the kroch tour wasn’t exactly a tour. i’d characterize it more as a presentation i think. after we arrived the tour guide/presenter showed us a duplicate copy of the thirteenth amendment, signed  by abraham lincoln, which was really cool. it’s strange to be so close to history like that. it makes me feel small. anyway, next we took a stroll through an exhibit on religious artifacts, which, among many other interesting artifacts, had a gutenburg bible. after that we filed into a classroom and our presenter showed us a series of interesting things he’d pulled out of cornell’s vault. the most instantly striking was an original print of shakespeare’s first folio. i also enjoyed seeing e.b. white’s handwritten drafts for charlotte’s web. famous novels like that one are so ubiquitous that i think we don’t often contemplate how much effort and revision went into making them. speaking of novel’s we also saw a print of fitzgerald’s tender is the night with a note written to his friend, “what the hell?” which i thought was great. there were loads of cool things to see, the first print of frederic douglas’s newspaper, cuneiform tablets, sitting bull’s signature… i had no idea cornell collected so many important and resonant things. obviously the vault everything is kept in is tightly secured, but i can’t help but want to sneak in there and take a stroll through history. overall i’d rate the kroch tour a 10/10 and i would’t hesitate to recommend it to all ten of my top ten friends.