Bit of Ivory

Well, no one’s tried the friend test yet. Of course, no one looks at my blog either, so I shouldn’t be too surprised.

Every Thursday at 11:00 (what I like to call the anti-devotional hour) my department at the library holds a training meeting. Today it was really cool—a tour through Special Collections! We got to go in the back of the vault and look into the cold storage room (where they store photographs—over 8,000 of them!) which is kept below 40 degrees at all times. We got to walk through the rare book collection, and go into the vaults where the really expensive stuff is kept—like the first edition Book of Mormon, and first editions of lots of Dickens stuff and Byron and Wordsworth and Alcott and a lot of other Victorian writers. I
got to hold an Academy Award—an actual Oscar! It was given to Ken Darby and Alfred Newman for Best Music, Scoring of Music, Adaptation or Treatment for Camelot! The library also has 7 of Cecil B. DeMille’s Oscars, and I think it has Jimmy Stewart’s too—it has tons of other Jimmy Stewart stuff. We didn’t get to see that today, though—ran out of time.

If you ever got your picture taken at the old Portrait Studio in the Wilkinson Center, Special Collections has the negative. If you ever had an x-ray taken at the Student Health Center, they’ve got a copy of that, too. They have student records dating back to the 1870’s. . .and every memo ever written by a Dean, University President, or any other important thing. Anything that was published by a faculty member is there too. . .as well as anything having to do with Mormons. Did you write a thesis at BYU? Special Collections has a copy of it. Every anti-Mormon book ever written is there too.

Cool, huh?