As students adjust to their course load for the new semester, many will find themselves at the beacon of academia in Athens: Alden Library.
This semester, a new rare books exhibit titled Meetings in the Margins: Encounters with Readers and Owners in Rare Books, strives to showcase the unique relationship that people have with their books and what that can mean.
The exhibit is on the fourth floor of the library in front of the staircase and will remain there for the spring semester.
Every book in the exhibit comes from the Rare Book Collection.
Miriam Intrator, the Special Collections Librarian for rare books at Alden and creator of the exhibit, wants to bring the books back to life by showcasing these books’ unique evidence of use.
“One of the things that I think is most interesting about all of them is evidence of people who have used them or owned them before,” she said. “The idea was to showcase some of the interesting things that we find in our books.”
There is anything from an elementary school textbook full of a child’s doodles to a 14th-century medieval manuscript leaf also with doodles in the margins.
Amongst the pages and doodles, there have also been physical objects discovered that were left behind by a previous owner between the pages like flowers and ferns.
Alexis Voisard is a graduate assistant with the Special Collections in the rare books department. During work one day, she pulled a green book from the shelf that was written by Frances Theodora Parsons titled How to Know the Ferns: A Guide to the Names, Haunts, and Habits of our Common Ferns.
After opening the book, Voisard noticed something unusual.
Between the pages, there were thin plastic sheets that contained actual leaves from the book’s previous owner, Anna Whitney.
“It leads people to wonder what kind of relationships people have with books when they're using them, what kind of marks they leave with them and just learning more about how people interact with books,” Voisard said.
Intrator asks herself these same questions about the connections that can be made between a person and their book.
“It's cool to find new (books) that are obviously super old or that relate to the book somehow, and just try to think about what kind of narrative can we reconstruct about the person who owned this or how they interacted with the book, how they used it, why it was important to them, why they wanted to leave something behind,” she said.
When seeing things left behind in books like an old library receipt, Voisard feels encouraged to interact with the book as well.
“Sometimes I would find those receipts from previous readers in those books, and I would always be so curious to see, what were they reading?” she said. “When I would find little mementos, I was encouraged more to leave my own library receipts.”
The personal touches added to each book can teach you something too, according to Intrator.
“It's not just the content, it's the book as an object and there's a lot of different things you can learn just by looking at the book before you read anything,” she said.
As the Library Support Specialist, Joseph Walden is frequently around books and recognizes the importance of this exhibit.
“It's another way of getting some more thoughts on things, especially if it's an older book because then you get to see what people are thinking in that time period,” he said.
Even though the physical books are being shown in the library, there is also a digital version of the exhibit.
“You can just be walking to your next class and you can interact with that exhibit without even necessarily having to visit the library,” Voisard said. “I think it's really cool to see how accessible the physical exhibits that we build reach farther audiences, even audiences who aren't even in Athens, Ohio.”
Making the exhibit accessible and interactive was key in the planning process for Intrator.
“The idea of these books is that people are interacting with their books, and I want the whole thing to feel interactive,” she said.
On the digital exhibit, there are opportunities for people to interact with one another with links to Padlet and Google Jamboard to try their hand at different margin doodles shown in the exhibit or to discuss the hot topic of whether or not writing in books is acceptable.
Walden understands both sides of this dilemma.
“I see a lot of value writing in the books,” he said. “If it’s not your copy, I have to admit I’m a little bit of a stickler of if it’s not yours, don’t write in it.”
Despite living in a digital world where these historical pages can be uploaded to the internet, the books lying in the exhibit leave a reminder of the past.
“Now most of us work digitally all the time, but still that idea of how do you leave your mark?” Intrator said. “How do you want people to see the evidence of the things that you've done over time?”
