Day Two: Field Trip

I've just gotten back from a nice dinner in downtown C'ville with a few fellow students. We walked into town since it's only a mile from campus, and enjoyed a lovely evening on the pedestrian mall in the historic downtown. It was great to stretch our legs and enjoy the outdoors. The weather has been remarkable. Last week here it was 102! Today the temperature was 78. Delightful!

Our class went on a field trip this afternoon. We got on a bus and headed over to the new special collections facility at the Morris Law Library. Boy, is it beautiful! So spacious. It's a terrific law library.

The collections we were going to see were upstairs on a table waiting for us. While we didn't get to handle the books we got to see some real gems. The oldest book in the collection was a manuscript from 1481. It was quite beautiful. Treatises, form books, justice of the peace manuals and maritime law were just a few of the books we saw this afternoon. There was a wide variety of binding styles and it was very interesting to examine title pages and frontis piece illustrations. One copy of Coke on Littleton had the fold out plate, which was traditionally placed after the title page, had instead been placed between the frontis and title page. It's placement really stood out to me as I've seen a number of these volumes in the downtown rare book room at WVU. I wasn't the only one who noticed. Others in the class noted the error too.

We have two assignments to do next. One we started on today involved examining a book and describing it as if it were to be added to a dealer's catalog. We'll have to do all the bibliographic research for the book and price it too. I'm looking forward to this exercise. We started describing the book this afternoon. Tomorrow we'll have an opportunity to work with the bibliographies and a librarian will introduce us to many online resources. That will be a great bonus for me as I'll be able to gather a number of resources that I'll use when I return to WVU.

There's another lecture tomorrow night on legal serials. I'm not quite sure what that is, but I'll find out tomorrow!

It's been a long but good day, with so much more to come!