Come, and take choice of all my library
And so beguile thy sorrow...
Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Act IV. Scene 1.
The “choice” books selected for this exhibition span seven centuries and include some of the great monuments of printing. The first century of printing is represented by the image-rich Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, one of the most well-known incunables or works printed between 1450 and 1501. Literature and science take the spotlight in the seventeenth-century examples: William Shakespeare’s collected plays of the Second Folio of 1632 and Robert Hooke’s astonishing plates of tiny creatures rendered gigantic in his Micrographia of 1665. Printing comes of age in America in the eighteenth century and Pennsylvania imprints from the press of Benjamin Franklin (1742) and the Ephrata Cloister (1748-49) are featured.
