Carolyn Vega is a manuscripts cataloger at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. On any given day, she’s combing through some of the most fascinating stuff this side of papyrus and telling the world about it at the library’s blog, Secrets From The Vault. We pulled her out of the stacks to talk about working with really old stuff and how historical odds and ends fill out the big picture.

Is “Cataloger for Historical and Literary Manuscripts” really just an awesome way of saying “Librarian for Really Old Stuff”?

Well, manuscripts means pretty much anything you can think of that hasn’t been run through a printing press: Letters, drafts of novels and poems and essays, commonplace books, diaries, and lots of other odds and ends like Dickens’ cigar case and a lottery ticket signed by George Washington.

Read more HERE.