The thing I noticed (sorry, LaTeX fan here) was how well they could typeset math and Latin all the way back in 1869! I have to say I'm impressed, and it makes me a bit sad that most of my college exams looked worse (typographically) than a paper produced over a century ago. Look at those goddamn gorgeously even margins, the ligatures, the kerning of the italics, and the protrusion of the hyphens.
Hell, this makes the SATs, with its ragged edges and sloppy Times New Roman straight out of MS Word, look like carelessly produced junk.
It's also interesting that the Greek portion of the exam was handwritten. Perhaps Harvard University Press didn't have movable types for Greek letters at that time? Also, I'm curious how they distributed the handwritten pages to all the applicants (hundreds?) without a Xerox machine.
Hell, this makes the SATs, with its ragged edges and sloppy Times New Roman straight out of MS Word, look like carelessly produced junk.