Danelle Moon turned a large black hand crank, and a bookshelf twice her height glided silently away from the one in front. We stepped into the opening and scanned the rows for books about Lincoln as she talked about the library’s cherished William Wyles Collection, 40,000 volumes on the 16th President, the Civil War, and the American West. But we didn’t get far. We kept getting distracted.
Moon, head of the library’s Special Research Collections (SRC), stopped when she spied a velum-bound copy of Dante’s Inferno circa 1825. “Oh, this is neat,” she said, flipping through pages of nightmarish William Blake engravings. A few feet away we pored over a 1493 Bible with an embossed leather cover and the handset type that had been invented by Johannes Gutenberg just a few decades earlier. We could have kept going back in time, but there was more to see.
Moon and her team of curators are still getting settled into their new digs, which offer much more room than their former home in the bowels of the old Davidson, but they’re already grateful for the extra space to collect, preserve, and digitize. “Yes, we’re excited,” she said. Above us on the third story of the just-opened Mountain Side of the library is a wide room with floor-to-ceiling windows and dark wooden tables where visitors wearing white gloves carefully view the building’s most coveted items.