I think that the Book Traces event in itself is an incredible idea. I love everything about old books so getting to handle so many was a really great experience. Something I found particularly fascinating was how different so many books in the same time range could be. One book from the 1890s seemed to be in rather pristine condition, while another was completely falling out of it’s binding. Unfortunately, even after looking through around 60 books, I only found one with inscriptions that could be considered significant.

On one of the pages in this book someone had written “skip this chapter” (I unfortunately failed to get a picture of this) which I found funny.

I wish that I had found more inscriptions because I believe that we can learn so much from these old texts. I also wish that I was able to better understand my discoveries. I don’t know how this could be done, but if there is any way to figure out more about these people who wrote in this books, that would be fascinating.

The best way to get the most use out of these books as possible would be to create an entire section of the library specifically for all of the findings during the event. This way it would be much easier and more convenient to find them and it would draw more attention to them. Having a section dedicated to these old books could also help preserve them. If people know that an entire section of books is nearly a century old (or older), they will be more likely to handle them with more caution.