Today I visited the Bobst library in search of literature that was published before 1923. Ideally, I went in looking for a book during the Romantic age which peaked between 1800 and 1850. Although the scavenger hunt started out slow because I mainly looked through English literature, I began to broaden my search. Finding a book written in the English language that was published before 1923 proved to be a challenge. I then remembered that the Romantic era encompassed a myriad of European countries that underwent the same literary trends. I eventually landed on this one series of books.

 

 

This book was one of many in a collection. It was called Revue Des Langues Romances. It was book 1-2 and was located in the Italian Romantic Literature section. My initial approach to finding these old books was to look through all the bindings. Each binding had a library code as well as the year it was published/written. This proved to be an arduous and inefficient approach to my problem. Eventually I decided to use a simpler method: look for the books with the most wear and tear.

 

As you can see, just from the outside of the book there are clear signs of age and damage. As I opened up the book, I found out that it was published in 1870. Strangely, there was no year for publication printed directly from the book. Instead someone wrote it in. I also found a few indecipherable notes after the cover page. Perhaps they were just further clarifications of the book’s identity. It is unclear exactly what the person wrote down but those were the only real signs of annotation. All the other parts of the book were clean.

 

The first thing I wanted to find out was what kind of literature I was dealing with. While I cannot read Italian, I can make assumptions based on how the book was organized. The pages with standard paragraph formatting and separation could be indicative of many different forms of writing. However, as I began to explore the pages, I found what appears to be poem-like structures in the text.

With the poems being separated by blocks of text, this leads me to believe that this series is a collection of poems with commentary. It would have been great to see more annotations, but sadly there none within the main body of the book. Perhaps this is done to preserve the book as it is the oldest one I found during my search.