"To hold ancient books, incunabula, in my own hands was a new experience for me..."

"... I particularly adored Conrad Gesner’s Historiae animalium (1551), richly illustrated (it had Albrecht Dürer’s famous drawing of a rhinoceros), and there, too, that I fell in love with all the works of Sir Thomas Browne— his Religio Medici, his Hydriotaphia, and The Garden of Cyrus (The Quincunciall Lozenge). It was in the stacks that I saw all of Darwin’s works in their original editions. How absurd some of these were, but how magnificent the language! And if Browne’s classical magniloquence became too much at times, one could switch to the lapidary cut and thrust of Swift, all of whose works, of course, were there in their original editions."

Writes Oliver Sacks, in his memoir "On the Move: A Life," which I'm reading in Kindle form, and,  reading on my iPad, I can Google my way into things that jump out, like that rhinoceros. There's a whole Wikipedia article, "Dürer's Rhinoceros":

The image was based on a written description and brief sketch by an unknown artist of an Indian rhinoceros that had arrived in Lisbon earlier that year. Dürer never saw the actual rhinoceros, which was the first living example seen in Europe since Roman times... Dürer's... depicts an animal with hard plates that cover its body like sheets of armour, with a gorget at the throat, a solid-looking breastplate, and rivets along the seams. He places a small twisted horn on its back, and gives it scaly legs and saw-like rear quarters... Despite its anatomical inaccuracies, Dürer's woodcut became very popular in Europe and was copied many times in the following three centuries. It was regarded by Westerners as a true representation of a rhinoceros into the late 18th century.

I'm also fascinated by that word "incunabula," which the OED defines as "1. The earliest stages or first traces in the development of anything" and "2. Books produced in the infancy of the art of printing; spec. those printed before 1500." The literal original meaning is: swaddling-clothes.