Origins of The Falcon Dirk — Part Three

The Long Room (Photo credit: National Library of Ireland on The Commons)

I have a great admiration bordering on a passion for old, rare books–emphasis on old. Rarity is impressive, but age, survival through decades or centuries by even a common book is equally impressive to me. The value of a book is the product of edition, condition, and scarcity. Those criteria apply whether talking about a copy of John Milton’s Paradise Lost or a copy of Marvel Comic‘s Amazing Spider-man. It isn’t the value that attracts me, however; it’s being able to hold an old book in my relatively young hands and have a sense of the time that has passed since it was first made, first held. There is something about the smell of aged paper and ink, the delicate state of the pages, and the voice of the printing carried across the decades or centuries. Read the rest of this entry »