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Today in Brooklyn hunting a tikkun soferim.
A tikkun is a book made out to look like the Torah. There are two sorts; tikkun koreim and tikkun soferim. The former is for people to practice their Torah reading; on the right-hand side it has the text with vowel marks and musical annotation, and on the left-hand side it has the text as it appears in the Torah, with just the letters. It is useful because you can look at the right-hand side and then cover it up and work with the left-hand side to make sure you know the reading without the vowels.
A tikkun soferim is different. You use it to copy when you're writing a Torah, to make sure you get all the words right. It doesn't have the vowels, because a sofer doesn't write vowels. It does have notation at the beginning of each line which tells the sofer how much he can expect to have to squeeze or stretch his letters to get them all in, so it might say 4M or 5F (except in Hebrew, but you get the idea), meaning four more, or five fewer, letters than the default (which varies depending on which tikkun you're using). It also has notes for other things a sofer needs to know but a reader doesn't.
I didn't find one. When places didn't give me an automatic no (which I bet they wouldn't have done if I'd been male), it went like this: I would go into a shop and ask for a tikkun soferim; they would show me a tikkun koreim; I would say no, I asked for a tikkun soferim not a tikkun koreim; they would say oh, we don't have one of those (although this last step varied; sometimes they had to go hunt it, and once the youth looked at me blankly and said "What's that?"). But the nice man in Eichlers ordered it for me, and I found another book I've been looking for for a long time, so that was some compensation.
A tikkun is a book made out to look like the Torah. There are two sorts; tikkun koreim and tikkun soferim. The former is for people to practice their Torah reading; on the right-hand side it has the text with vowel marks and musical annotation, and on the left-hand side it has the text as it appears in the Torah, with just the letters. It is useful because you can look at the right-hand side and then cover it up and work with the left-hand side to make sure you know the reading without the vowels.
A tikkun soferim is different. You use it to copy when you're writing a Torah, to make sure you get all the words right. It doesn't have the vowels, because a sofer doesn't write vowels. It does have notation at the beginning of each line which tells the sofer how much he can expect to have to squeeze or stretch his letters to get them all in, so it might say 4M or 5F (except in Hebrew, but you get the idea), meaning four more, or five fewer, letters than the default (which varies depending on which tikkun you're using). It also has notes for other things a sofer needs to know but a reader doesn't.
I didn't find one. When places didn't give me an automatic no (which I bet they wouldn't have done if I'd been male), it went like this: I would go into a shop and ask for a tikkun soferim; they would show me a tikkun koreim; I would say no, I asked for a tikkun soferim not a tikkun koreim; they would say oh, we don't have one of those (although this last step varied; sometimes they had to go hunt it, and once the youth looked at me blankly and said "What's that?"). But the nice man in Eichlers ordered it for me, and I found another book I've been looking for for a long time, so that was some compensation.
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