, moving from front to back, are:

• Some calligraphy. The text is copied out of a book entitled A Treatise Of Daunses, wherin it is shewed, that they are as it were accessories and dependants (or thinges annexed) to whoredome : where also by the way is touched and proued, that Playes are ioyned and knit togeather in a rancke or rowe with them, printed in 1581 by an anonymous author (though I assume he was a Calvinist minister, as they tended to denounce in print anything even the least bit fun, but especially dancing and the theatre, and it was published about the time many other Calvinist ministers, such as John Northbrooke, were printing similar things). The calligraphy style is an English secretary hand, given in Richard Field's 1611 book of penmanship, and was the most prevalent style of handwriting during that period. The scanned image is mapped onto a bicubic patch.
  
  
• A quill pen. These were usually made from the feathers of a goose's wing (preferably the second or third feathers, or, failing that, the pinion feather), or a raven's. After being prepared (which involved soaking in water for 24 hours, then being "tempered" by being plunged first into a bucket of sand soaked with boiling water, then into cold water), the barbs were stripped off, the quill shortened to a manageable length, and finally the nib was cut with a pen-knife and a cleft made to carry the ink to the tip. The cardioid cross-section of the pen was modelled using the formula r=a(1-cosA), and projected along the Z axis with a shallow curve in the -X direction, and a shallower curve in +Y, to model a feather taken from the right wing of a goose. This was all accomplished as a mesh calculated with nested #while loops.
  
  
• Scratch paper. The Rules by F.B. for Children to write by, contained in Field's book, mentions keeping "brown paper for great hast, or else boxe with sand". While it was used primarily for soaking up blots and spills, scratch paper is also handy for getting past the heavy flow of ink after one has just dipped the pen. This was also a scanned image put onto a bicubic patch, but by the time I moved it around to where I was happy with it, the turned-up corner had moved off the image.
  
  
• A stick of sealing-wax. Unlike beeswax or candle wax, sealing wax is an incredibly hard substance. Period sources stipulate that it should be hard enough to require that it be broken in order to open the paper beneath it, but sturdy enough that it not shatter immediately. Period recipes indicate a mixture of shellac, turpentine and rosin, which results in a rather shiny substance that bears a surprising resemblance to plastic.
  
  
• A bottle of ink and its cork. I originally designed this as a lathe object, but that slowed down the rendering to such a staggering degree that I remodelled it as a CSG object. This wasn't much better, but at least it showed some improvement in speed. The cork texture is based on the one in the standard POV-Ray include files, but modified to give darker bits.
  
  
• A pen-knife. Used for cutting the quill, pen-knives had a short blade with a curved cutting edge. In order to get rounded edges, the wooden handle is a CSG composed of bits sliced out of superellipsoids.
  
  
• A candlestick. Loosely modelled on a brass candlestick I had floating about my apartment, it comprises two lathe objects, two meshes and a couple of primitives. In retrospect, the bottom mesh object (the hexagonal base) could have been more easily constructed using a prism with a conic sweep, but since I did that one in the wee hours of the morning, my thought processes were a bit fuzzy. I had wanted to give slightly rounded edges to the mesh object that makes up the majority of the candlestick's height, but couldn't quite get the hang of smooth triangles.
  
  
• A candle. The first object I created for this scene. I wanted to model the fact that wax or tallow candles seem to glow at the top from the light coming from the flame. Unfortunately, the only method that really seemed to work made the wax appear to be brighter than the flame itself, but overall I think the effect isn't too bad.
  
  
• A piece of bread. Because they didn't have rubber erasers, students learning to write would erase their ruling lines with bread, squooshed up the way all children seem to do instinctively when playing with bread. It doesn't work too badly when using actual lead, as long as the marks are lightly made (the results are rather disappointing when trying to erase modern graphite pencil marks, but it does work to some degree). Because period "white" bread was only about as white as modern wheat bread, I made the interior a little tan. Its inner surface is a combination of a bumps normal and a CSG difference of lots of little spheres.
  
  
• Books. Unfortunately, I didn't have any books from the time period I was portraying, so I used the oldest books I possess as models. They are admittedly anachronistic, but I hope that this inaccuracy may be forgiven me in light of the fact that binding techniques changed little between the 17th and 19th centuries. As the greatest amount of time was spent on these books, specific comments on their construction and histories may be found in each book's include file; the Roxburghe Ballads are in book1.inc and book2.inc, the book in the centre is in book3.inc, and the thick, badly damaged book is in book4.inc.

The room in the background is loosely based on the drawing-room of Edmund Blackadder (from the British historical sitcom Black Adder II). Because the room was intended to be very dimly lit, I did not spend an inordinate amount of time on fine details. At first, I was worried that the shadows of the candles on the far wall were unrealistic, but experimentation with real candles convinced me that my fears were unfounded. The portraits on the walls are of myself (centre) and two of my friends in Elizabethan clothing, and the Tudor-style house visible through the window is based upon a building in Winchester, England (near a structure known as "The Cross").

Items that I had originally wished to put into the picture were a pile of "Stanch graines", used for preparing the writing surface, and black lead for ruling lines on the paper. However, I omitted them for the sole reason that I didn't know what they looked like. For example, I feel fairly sure that one wouldn't use a plain old hunk of lead, but was there some sort of stylus used with it, like a modern pencil or a silverpoint stylus, or was it just formed into a stick, as is done with modern artists' charcoal?

The "Rules by F.B. for Children to Write by", upon which I based this image, was taken from the book entitled, A NEVV BOOKE, Containing all Sorts of Hands vsvally written at this Day in Christendome, as the English and French Secretary, the Roman, Italian, French, Spanish, high and low Dutch, Court and Chancerie hands:with Examples of each of them in their proper tongue and Letter, imprinted at London by Richard Field, 1611. The Rules are available on the Web at <http://www.shipbrook.net/jeff/writing.html>, for those who are interested in such things.