Ohio State’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library helps students access lesser-known stories

Joshua Farley
Wed, 08 Nov 2023 02:52:22 +0000
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Eric Johnson, professor and curator of Thompson Special Collections, holds an ancient Babylonian clay tablet. Credit: Joshua Farley

In the ancient Babylonian empire, temple scribes across Mesopotamia wrote manuscripts detailing the grain offerings being sacrificed to the gods.

Thousands of years later and an ocean away, screenwriters for the original series of “Star Trek” crafted a world of science fiction that has since been beamed into countless televisions around the globe.

While these works originate worlds apart, they do share one commonality: both are kept safe in Ohio State’s Rare Books & Manuscripts Library, located in the Thompson Library basement.

Professor and curator of Thompson Special Collections, Eric Johnson, said the library staff work diligently to preserve and share about 250,000 items that are deemed historically interesting and difficult to find elsewhere.

Whether the item is an early printing of Shakespeare or the slender handmade bindings of a medieval European’s favorite prayers, Johnson said the rare books staff works to get it into students’ hands. Any Buckeye can use the online Ohio State Libraries catalog to reserve time with any piece in the collection, he said.

Johnson said the careful process of preserving such texts has helped keep their messages alive.

“We are very much conscious of the fact that we want things to be in good condition so that people can continue to use them,” Johnson said.

Johnson said the special collection became its own distinct collection from Thompson in 1962, created to better manage the large volume of rare materials that had been accumulating. This included much of Ohio State’s original crop of circulating materials, which had become rare works themselves.

“Just this morning, I arranged for the purchase of a book printed in 1522 related to Martin Luther,” Johnson said. “At the same time that I was getting that, an email came in, and a donor will be giving us a 1602 copy of Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales.’”

Johnson said after new materials arrive, library staff enter them into the digital catalog and then perform examinations to determine what preservation work may need to be done, whether that be repairing a binding or giving the item a protective casing.

Some common damages have been intentionally inflicted by past owners, Johnson said. Book dealers commonly split apart medieval manuscripts and sell individual pages to various collectors looking for a less costly item, he said.

Last spring, the library even curated an exhibition all about these maimed materials. Called “Deathless Fragments,” Thompson’s gallery was adorned with numerous colorful, gilded scraps of parchment from over 500 years ago.

Now, the library is trying to reassemble some of these fragments into a more complete form, which is a painstaking process, Johnson said. This effort will help return historical context to the puzzle of pages.

Alan Farmer, an associate professor in Ohio State’s Department of English, said the library’s preservation efforts have allowed many more historical discoveries to come to life than anyone thought possible.

Farmer’s research centers around printed texts from medieval times, a technology he said helped spread information and connect the world like never before. In one of his courses, titled “History of the Book Studies,” students have discovered new illustrations and whole editions of books that were thought to be lost to time.

“You never know what you are going to find until you start looking,” Farmer said.

Leslie Lockett, an associate professor of English with a specialization in historical manuscripts, said the ability to touch and study rare books and manuscripts brings history back to life through handwriting.

“I feel like I’m just inches away from the person who left that stuff on the book,” Lockett said.

More information about Ohio State’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, as well as the catalog for reserving time with materials, can be found on the library’s university web page.