Really Old Books

The library in Leiden was a great experience overall. Not only was our guide extremely knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the subject, but he also genuinely cared that we had a wonderful experience at the library. I think that the library is a very important place because it preserves and provides knowledge and perspective from centuries past. I think the most interesting part of the library was the bible from around 1480. I thought this piece was interesting because you got to see the style of writing in the late medieval times and beyond that we were able to see how the book was hand illustrated and colored since the press could only be set up with one color of ink at a time. I found it amazing that with my limited knowledge of German that I was able to understand something that was over five hundred years old. The main difficulty when reading the book is the difficult to interpret gothic typeface. I asked our guide a little more about the book and he said that another reason why it might be difficult is that it is written in a dialect of German that is a little different than contemporary German. He told me that if you read it out loud it is actually easier to understand than if you just try to read it straight from the book. After going back to it and sounding out the words it did make more sense and made looking at this book way more enjoyable.