I was really impressed by the Special Collections area of
Ellis Library. I thought that it was amazing that they had everything from
cuneiform tablets to an original leaf from the first Gutenberg Bible. The book
I sat in front of during the presentation was an extremely old manuscript with
plastic around the covering. I observed that on the inside cover someone had
written “1460-1472” in pencil. The book cover was made of animal skin and two
strings made up the binding. I also noticed that some pages had water damage.
The script
was very anesthetically pleasing. I couldn’t read the book because it was
written in Latin, but the script still looked beautiful. The same scribe
clearly handwrote it because the handwriting was neat and perfectly the same
throughout the entire book. I noticed that red ink was used for the first
letter of each sentence, which made the text stand out even more.
“Watermark
resembles Briquet” was written on the back cover in pencil. I researched
Briquet online and found out that he was a man who collected watermarks of
papers in France. I think this explains why France was written on the inside
cover of the book. I didn’t see the watermark on the book, but I still thought
it was interesting.
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