I began this assignment in, of course, the wrong section of the library, and eventually made my way to the 18th-19th century English Literature area. At first I found loads of religious texts on the 4th floor, many in different languages (I think I saw Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Arabic), and finally I came about some Christian texts. They were all very large, ungainly, quite decrepit, and didn’t seem to have any annotations within them. I first came across a collection of gargantuans known as The Christian Intelligencer, which seemed to talk all about what good Christians were up to in the early early 1900s, but didn’t find anything of importance written inside.

Right after, I found a living relic known as the Calendar of Wills. Considering the fact that there was no publishing or printing date in it, and the only dates being “A.D. 1258 – A.D. 1358” (which is clearly the recorded period discussed in the book, not the printing date).

At this point I realized this probably wasn’t the literature I should of been looking at, and I found out that the 8th floor stored a great deal of old English Literature. In this section I uncovered multiple texts including a collection of works by William Thackeray published from 1910 to the mid 1920s, and a book of poems by William Watson.

Though it took some endurance and extensive searching, it was an interesting experience finding all these ‘ancient’ books in the library. I feel it’s necessary to preserve at least one copy of every book if we are to thoroughly record our human history.