Archival Item

Overall my first intake was the vast array of monster collections. The delicacy each book was given to preserve them was absolutely fascinating. On a side note, I thoroughly enjoyed the description given by the speaker from the Special Collections about each novel. I was shocked by the detail and length of each book due to the large difficulty in crafting them as they had to be handmade and drawn. Moreover, the originality of everything was refreshing. A quick glance over the hand drawn pictures confirmed that there were vast amounts of inaccuracies on ‘scientific’ novels. On par with this idea, it was weird yet fascinating that the people back then seemed fixated any monster or creature part human would indicate a human head rather than a human body. My overall take-away was that mythological ideas can withstand time and so can false information.

When I first held upon the book, The Island of Dr. Moreau, by H.G. Wells, part of the Famous Fantastic Mysteries, the first thing I realized was the sheer weight of it, or the lack thereof. In addition, there was an interesting smell that resembled an old wooden attic, not displeasing in the slightest. The english was harder to read than normal horror books in our time, or at least the ones I have been introduced to. Out of all the books shown during this Special Collections class, this one was the most colored. What interests me the most was that it looked like a news advertisement with a few short novels in it. It made me think of a man in a beige wool suit, sitting on a coal pumped train, reading this book on his way to the fast growing city.. Its intended purpose is a light read because it is small and easy to carry around.