Condition of The Book

               This book is interesting to look at, and its condition provides much valuable information about how the owners of the book treated and used it. The cover of the book has a great looking design of swirls and leaves. The designer of the cover organized designs into diamond with a small circle shape in the middle and had them pushed down or engraved into the cover. This not only allows the cover of the book to look appealing to people but also as a place to grip the book easier. The back cover of the book has fallen off but has the same designs as the front cover. The book’s chapters are noticeably short and are on average five to six pages long. The chapters have numbers on each paragraph, and these numbers link to questions found in the footnotes about the contents of the paragraph. Due to the contents and the organizational structure of this book, one can assume that the book is a school textbook. There are also no marginalia in the book at all, and no writing in to besides the names on the first page. However, there are dark spots on the bottom outside corners of each page that look like marks left where people held the book. The book also has different illustrations in different areas that often take up the entire page. These pictures depict different topics in the book and multiple different people created these pictures. This is strange, as the cost of a book was partially due to the cost of paper. The more pages in a book the more it will cost, and the author decided to dedicate entire pages to images of different topics in the book. The spine has also fallen off, and someone has rebound it with a ledger. This makes it apparent that people used this book quite often. [1] This book was remarkably interesting to look at, and the condition of the book provides a lot of information about how the Fontaine family used this book.

[1] Goodrich, Peter Parley’s Tales about Ancient Rome, With Some Account of Modern Italy.