On the Topic of Archives and Special Collections...

It was incredibly interesting to get a glimpse of the extent of the texts and other materials that SCU keeps in archives and collections. Honestly, I thought that it would be much colder in archives and collections to preserve the materials it had, but I was also wearing a heavy overcoat so I may not have gotten the full experience. 

Personally, I didn't expect archives and collections to be all that impressive, but it was essentially a miniature museum from what I saw. I certainly didn't expect SCU to have papyrus scraps, and learning that researchers come to archives and collections to study various items was enlightening to say the least. Also, the scope of materials collected was baffling; I thought that archives and collections would be focused on texts, but I spotted paintings, armaments, and what appeared to be a textile banner of sorts.

Regarding facets of book history that I am curious about, I am interested in the forms that text have been transcribed on as times have passed. We've touched upon scrolls and codices thus far, and during the visit to archives and special collections I was able to see folding mediums that were a sort of middle ground between the two. This got me curious about other mediums, such as tablets, which would have preceded scrolls. The assumption would be that mediums evolved to be more portable, as I assume that longevity of texts would have been tied to the physical material that would have been transcribed upon. That being said, I'm not sure what would have preceded tablets, as etching into stone is probably one of the simplest mediums possible, but perhaps there was something between tablets and scrolls.