The Stories They Could Tell

I absolutely Love books.  Any books.  I'm constantly ridiculed when moving for the numerous, super heavy totes full of westerns and romances.  I currently have two flat totes full of unread books in my house now.  Over Christmas I used my mama's Nook like crazy.  I seriously read 15 books over break.  It was great because I could search for whatever I wanted and got it in a nano second and I could read in the dark without any lights on.  Perfect right?  Not really, I almost felt like I was cheating on the real thing.  Actual books have history and tales outside of the stories they contain.  Old books smell like moth balls, most of you may think yuck, but it's comforting in a way.

Our University Library has an amazing collection of really old, worn out, torn and abandoned books in the basement.  I could spend days down there fondly caressing the spines of books tucked away and forgotten.  No one ever goes down there for the books.  Anyone who happens to be down there is only there to study or use computers.  But not I.  There are rows and rows of classics, books published before 1900, books with special inscriptions from loved ones passed down.  My favorites are the books that have cardboard covers and are literally bound with string.  How cool is that? I'll admit, I walk around looking for the oldest looking books and take them down just to see when they were published, or if anything is written inside the covers.  A lot of these old books have been donated and I really find myself thinking of their pasts.  Did the belong to people in OR?  Did they hold regal positions in a ceiling to floor personal library like you see in movies? Were they read and re-read, cherished and coveted?  Or did they sit untouched on a desk or shelf in someones study?  I would love to know each and every books' story.  Call me a nerd, but hey, I love Libraries!

Here are some pictures I took while creeping around in the basement, alone.  I'll add that I currently have 5 of these pungent smelling forgotten books.  I like being the only person who's checked them out since they've been there.  I feel like all books deserve to at least be looked at, if not read.  I doubt I'll be able to single handedly read every never checked out book in the library, but I'm sure going to do my best!  At least with the classics.

 These are the 5 books I have right now, Tennyson, Chaucer, Tolstoy, Leighton and Lehmann

 

Leo Tolstoy, Russian Text

 

Isn't this one awesome? If I can find it again I'm going to check it out next.

Little Red Riding Hood of course. This is one of the books from the set above. There were only 500 copies in Art Vellum and we have copy 450. Copyright 1896

 

I really have no idea what language this even is, but pretty cool huh?

There are just amazing treasures down there I tell ya!

One of my favorites, string binding

Talk about Classic

Isn't this just too cute?  It was the size of my hand and had all kinds of great advice.

There are a lot of books bound this way, and I've never seen any before. 

This one is awesome. An 1880 copy of the Iliad. It doesn't get any better in public libraries. There was even a note written inside from a father to his daughter in 1881.

This ones a little rough from time...

I know I've been on a streak of really long blogs lately, but sometimes I get so excited I can't contain myself :)  I hope you at least enjoyed the pictures.

Xo Loves,

Me