Lincoln's Hand
Over the Course of fifty years the Clarke Library's staff has worked diligently to gather material in support of the library's three core missions. Despite focusing on the core, every now and again an item not essential to the collection but too wonderful to not accept has appeared. Like most special collections libraries, the Clarke has a few things that probably fall out of the library's collecting scope, but are too wonderful to not treasure.
Among these treasures are found a cast of Abraham Lincoln's hand, the mold for which was made in 1860 as Lincoln sat in Chicago, awaiting the presidential nomination of the Republican Party.
Another of these treasures is a beautifully hand copied and illustrated Book of Hours, likely originally created in southern France in the mid 1500s. The book has its own, hidden, history. The empty oval on the page to the right likely once held a family crest. It appears that the volume was stolen during the French Revolution, rebound to disguise its original provenance, and disfigured by the removal of the family crest to make its original ownership an unanswerable puzzle.
A final example is an Asian manuscript, donated to the library by Dr. Clarke.