I have always known that Cornell has an incredible collection of books, artifacts, and ancient pieces. Although I have always been curious about exactly what we have, I never found the time to research and look into it. Last Friday I went on the Kroch book and manuscript tour where I learned about some of the amazing pieces our libraries hold. One of the first things that I learned was that Olin and Kroch Libraries have a huge safe where they keep all of their unique pieces and books under the Arts Quad. What blew my mind was that this safe is the size of an entire football field. I couldn’t even comprehend the millions of books and rare items we must have in that space.

The librarian who gave us the tour had brought up about 10 items from inside the safe so that we could look at them. He took us through history by starting with artifacts from 4,000 years ago and eventually ended with something that was only a few decades old. One particular book that I found incredibly interesting was an old book that used be housed in a monastery. It had a metal chain on it which we learned was their version of “library security” because the books would be chained to the wall and you could only read them there. Looking at the writing inside of this book was incredible because the first half was completely handwritten. You could imagine the amount of hard work that would have gone into making a book with such small print. The second half of the book was actually printed by a press, and I liked seeing the contrast between those two.

Another artifact that I really liked seeing was a letter that Mark Twain had written. It was a recommendation letter that Mark Twain had written to Cornell University on behalf of a professor who had applied for a job. This professor was ultimately given the job offer and he went on to work for Cornell for many years. I had no idea that the famous author Mark Twain and Cornell were related in any way, and it was exciting to learn. We also found out that he would spend his summers in Elmira, which is right near Ithaca.

On top of these two items that I mentioned, there were more that were showed to us and many more within the library. It is important to note that all of these items are accessible for undergraduate students to use. For example, if you are working on a project about Shakespeare’s writing, you can request to work with the books that originally printed his plays centuries ago. I didn’t know that these times were available for us to use but it is amazing that they are.