‘A Unicorn’ in the Archives: Trinity College’s Watkinson Library Makes a Rare Discovery
A page of printed text hidden for more than a century in an uncatalogued scrapbook in Trinity College’s Watkinson Library has been identified as a previously unrecorded 15th-century printing connected to the circle of famed printer Johannes Gutenberg. Scholars describe the discovery as extraordinarily rare. “Any new discovery of a book from this period, especially of an unrecorded book—one that we had no record of anywhere at all—is always a big event,” said Eric Johnson-DeBaufre, rare books and special collections librarian in the Watkinson Library. “And when it’s one that’s connected to Mainz, Germany, which is where printing in the West began, it’s especially exciting. For a discovery like this to happen here in the United States is almost unheard of.”
