The Globe and Mail's features writer Ian Brown has again looked to the Fisher Library for inspiration and written a story that examines the power and relevance of the printed book. Titled "Inside old-school books, every scribble tells a story," the article, published Saturday March 31, focuses on one of the Fisher copies of Thomas Gray's "An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard" - specifically, the copy that General James Wolfe took with him to the 1759 siege of Quebec, "the same copy he seems to have read the night before he fell on the Plains of Abraham," writes Brown. (Images of the book and Wolfe's marginalia can be seen below.)

The article also touched on other topics, including book binding - it provides some background and a link to Fisher Librarian Philip Oldfield's database on British armorial book stamps, which recently went live - and marginalia in discussing the merits of the printed book over e-books. As Brown writes, "printed books are rapidly becoming more and more valuable as 'material objects of print culture,' as book scholars like to say – artifacts of the human mind, physical evidence of the way we read and think and feel. In the world's most richly stocked libraries, books aren't dead; they're the newest form of history."

This is Brown's third story that has featured the Fisher Library. The other two examined the records and maps of Joseph Burr Tyrrell, and Larry Sherk's collection of beer labels housed at the Fisher.

Globe and Mail article features Gray&#039;s Elegy

Globe and Mail article features Gray's Elegy