We got to the Cal Poly campus early for our tour at the Shakespeare Press Museum and headed to the library. My mom wanted to get some books, and had the thought I might want to check out some of the fine press books in Special Collections. Neither of us had thought about looking at their catalog beforehand, and they don’t have open stacks that you can just walk around in and pull things off the shelf as they strike your fancy. Fortunately, there was a cart of recent acquisitions of artists’ books that were being measured for covers that they let me browse through. I still haven’t looked at the catalog, so I’m not sure how representative a selection it was, but WOW! A couple of the books I’d seen at Codex, other names I’d heard, but many were completely new to me. If I’d picked things from the catalog myself most likely I would not have seen most of those things, so that was a cool bit of serendipity. It was SO wonderful to be able to spend time with the books and turn the pages and read them and not be limited to a single spread open under glass. The amazing magic of libraries!
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