A lot of what we post at The Collation is weighty, chock full of information and detail and (I hope!) interesting facts about our collections, library work, and early modern studies. But sometimes all you want is to look at a picture, right? Or maybe chime in with your sense of why something is interesting, yes? So with this post we are inaugurating an occasional series featuring curious things from the Library, whether a collection item or something used to care for the collections. What makes this series different from our other posts is that I’m not going to tell you what you’re looking at! I’ll post an image of an object (or a specific detail of an object) and you’ll guess what it is. After a week or two, I’ll post the answer and a discussion of what we can learn from it.
We’ll start with one that’s not too hard but that is still kind of fun to look at and talk about:
Click on the picture to enlarge it, leave a comment below telling us what it is, and get the discussion rolling by adding what you think we might learn from it. I’ll be back soon to reveal all!
By the way, I need a much better title for this series than “What’s that?!” so if you have any suggestions, please leave them in the comments!
UPDATE April 3rd: Read Erin’s post to learn more about this and other fore-edge paintings!