St. Cuthbert Gospel Book

[aelfgyfu_mead]

The British Library is making an effort to buy the earliest extant European book: see British Library launches bid to save St Cuthbert Gospel at the BBC website. Otherwise, it will be auctioned to the highest bidder.

I wish the little video showed the manuscript text more, but it's not even a minute and a half; do take a look.

Comments

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

[caffienekitty]

Oh that's so cool! It's so well-preserved!

I cringed a little when she was handling it with bare hands in a room with other people in it. Isn't that an archival no-no, or have movies lied to me again?

[aelfgyfu_mead]

The movies have lied to you! They did so partly because old practices involved using gloves, but we now know that's not good for manuscripts.

Manuscripts and many of their bindings are best handled by bate hands. Skin oils don't hurt the parchment or leather, which are animal skin; they actually help to keep them supple. Using gloves makes people clumsier and does nothing to help the manuscript.

I've handled manuscripts a thousand years old with no gloves at the British Library, the Bodleian, Cambridge University Library, and a couple of other libraries. It tends to be the newer or smaller places that make people use gloves. (My own university did, until they hired someone who knew better. At one point I had to use big, clumsy gloves on a twentieth-century facsimile! It was ridiculous, and I was at far more risk of damaging the book than with my own little hands. The gloves were one-size-fits-all-but-Hagrid.)

Some damaged manuscripts may require special handling, but the Cuthbert Gospels aren't in that category.

Some printed books don't react well to skin oils and might need special handling too, because of the quality of their paper.

[caffienekitty]

Cool, and good to know! Not that I'll ever be anywhere near old manuscripts myself, but they might come up in fic sometime. :-)

Curse you, movies! *fistshake*