BYU Library Special Collections Visit

Lateness is (pretty much) never a virtue. This is the case with the Special Collections visit my class just made. See, BYU has a number of rather valuable and irreplaceable items. These are housed in the Special Collections section of the library, which enterprising professors teaching relevant classes can schedule visits to. Frankly, I missed the first half hour of class. That's really sad, since when I walked in I had missed all of the explanations.

It was really quite amazing. The librarian had a host of items out for us to inspect. He showed us a cuneform tablet (that apparently contained a beer brewer's inventory). Those are neat; apparently a palace north of Israel was burned down during a civilization's fall and a whole shlew of them was preserved. Linguistically, this is notable because it was quite some time before this particular language had been cracked. I think the Rosetta stone was involved. This palace, it was discovered, if that talk on CD is to be trusted, was the center of a kingdom named Ebla...that had been mere legend to date. Syria is keeping a lid on that, though, since the translations started talking about Abram and Melchi-zedek... Naturally, our distinguished lector didn't know where this tablet was from, but it was really neat to see a real live hardened clay cuneform tablet. That's Old.

I digress. This really is just a stream of consciousness ramble. I really want to do these properly. I showed up expecting a tour and got a lecture with really really cool visual aids. I was unable to take notes.

There was a really cool later-1800s era printed book with a ripply-looking paper glued to the inside of the 'boards.' I got to read something on the process this entailed. That must have been a collector book like he said, because each sheet had to be carefully dipped in phases in an oil-based paint.

Seeing the old Bibles was amazing. The intricate designs, the gold leaf inlays, elaborate text decorations, and other details were fascinating. Bookmaking was as much art as it was a science or trade. Some of the documents, as I recall, were even Palimpsests and had been examined with multi-spectral photography to reconstruct the old writing. (Palimpsests are documents that have been erased to provide writing space for more-important-at-the-time writings, e.g. Aristotle would be erased in favor of copying the Bible.)

So, visiting this part of the library was rather curious. They even had a first-run Book of Mormon we got to see. (I say 'see' because the trained student walked around and flipped through it so we could all see it.) The oldest of the old—cuneform—was sitting in the same room as almost-new print-and-bound books from the late 1800s.