A couple of weeks ago, we hosted a group of four-year olds from a local child care center in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts in the University of Pennsylvania (the home of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies). The visit went so well, we’ll be hosting another group in July. My colleague Deborah Bishov, who arranged the visit, wrote up a short blog post on our library’s main blog, but I also wanted to say a bit more here about how the visit went.
We’ve hosted groups of children before, but they were older – 5th through 7th graders. The idea came from former colleagues of mine in the Lilly Library at Indiana University Bloomington* : Lori Dekydtspotter, Head of Lilly Library Technical Services, and Cherry Williams, Manuscripts Curator in the Lilly. For many years Lori and Cherry have hosted groups of students from schools around Bloomington, a program that they have presented about at the ALA, and published about in books and journals. Shortly after I started at Penn, Lori and Cherry gifted me a box of goodies: quill pens, buckthorn berries, walnut hulls, oak galls, gum arabic, and a mussel shell with gold paint. To this I added a piece of cinnebar, lapis lazuli, saffron, and madder root. On visiting day I meant to bring along an egg and a bag of parsley, but of course I forgot.
Why these materials? Because they are the materials used by the girl Marguerite in the Getty-published Marguerite Makes a Book, which I loaned to the school about a month before their visit. They read it several times, and they were so excited to remind me of important plot points when needed:
Me: So, Marguerite has to help her father make the book!
One child: The horse stepped on his glasses so he couldn’t see!
Another child: He had to go home to bed!
Yet another child: His name was Papa Jacques!
We had a great time. We started by looking at the cover of the book, which was projected onto a screen.
I pointed to each item at they were able to identify every one! The parchment, the different color inks, the quills (we did have a brief conversation about the weight holding down the parchment). On a long table, I laid out all the materials from my box, plus a piece of parchment from the teaching collection. The children formed a line (more or less) and took turns touching everything – noting the different textures of the two sides of the parchment, the weight of the stones, the smooth shell, the pointy quill. At the end of the table we had set out two of our Books of Hours – very similar to the Book of Hours that Marguerite makes in the book. The kids weren’t able to touch those, but they leaned in nice and close!
Finally we had a question and answer period. We talked about where the books came from, who made them (“No, not Marguerite, she is pretend. But maybe someone like her!”), how they have survived so long, how they got here from England and France, what people did in the Middle Ages, why I am interested in medieval manuscripts, and we talked about how yes, sadly, the people who made these manuscripts are all dead. But their books survive, so a little bit of them survive, too!
This was so great, so much fun. I can’t wait for the next visit!
*I never worked in the Lilly – I worked in the Digital Library Program, which is now defunct, but I worked with the Lilly folks when I could and I still miss them very much!
Reblogging myself because I just spent 30 minutes with another group of preschoolers and I’m feeling very alive right now.
This is fantastic. We have a preschool group scheduled to visit in a couple of weeks, and these are great tips!
