Special Collections

I found the lecture on rare books in the Special Collections room to be extremely fascinating, especially when she showed us the pieces of tablets dating back to the seventeenth century. She also went into detail and showed us how they made paper and just how tedious and time consuming the whole process was. And after all of that hard work, you could only write on one side of the paper, the horizontal side. The writing on the tablets and the paper was extremely well preserved though, which is really cool considering the fact it is a couple of thousand years old and looks almost brand new.  

We also had time to look at different books like Othello, original comic strips, and other older works of literature.  One of my favorite books that I looked at was Le Morte Darthur, even though it was a slightly newer book compared to the others. Unlike the other books, Le Morte Darthur was beautifully illustrated on EVERY SINGLE PAGE, which sort of impressed me because even modern day books normally do not have as many illustrations as this book did. It is even bonded like modern day books and has a title page, which for older books is not very common.