I learned about the history within the Archives and Special Collections and my greatest takeaway was how popular religious texts were. In current times, religion is still worldwide, but many other subjects have similar levels of notoriety. In medieval times, the most common books were religious texts. In Europe, it was the Bible.
I also learned about colors used in books during ancient times. The colors were a lot earthier than they are now. They were made from dirt, plants, and dyes.
Once books started to become printed through presses, many upper-class people began wanting custom manuscript elements implemented into their printed books. The ease of production the printing press allowed made older manuscript elements more sought after. Upper-class people did not like type since it was suddenly so abundant.
The inventor of the printing press was named Johannes Gutenberg. Although, some Koreans were also using similar technology at the time.
In the collection, we were also able to use magnifying glasses to zoom in on the text to determine whether it was print or manuscript. Oftentimes, it was hard to tell the difference. I also put the magnifying glass up to my phone screen and I was able to see the RGB coloring. It was very cool.
There were definitely a lot of interesting things to learn about how books were printed back then during our visit. I loved doing the magnifying glass activity in particular. Also, it's interesting how popular religious texts were back then, especially since they were usually taken as absolute facts by most of the population. For something like that, proper translation and production is very, very important.
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