What a wonderful thing the web is! The Abbey Library of St. Gall (in St. Gallen, Switzerland) has been in continuous existence for over 1,200 years and houses a vast number of old manuscripts. But until recently the only way to see the books was to go to Switzerland. That is until they got a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to digitize, index and describe their holdings of 355 manuscripts produced before 1000 A.D. And they have generously put their gorgeous high resolution images on their website for anyone to study. No plane ticket required!
While there’s lots of info on the library website, here’s a nice overview article about the project from The New York Times.
The library in St. Gallen is quite beautiful in and of itself, not to mention the books! I visited there in person once–I’ll have to take a look at the virtual site.
Wow. How incredible. Thank you for sharing this link.