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Exploring the Archaeology of the Book in the Liberal Arts Curriculum

from Part I - Rationales

Martin Antonetti
Affiliation:
University of Virginia's rare Book School
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Summary

You might think of your next visit to the college's rare book room this way: handling an old book may be the closest you will ever come to physically holding hands with your intellectual predecessors. This is why rare book reading rooms are for me numinous spaces: when they are interpreted by an energetic curator the physical objects contained in them may be catalysts for deep intellectual and emotional connections and insights unavailable elsewhere or by any other means. At the same time, those of us who work in rare book rooms tend not to think of them as temples or shrines or (even worse) mausoleums of the book. Nor do we consider them any longer as ‘Treasure rooms’, although the notion of rare books may conjure something elitist, rarefied, clubby, and a reminder of the pretensions of earlier generations of college benefactors. On the other hand, whereas at many colleges the rare book room may be the pride of the development office, it may also be an embarrassing burden to the library administration and a puzzle to everyone else on campus. In fact, many rare book curators in liberal arts colleges these days may be faced with a lack of enthusiasm or even apathy from the faculties they seek to serve. The following remarks are an attempt to explain how a small college's rare book collection may be relevant and useful to all constituents of its home institution.

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Publisher: Pickering & Chatto
First published in: 2014

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