Inside the Manuscripts of @themorganlibrary with...

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Inside the Manuscripts of @themorganlibrary with @cnlibrarian

For more glimpses inside the pages of The Morgan Library and Museum’s rare manuscripts, follow @cnlibrarian on Instagram.

For Christine Nelson (@cnlibrarian), the Drue Heinz Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts at New York City’s Morgan Library and Museum (@themorganlibrary), the past is never far from reach. “I work with personal letters from Jane Austen and Voltaire, manuscripts of Charlotte Brontë and Bob Dylan,” Christine shares. “This range allows me to move from one century to another, one fascinating life to the next.” Through her work in the library over the past 25 years Christine has come to find beauty in intimate familiarity revealed through these handwritten records. “Thoreau looks at some ice crystals on a window and makes a little sketch in his journal. Teenage Brontë makes a tiny list of the stories she’s written. Jefferson goes on the road and writes a letter home, using a piece of tree bark instead of paper. This is everyday life at its most mundane, which to me is the beauty of it! These little details I see, these ordinary traces of extraordinary lives, connect me with the past in the most intimate way.”

In addition to sharing excerpts from her findings in the archive — details from 19th-century hand-colored engravings, flowers pressed into a note by Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, original watercolors from Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince — Christine runs her own series, #letterformfive, where she documents all the variations of the most common letter in the English language: E. “It’s a good game, finding Es,” Christine explains of the series. “It’s fun to look at a handwritten E by young Henry David Thoreau alongside a glorious E printed in Venice in 1498, or to see my husband running past a giant metal E under the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philly, and realize they all represent the same sound, across time and space.”

by via Instagram Blog