Let me tell you about my experience at The Life and Legacy of the King James Bible exhibit in the HBLL!
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| Latin Bible (Vulgate). Vellum manuscript from France, 13th century |
Can I just say that of ALL the ways you can use a book, perhaps the oddest is to put it on display? I like art museums, but art is specifically designed to be viewed. Looking at paintings and sculptures isn't weird to me, but as we begin our study of print knowledge and as I thought about books and went to this exhibit, I thought about how funny it was to look at an exhibit of books. Libraries facilitate the discovery of books by making them available to the public, but sometimes when I'm in the HBLL I see some books that make me wonder if anyone has even opened them before! Putting books on display certainly makes them visible, but the book also becomes inaccessible to someone who may want to reference it. After all, you can only open up a book so that two pages are displayed (when they are in their original form, of course). The "interactive tool" we talk about in lecture that is a book becomes a piece of sculpture when you put it on diplay like that!
So I guess I want to address the value of putting books on display, especially these ones. A library would have to have good reason to take books out of circulation and exhibit them (though I doubt
these books have been accessible to the public for a long time, if they ever were.)
