Whew! We finally began shelving the rare books yesterday, literally just un-boxing them onto the shelves. The next step will be cleaning them and arranging them in some sort of order, which is, as yet, undecided.
A few months ago, we'd purchased six teak bookcases at auction, and I still think that these will be enough to house the 236 books from the collections of John Archer, Upton Scott
Here are a few things that I found as we were shelving the books:
The definitive guide to pronouncing Osler's surname.
John Archer's signature on a 1799 medical journal.
Upton Scott's signature on one of his books from 1773.
It was absolutely filthy work, as evidenced by my hands!
Hello Meg, Yes, those leather-bound books, aside from accumulated dist and grime, now suffer from disintegrating leather, which gets all over everything, but it's worth it for the treat of working with and reading these historical volumes. Speaking of Dr. Osler, I was just reading a c.2002 essay by Joseph Epstein, who said, "One index of the slip in prestige of physicians is the absence within the last forty years of any towering national figure--of the stature, say, of William Osler--in medicine. While we approve of his admiration for Dr. Osler, I think he is being a little harsh. Perhaps the increased specialization in medicine (and other fields) could account for this same phenomenon.
ReplyDelete--Jim