It's a catacomb of more than 450,000 things only a few have seen, especially those who are still living. It is a unique, valuable and rare - home of the things people long gone created and those still around admire. 

“Materials, printed works, that are housed in this repository that range from rare books, stone tablets, all the way to 21st-century comic books. We are a popular culture repository, so we document the human experience,” head of special collections, Leslie McRoberts said.

It began in 1962. Many major universities in the nation have the same thing. This one has just always been underneath the feet of students stressing over exams and passing classes. Not many have seen the extent of it. 

Originally, McRoberts said, “It was charged to house these very rare and distinct materials. And it was started by an English professor named Russel B. Nye, he started the popular culture collection with an initial donation of 8,000 comic books in the early 1960s.”

You walk through the halls and shelves of books written and bound by those from before the United States was even a nation — a stone tablet from the third century resides in a vault, along with other extremely historic works of art and literature. 

“We have a terrific collection of rare books too … I could give you a couple of favorites … one of my total favorites of our rare books is we have a copy of the first work of modern anatomy, which was printed in 1555. That’s the beginning of the Renaissance,” Special Collections Education librarian Ruth Anne Jones said.

Jones said her favorite piece of history is a burned piece of cloth from the cloak of Jan Hus, a reformer from historic Bohemia — or what is now the Czech Republic — who, during the 14th century, tried to reform the Catholic church, only to be burned at the stake.

The values of many objects that reside in this labyrinth of history, McRoberts said, as she gazed at the ancient tablet, are unfathomable. And this isn’t the only space for preserving things either, a facility off-campus that only a few know the address of houses thousands of one-of-a-kind works and records.

The incredible part of this, McRoberts said, is that all of it is accessible for students and faculty, by appointment only. Even during a pandemic, viewing historical objects, books and art continue on. 

“Everyone should know about this place,” rare books curator Tad Boehmer said. Boehmer has been with MSU libraries for three years.

He held a box with a 500-year-old book housed inside, tenderly flipping the pages as he awaited a student to meet him in the reading room, saying that there is only paper and pencil allowed in the reading room — no ink — for fear that damage could come to the books. 

Boehmer, McRoberts and the rest of the staff work their 9-to-5 jobs in the basement and sometimes the desk. They are all librarians by trade and historians by intention. It’s proof that it matters, their work preserves the nations and world works that help tell the stories of those who have died and moved on from our world.

“It’s so important to know about our past and to learn from our past,” Boehmer said. “Also to be aware of the variety of cultures and experiences beyond our own.”

Boehmer has been with MSU libraries for three years. He wears a suit and tie despite working in a basement, ready to prepare something for a student to view because he is proud of the work they do. 

“Sometimes I feel like they are speaking to me and I’m reaching through you know, centuries back to the people who were touching this book and experiencing it before me. It is such a rich experience you can have with these books,” Boehmer said.

There is a popular culture room — it doesn’t house the largest collection in the United States of comic books, but it holds a set of instruments: a set of drums, guitar, bass cello and a triangle. 

McRoberts said during a walking tour that led us through twists and turns of shelves, filing cabinets and dust that they play so loudly sometimes you can hear them on the first floor. 

“It’s a fantastic place to work, its amazing collection,” Boehmer said.

But be careful, you might bump into an ancient sword, or coffin created to mock the fall of the apartheid in 1990s South Africa, the duo just lies next to the collections of thousands of comic books from pre-1960.

The extent of the collections is unknown and ever-growing like the roots of a tree planted firmly in the center of the MSU campus. Its history is unknown by many other than those that tend to it, even if it’s the reading room is firmly planted on the first floor of the main library.

A book made of cheese, Olympic record books from the 1930s, photos worth nearly $1 million. 

“It might be the only thing that survives from that person's lifetime,” Boehmer said. “This is all that really survives of them.”

That is why Boehmer, McRoberts and Jones, among the thousands of other curators and librarians who perform the same work at Wayne State University in Detroit or the University of Illinois in Champaign, do the same work. It is to preserve things so the memory holds on forever.

"When we think about the other parts that MSU special collections documents, we have extensive holdings in cookery, as there are over 35,000 cookbooks in our collections. Because you, right, you can understand American life from a comic book but you can also understand American life and international ... the kind of the scope of that human experience, from a cookbook," McRoberts said.

Music, left and right-winged documents from history, it is about learning from the past. And it's just underneath students feet.