The Library of Parliament’s Rare Book Room is home to unique titles, placed there for their rarity, age, fragility, historic significance, or other similar factor. Some of these rare books also form part of the Library’s institutional memory. Such is the case for the Library’s visitors’ books, where guests who have been captivated by the Library over the past 100 years have signed their name and sometimes left a personal note. Moving in political, diplomatic, royal and artistic circles, many distinguished guests from all over the world have toured the Main Library since it opened in Centre Block in 1876. Some of these visitors have written a page in our history by signing our visitors’ books.
The Library of Parliament has a number of visitors’ books, each one with its own style of binding, gold tooling, paper, calligraphy and design techniques. These leather-bound volumes contain visitors’ signatures, with the earliest ones dating back to the 1920s. The Library moved away from commercial bindings in the 1960s, and its preservation laboratory has been crafting hand-made visitors’ books ever since. The most recent books feature decorative elements, such as endpapers from watered silk or marbled paper, custom-made for the Library of Parliament, or gilded edges, embossing and even gold tooling. The calligraphy on the inner pages varies greatly from one book to another. These days, talented Library of Parliament employees sometimes do the lettering, the coats of arms and even the official seals within the pages of the visitors’ books.
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