Nerd Adventures, Part 2

Monday morning, I finally made it to the British Library. Alice and I went to check out their "Treasures." They had a lot of really cool stuff:

• handwritten pages of Persuasion by Jane Austen
• handwritten pages of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
• first modern edition of Shakespeare's works from 1709
• book of Shakespeare's sonnets from 1640 (I thought it was interesting that they had names, like "Faste and Loose" and "False Beleefe" instead of numbers.)
• printings of Shakespeare's "The Rape of Lucree" from 1594 and "Venus and Adonis" from 1596
• First Folio of Shakespeare's works (The most famous surviving printed edition from his lifetime).
• Romeo and Juliet from 1597
• pages from da Vinci's notebooks
• handwritten letters and other documents by Sylvia Plath, Oscar Wilde, Wordsworth, and John Milton
• handwritten music by Beethoven, Mozart, Handel Schubert, and Mendelssohn (though some of them I think were actually reproductions -- or remixes? Haha.)
• writings by some of the Beatles
• map of "Longe Isleland," which was really lower Manhattan, with something about New Amsterdam written in a caption
• the earliest manuscript of the complete New Testament (in Greek)
• a Spanish Hebrew bible (I guess I just never think of "Spanish" and "Jewish" as going together)
• the Magna Carta -- The British Library has 2 of the 4 remaining copies from the original ones issued

I tried to go up to the reading rooms, too, but you needed a library card and I didn't have the stuff I would need to get one with me. Oh, well. It was still really awesome. :)