Tag Archives: printing press and history

A very British Library

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Book stratigraphy

Being acquainted with things that are really ancient, is an everyday experience for a geologist; fossils and other flotsam of lives past, meteorites as old as the solar system itself. Records of these ancient lives, their successes and failures, of catastrophes, of ancient worlds, are written in every chip of rock, every grain of sand. We marvel at these stories, at their old-ness. My recent visit to the British Library in London was a reminder that our written history is also ancient, but counted in millennia rather than eons.  I’m talking books and parchment, not carved cuneiform tablets. These treasures are housed in a room of the same name, light and humidity controlled, protected from hands that would love to turn the pages. Sensible precautions of course; many of these pieces would probably disintegrate at the slightest touch.  I’d never seen the sole-surviving copy of Beowulf, an original Gutenberg or King James Bible, the Magna Carta, a 3rd Century fragment of a Gospel, a Thomas Tallis liturgical composition. So many documents that record our history and inform our present. Continue reading

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