
Before he opened it, Steve Delamarter knew the book before him would be extraordinary. The smooth sienna leather was worn in a few places but hand-tooled and carefully fitted together inside the cover. The rough edges of its yellow parchment pages didn’t look hand-cut. Then he recognized the intricate section headers, entwined lines of red, green and yellow ink, as the work of a government scriptorium.Delamarter, an Old Testament professor at George Fox Evangelical Seminary, is founder and director of the Ethiopian Manuscript Imaging Project. In the past five years he’s tracked down 900 rare books owned by dealers and collectors outside the African country. He and his team digitize the contents, creating copies for Ethiopian libraries. It’s an attempt to preserve some of the cultural heritage that’s been lost in the turmoil of Ethiopia’s history.So Delamarter is used to handling rare manuscripts Those he works with are often well-worn religious volumes, handwritten in Ge’ez, the ancient liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church He’s examined many Psalters, books of Psalms and other texts used for prayer.
