This week I was able to work with a few really cool items! The first item was an oversized art print book featuring illustrations alongside the poem the Raven by Edgar Allen Poe. The book was absolutely huge and took up the majority of the scanning deck of the Book Eye (the overhead scanner)! Scanning the book using the Book Eye was really the only way we were going to be able to process the material in a timely fashion (especially since we were also using the Nikon to photograph a few medieval hymnals at the same time) so we just had to make sure to keep everything relatively lined up to ensure we captured the images with sufficient detail and clarity. The other item I was able to work with was from the Ricketts mss. which is a collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. The item I was working with, Ricketts 132, is a really lovely manuscript from (approximately) 1490 and was created in France (although the language used in the text is Latin). Interestingly some of the manuscripts in the Ricketts mss. have been rebound in more modern bindings (including marbled lead in pages), which creates kind of an odd contrast to the art and stylized text of the pages.
The manuscript pages themselves are absolutely gorgeous and in (at least to my eye) Fine condition. The beginning pages of the manuscript feature two miniatures of Saints and at least every other page features beautiful floral marginalia. The pages on this manuscript were tricky to position, due to the (surprisingly, given its age) crisp vellum.
The Ricketts 132 manuscript is exactly the kind of thing I want to work with in my professional career, so it was really incredible to be able to work with this collection! I wasn’t able to finish this digitizing this item (I had to go much slower than usual to make sure I did not damage the pages and/or binding), so I am planning on completing the digitization next week!
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