This week I finished my processing plan, my personal organizing of the materials related to the Herbert Hoover Collection, for Lisa to review. In the meantime, I got to look at one of the oldest books in the collection, Geographia by Stabro written in 1472. Additionally, I looked through Agricola’s De Re Metallica from 1560 and Hoover’s translation from 1912. It is amazing to see how the material of the book affects how well it ages; while the original and the translated copy of De Re Metallica are 400 years apart, their pages’ edges were wrinkled. There were also some collections from the Royal Society dating around the 1700s to 1800s. I got to see the documents we discussed for my History of Science course in person; however, it was more challenging to read than I thought because the sources are in academic writing from over 100 years ago. It was amazing to touch such old documents and the details of the maps and pictures. I felt I was touching history. I have attached the photos of the material I looked at.
