I love books of hours in general and find them so beautiful, just knowing how much painstaking work went into creating a manuscript like the kinds we see from the 1400s-1500s–from making the parchment to doing all of the lettering and detail work and copying to binding the book to adding illustrations and gilt; it always results in a truly special and unique object.

In this reoccurring series, members of the Special Collections staff will introduce some of our favorite objects found in the stacks of Special Collections at Princeton. April C. Armstrong *14, Library Collections Specialist | “Untitled, 1910 December 29” April, what do you do at Princeton? […]

This little book is a list of the names of all the champion hunting dogs owned by a great English book collector, who also had a Gutenberg Bible, etc.

Encountering this jacket, you can’t help but think about Zelda as a flesh and blood person. A person with a *body* who wore jackets — not just a character in someone else’s story; not just a person defined by their brain.

The illustrations in this volume are amazing. One of my favorite things about history is seeing how similar humans have always been despite how much the world has changed, and who hasn’t doodled on their math homework before? Whether I’m poring over the depictions of various creatures or trying to figure out exactly what math is going on, every page of this manuscript piques my interest.