Mom and Pa came down for a visit today and we all went on a field trip to the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, where they currently have a rare books exhibit. We showed up right at 11:00 when the doors opened, to "beat the crowds," but luckily not everyone gets as excited about old books as we do, so we actually had the exhibit to ourselves. Lots of neat things there, like a first edition (1721) of Leonardo da Vinci's Treatise on Painting. I wish we could have actually flipped through the books and read them. We wandered around the rest of the museum too, of course, through an Egyptian tomb replica, past actual mummies and a rare original statue of Cleopatra VII, and eventually outside to a nice fountain where we had our picnic. A fun tri-generational outing all around.
Saturday, July 31, 2004
Rare Books and Egyptian Relics
Mom and Pa came down for a visit today and we all went on a field trip to the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, where they currently have a rare books exhibit. We showed up right at 11:00 when the doors opened, to "beat the crowds," but luckily not everyone gets as excited about old books as we do, so we actually had the exhibit to ourselves. Lots of neat things there, like a first edition (1721) of Leonardo da Vinci's Treatise on Painting. I wish we could have actually flipped through the books and read them. We wandered around the rest of the museum too, of course, through an Egyptian tomb replica, past actual mummies and a rare original statue of Cleopatra VII, and eventually outside to a nice fountain where we had our picnic. A fun tri-generational outing all around.
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2 comments:
I AM SO JEALOUS!!! I wish I could have seen the rare book collection :(. I am obsessed with them. Someday, one of my books will be in a rare book collection. Most likely, because no one will want to read it. Oh wait... I don't have a book written yet. Ah well. Love your blogs! I have just started and am just checking out different people's musings.
I went on a field trip to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Was it only last week?
Anyway, they have an exhibit called Fit for a King. I keep meaning to finish writing about my trip in my own blog. So many other things keep coming up to write about that when I actually feel like writing it has not been about the museum. This doesn't mean I didn't like it--quite the contrary!
Since I doubt that anyone else will go about looking for the entry I might as well tell you here that I saw some gorgeous hand written Psalters in Gothic text with pictures outlined with florals in real gold and lapis lazuli ink. I had never really considered the amount of work that would have gone into old books. I use to practice caligraphy more and made books in high school for assignments. Remembering how much work it was, I was really appreciative of what I saw at the Getty! I was not even close.
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