Alan Jacobs

I’m friends with our sub­ject librar­ian, and I had talked to her about the visit. She had men­tioned that there were some shelves of dis­cards that the library still hadn’t got­ten rid of. So after my stu­dents and I ooh-ed and aah-ed over the dis­cov­er­ies from the stacks, we headed up to her office. She took us back to the dis­card shelves and pulled a few books for us to look at. “Oh, and there’s this one,” she said, hand­ing me a thick vellum-bound book. She had pulled it because she thought we’d like to see its bind­ing. My jaw dropped when she handed it to me and I looked at the title page: it was a Latin bible pub­lished in 1591. On the dis­card shelf.