Wouldn’t it be great to find something old, rare, and valuable in your library? It happens!

“A librarian in England has stumbled upon a rare page from the early days of book printing.

The 540-year-old leaf comes from a medieval priests’ handbook that had been printed by William Caxton, who introduced the printing press to England, according to a statement from the University of Reading.

“I suspected it was special as soon as I saw it,” said Erika Delbecque, a special collections librarian at the University of Reading, who found the paper hidden in an archive. “It is incredibly rare to find an unknown Caxton leaf, and astonishing that it has been under our noses for so long.”

The double-sided page has black-letter typeface and red paragraph marks that gave it away as an early western European printing, according to the university.

“The leaf had previously been pasted into another book for the undignified purpose of reinforcing its spine,” Delbecque said in the statement. Delbecque and her colleagues figured out that in 1820 a librarian at the University of Cambridge saved the page from the book spine but apparently didn’t realize its worth. The 15th-century leaf then ended up in a private collection that was purchased by the University of Reading 20 years ago. ”

Read the rest of this article here!