I have visited quite a few museums in this world. That list includes most of the world class museums.
And those billion dollar museums are great, but, they are also overwhelming.

You have to spend several days in them to absorb just a percentage of the treasures that they hold. After all, every single item has a story and a history.

And this is why I love the smaller museums much more.

They carefully choose something and dig really deep into it. So you can spend a few hours or one day just really digging deep and grokking what the museum has on display.

With that in mind I want to say that the Walters museum is my second favorite museum in the whole world. It's a medium sized museum and I have visited it twice. Once on my sojourn around America and a second time (more recently) to see an exhibition of Medieval illuminated manuscripts (Books of Hours).

Oh and my first most favorite museum in the world is also a smaller museum. It is "The Cloisters" in New York.

You can call this adventure to Baltimore a "writers sojourn". Most everything about it was oriented around writing. It was the manuscripts in the Walters Museum, the Edgar Allan Poe museum and the Peabody library.

Here I am spending some time with the various 15-16th century books. Imagine that. These books are five hundred years old.

First let's take a look.. Some of them are even older than that. These books all range from the 15th through the 16th centuries.

The exhibition has twenty different books on display.

The books are, of course, very beautiful, and very lavishly made with spectacular paper, amazing illustrations, and many of them have brass clasps.

And they all are part of a type of medieval book called "Book of Hours"

A Book of hours is a personal, devotional prayer book. And they were very popular among royalty and the rising merchant class for several centuries in the middle ages - roughly the 12th through 16th centuries.

They were a way for lay people to emulate a structured prayer life much like monks, priests and nuns would do. But without having to join a monastery.

Books of hours came in a lot of variations but typically they were arranged with a series of monastic prayers that took place at eight specific times during the day. These times were Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, none, Vespers and Compline.

There was also often a lighter version of the Book of hours that consisted of shortened prayers that centered on the Hours of the Virgin which allowed a person to weave devotion into their daily routine at home.

The books had a consistent structure which included:

• A calendar which noted various feast days and saints days throughout the year
• Gospel lessons that are extracted from the four Gospels
• Hours of the Virgin which is the core of the book; a series of prayer and pslms for the eight canonical hours
• Penitential Psalms which are seven psalms recited to ask for forgiveness of sins.
• Office of the dead - Prayers that help the souls of deceased loved one to pass through Purgatory
• Suffrages - Short prayers dedicated to specific favorite saints

Often times the book of hours was smaller than what we think of as an average book. And they also often had a cord attached to them so a person could hang the book on their waist belt; carrying it around for the day.

But to really grok what these books are about we have to realize that 500 years ago books were an extremely rare, and extremely revered, thing. A whole lot of love and devotion was imbued into these books. And there were some very clever techniques that were used to make these books more than books. Let me explain.

The owner of the book is placed in the book with a portrait or illustration. This was a very big thing -for the person to actually be in the book. It creates a sense of connection and brings the owner deeper into the book.

This next illustration is from the famous Hours of Catherine of Cleves. It was created as a wedding gift for Catherine. And she has been placed in the book. She is the figure in the red dress in the lower left of the book.

2. The Edgar Allan Poe House (And his grave site) -

3. The famous Graffiti Alley - This was an unexpected surprise for me.

4. The Basilica of the Assumption - It's a beautiful cathedral but I was very much surprised by the fact that it was not built in the gothic style.

5. The Peabody Library - They do not build libraries like this anymore.

6. Overview of Baltimore and my stay there -