Nolan A. Moore III Collection at MSU

For the first assignment of the semester, I had to go to my campus’ library and do a little research on our archives. I found that the oldest full text in the collection is the Nuremberg Chronicle, even though we do have a few pages of the Gutenberg Bible. The Nuremberg Chronicle was published in 1493 by Anton Koberger. One of the interesting things about this text is the pictures. On a lot of the pages, custom wood blocks were inked and pressed onto the pages and then colored in by someone the owner hired. Five hundred years later and the pictures are still as bright and vivid as I’m sure they were when the text was published.

All of the books in the collection showed some evidence of reader use, but one that stood out to me was Aesop’s Fables. It was covered in writing and even had a little bookmark that had notes all over it. This tells us that the Fables were beloved and studied just as much then as they are today.

Being at a smaller university, MSU just has the one collection. Although it’s not huge, the collection has everything from pieces of Sumerian clay tablets to newspaper clippings of the Emancipation Proclamation and Pearl Harbor to original comic books. The one thing the collection has in common is that it was all donated by one man, Nolan A. Moore. He travelled the world to find all these texts and being a man from Wichita Falls, TX, he decided to donate all of it to our school. For more information about the collection, click here.

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