The Immortality of the Soul, by Henry More, pub. 1659

Three hundred and forty nine years old and it looked great. I don't know if it had been re-bound, but the pages were perfect and supple. As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing like an antique book that's well preserved. They're works of art, even the simplest of them. They make even the nicest modern tome look trashy. And think about it; this book was printed and bound only fifty three years past the death of Queen Elizabeth I. Franklin Roosevelt has been dead longer than that. Maybe I'm just geeking out, but it was incredible to pull this book out of the cardboard box it was sharing with its fellows and see just how old it was. And to handle something so old without supervision and with no constraints. Man, I live for strange moments like that. Of course, the woman who owned the book had no idea what she had, even after I told her. She thumbed through the pages like it was a cheap dictionary, then she stuck it in her purse and left. I was dumbfounded.