Bookish glee

You can tell a lot about someone by what makes them excited. So I guess this post will say a lot about me. But-- I had a very cool moment in humanities class today. We've been studying the Renaissance, and last class my professor (who is a bibliophile) was telling us about his collection of books. Today he brought in one of his old books for us to look at. And when I say old, I mean it: this was a 1525 edition of Theophylact's Gospel commentaries, in Latin, with the original leather binding. It was in beautiful condition: the paper was heavy, the print was clear, the binding was worn but intact. My professor got it as a gift from a friend who found it at a library booksale, somewhere in Illinois, for the bargain price of $1. (It's worth tens of thousands!) I got to look at it after class and read a little of it. The page layout looked just like one of Howard Pyle's books, with the decorative caps and ornamental title illustrations and side-note summaries. It was hard to realize that I was holding something printed before the founding of the US, before the Pilgrims, before Queen Elizabeth, before Shakespeare. That must be something like how the scholars of the Renaissance felt, when they were rediscovering classical writings and having fresh conversations with old manuscripts.