We had some welcome visitors at our weekly Books meeting this morning: the coordinators of the Internet Archive’s scanning efforts, from 21 scanning centers around the planet. It was great to hear from Andy, who runs the scanning out of Boston Public Library, who mentioned how happy BPL are to have scanned one of their most prized volumes. It’s a copy of Opticks by Isaac Newton, owned and inscribed by the author himself.

It’s goosebump-inducing to see annotations in Newton’s own hand, and I particularly like all the “old-time post-it notes” in the front of the volume that warn not to let this book leave the library.

BPL also has a separate binding of 16 handwritten pages of corrections and additions attributed to Newton which is well worth a look as well.