From Georgius Agricola’s De Re Metallica. Translated from the Latin by Herbert Clark Hoover & Lou Henry Hoover. London, 1912. Hoover Collection, Special Collections, Honnold/Mudd Library.
It can be hard to convince students that the library, as a physical space, matters any more. The cyberbrary—that online world of Google Scholar, Wikipedia, YouTube, web databases, and seemingly endless digital sources—has become indispensable for everyday life. Those physical vestiges of olden days, like buildings, books, and print journals, seem more and more like an antique shop: quaint but marginal. I have had students, more than once, assure me that everything can be found somewhere on the internet. I don’t think they were kidding. What’s the point, then, of picking through the detritus of the pre-digital age?
Detail from Georgius Agricola’s De Re Metallica. Translated from the Latin by Herbert Clark Hoover & Lou Henry Hoover. London, 1912. Hoover Collection, Special Collections, Honnold/Mudd Library.
One answer lies in Honnold/Mudd Library’s Special Collections Reading Room. I make a habit of walking my students down there—so this big white thing is the library!—sitting them down in the reading room, and having Carrie Marsh, the Special Collections Librarian, introduce the place. The effect is immediate. I think it’s the smell of the place, the hush of the room, the feel of the books. Old books smell like leather and parchment and vellum; they feel different—cooler and weightier—than your latest Stephen King paperback. When you step into Special Collections you enter a different sensory world. This leads to another, sometimes almost visceral realization: these books, these posters, this stuff is singular. I cannot find it anywhere else; it is certainly not on the web.
As a historian, that is one of the things I try to get across to my students. The past is filled with singular, particular, non-repeatable places and times. It is impossible to reproduce them, try as we may. But I like to think we can get a glimmer of former worlds, now lost forever. Walk into Special Collections some afternoon. Ask Carrie to show you one of our first-edition Agricola volumes. Open it up. Look at the miners. Notice the bits of sand under your fingers as you turn the page. Is it 450 year-old ore from some long forgotten Saxon silver mine? Probably not. But it could be.
Not everything can be found on the internet.
