The chances of a medieval book making it to the safety of a modern library are dazzlingly small. Relatively few did. Imagine the challenging journey across centuries of wear and tear, fire and water, and perhaps worst of all, fickle readers. Why keep a book from the past that is handwritten on yellowish animal skin if the printer around the corner offered a perfectly white vegan option on paper?

It is an utterly unbalanced fight, book survival. What is to survive must be kept one hundred percent of the time, while a single discarding gesture made the book disappear forever. A medieval codex easily had ten or more owners and for this survival thing to work, each one had to care as much as their predecessor. A weak link in the provenance chain may undo a rare book’s existence. Not that we would necessarily know, because books that vanish, usually vanish without a trace. We think.

I find myself pondering all this when I open a battered manuscript in the library and observe its attention-seeking imperfection: bright purple mould stains mark the tough journey the book is recovering from. Made it, crossed the finish line! This is probably why I like imperfections in rare books so much. It feels as if an old book in perfect condition has missed the chance to grow a personality: it sneaked through history without absorbing any of it—it is not perfect yet.

Image: Leiden, University Library, BPL 2896 (Glossed Psalter, Italy, 12^th century), digitized here. Large photo my own.