By the 16th or 17th century the book had a new and still unidentified owner, who added chapter titles. Provenance: A reader in 1429 made notes in the margins. A few decades later, Constantinus traveled from North Africa to a monastery in southern Italy, where he adapted and translated Ibn al-Jazzar’s work into Latin. Synopsis: In the 10th century A.D., Ibn al-Jazzar, an Muslim physician, wrote a book titled Provisions for the Traveler and the Nourishment of the Settled, a compendium of the medical knowledge of the day, which focused on the interaction of humours and elements in the human body. College of Physicians The College of Physicians of Philadelphia Constantinus Africanus, Viaticum From Phillipps, it went to Margaret Barclay Wilson, a teacher and librarian, who donated her extensive collection of cookbooks and medicinal recipe books to the New York Academy of Medicine in 1929. It was later held in Rome and then Paris, where it was sold in 1824 to noted bibliomaniac Sir Thomas Phillipps. Provenance: The manuscript was originally created in a German monastery in the ninth century.

Some of the highlights, according to the library, are “roast lamb with coriander, deep-fried honey fritters, and cucumber with mint dressing.” These were recipes meant for average Roman households, although they included non-native spices that would have had to travel far to reach the Mediterranean. Synopsis: The earliest surviving cookbook in the West, this Latin manuscript contains recipes that date all the way back to the fourth century B.C. Courtesy of The New York Academy of Medicine Library New York Academy of Medicine Apicius, De re culinaria Some of these items you can even see in person, if you pay a visit. Instead, this is a wondrous collection of illuminated manuscripts, papyrus scrolls, and clay tablets. In the history of writing, bound books as we know them today arrive fairly late, so there are no actual “books” on this list. 770, as well as a medieval manuscript from 1150, delightfully titled Exposicio Mistica Super Exod. In addition to its own cuneiform tablets and Gutenberg Bible, the Library of Congress holds one of the oldest examples of printing in the world, passages from a Buddhist sutra, printed in A.D.

The New York Public Library, for instance, has not only cuneiform tablets and ninth-century gospels, but also a Gutenberg Bible and a copy of The Bay Psalm Book, one of the oldest books printed in America. Librarians take these kinds of questions very seriously, so when Atlas Obscura contacted some of our favorite libraries to ask about the oldest books in their collections, we were treated to a wealth of information about the treasures they hold. What’s the oldest book in any particular city? What’s the oldest book in the world? Well, what do you mean by “book”? The oldest written text? The oldest manuscript? The oldest printed material? The oldest bound book? When you start to think about the oldest books that a library might hold, there are any number of rabbit holes you can fall down.

Manuscript tablet