“It’s an exhibition about the materiality of the book that helps you imagine the work of artisans, miners, paper mill workers, silk workers, tanners, parchment makers and silversmiths,” said Montelongo, who curated the exhibition. “These are not the invention of one person but of many generations of craftsmen honing their skill and experimenting and working with the limitations of the environment and then producing these objects that, when we open them, transport us to the beginning of legal systems or the description of Indigenous cultures of the Americas or to religious poetry from the time of King David.”

Montelongo deepened his scholarship on this topic while attending an intensive course at the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia in June 2024.

“When I came back from that weeklong intensive course, I didn’t want to turn the page — I wanted to keep learning, and I had the perfect place to keep the course going,” said Montelongo, who in 2019 joined the curatorial staff of the John Carter Brown Library, an independent research library located in the heart of the Brown University campus.

Supported by his colleagues, Montelongo selected 35 books from the library’s collection to comprise “Elemental.” Printed in Europe and the Americas, the books are written in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Spanish, English, Italian and even Otomi, the language of an Indigenous group in Mexico.

“Each one of the books is remarkable in its own way,” Montelongo said.

He is particularly enraptured by a book for young scholars called “Margarita Philosophica,” printed in 1504. Covering subjects like rhetoric, logic and astronomy, the book was an encyclopedia used by generations of young scholars. While its contents shaped German minds, its physical form is redolent of the land where the book was bound using wood and pigskin local to the region, according to Montelongo. 

“This one book takes you from the observation of the stars in the times of Ptolemy to the forests of Germany and the pigs that fed the people and then provided the skin for the protection of books,” Montelongo said.

The exhibition also explores the provenance of these volumes. From branded insignias to handwritten notes, the books hint at the many people who touched their pages, including book collectors like the library’s namesake John Carter Brown, who had a hand in their preservation. 

“These books have reached us because of that obsessive passion of book lovers,” Montelongo said.

In bringing the past lives of these books to exhibit-goers, Montelongo, too, carries on this tradition.

The exhibit is on view at the John Carter Brown Library until Dec. 15, 2025. The library is open Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. and 2 p.m. to 4:45 p.m., and Friday, 10 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.