Time Travelling with Rare Print Materials
So back in January my fellow student staffer at Bruce Peel Special Collections, Michaela Morrow, and I had the privilege and delight to lead a Peel Workshop of our own design, titled Time Travelling with Rare Print Materials. Basically it was a chance for us to pull an absolute treasure trove of materials from the collection, share them with friends and patrons, and – perhaps the biggest bonus to me – spend some extra time studying them ourselves.
And what a trove it was…
Our selections for the workshop laid out across two library tables for our “dress rehearsal,” with apologies for the distortion… I’m terrible at pano shots!
A much less distorted, if also less revealing, photo of our selections.
Going in chronological order, and roughly from left to right in the photos, the materials included:
four cuneiform tablets, circa. 2900-2000 BCE, with the oldest one being almost 5000 years old
a selection of palm leaf books, a technology going back 2500 years
a facsimile of the Joshua Roll, a Byzantine illuminated manuscript from the 10th century
a facsimile of the Codex Tro-Cortesianus, a Mayan accordian-style book from circa. 900–1521
a facsimile of the Genji Monogatari Emaki, produced sometime between 1120 and 1140, and also known as the Genji Scrolls, an illustrated handscroll edition of The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
a Flemish Book of Hours from from 1430
an original leaf from the Decretum of Gratian, printed on vellum by Peter Schoeffer, an apprentice of Gutenberg, in 1472
the Peel’s spectacular copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle, published in 1493
a facsimile of the Book of Felicity, a Turkish Muslim manuscript published in 1582
a Chinese printing block from the 1800s
a first edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, 1813
three different versions of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, including a boxed set of the original 1849 serials and two different bindings into book form
The Metaphorical Kindle, an altered book created by Rachel Walsh in 2011
a certificate entitling the Peel to one complete set of the texts printed as part of the Future Library Project, to be received 90 years from now, in 2114
And with that extra 90 year jump into the future, we managed to capture a full five thousand years of book history across two library tables, or an average of about 300 years/linear foot.
The opening slide of our presentation…
Our selections on workshop day, ready to go!
A picture of me, a bit excited to get the workshop started…
As added context, we also shared this comic from XKCD in our slidedeck, reshared here under their CC BY-NC 2.5 Deed Creative Commons Licence…
…which we then set within the full context of book history…
This image as well as a long description is available in the Black Riders website and is also shareable under a CC BY-NC 2.5 Deed Creative Commons Licence.
All in all the workshop went over great, with thanks to our enthusiastic participants and extra thanks to our amazing fellow staff of the Peel for the opportunity and support in preparing our workshop. And it was certainly a joy to deliver!
If there’s anything you’d like to take a closer look at, information about visiting the Peel is available on their website.
In the meantime, happy reading and happy exploring!
– Winston
