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The Fragmenta Manuscripta collection is again the source of this week's feature. It's a fragment from a fifteenth-century gradual in Latin, possibly from England. Note the square musical notation on a four-line staff. The staff here agree that we particularly like the face in profile added to the large initial. More information at the Digital Scriptorium.
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The semester is well under way and our study rooms are becoming very busy. Please remember to be courteous to your fellow students as you all must share in the use of these rooms. A group is allowed to reserve a room for two hours at a time. After the two hours, and if no one else needs to use the room, your group may reserve another two hours. Read the full engineering study room policy at the bottom of this page.
Mizzou Superhero Challenge:
Design Your Own Scientific Superhero
Contribute to STEM literacy and design a superhero based on real science. You could win tickets for Bill Nye’s talk at Mizzou on March 15 and a $100 gift card to the Mizzou Store! Entries should include the following:
Register at http://library.missouri.edu/specialcollections/superhero/ by MARCH 9, 2014.
Finalists will be judged during a poster session at Ellis Library on March 11 from 1 to 3 p.m.
The top three will be announced during Dr. Tim Evans’ program for Superhero Science at Ellis Library on March 12 at 11 am.
Dress as your favorite superhero or supervillain–or your own!
Superhero Science will be on display in Ellis Library March 3-28, 2014.
Affiliated with Decoding Science: Bridging the Gap. Engaging the Public.
http://lssp.missouri.edu/decodingscience
MU faculty Wilma King, Anand Prahlad, Scott Brooks, Charles Menifield, Berkley Hudson and Flore Zephir will read and discuss excerpts from published work.
Sponsored by the MU Black History Month Committee
This post is the third in our series highlighting the work of African-American artists and authors in Special Collections. Countee Cullen was one of the leading poets and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. This book of poetry, published at the height of his career, examines the relationships between faith and injustice. Cullen draws parallels between the suffering of the crucified Christ and the suffering of African Americans in the climate of racial violence that characterized the 1920s. The copy in Special Collections is inscribed by Cullen to Frank Luther Mott, who was Dean of the School of Journalism from 1942 to 1951.
In October 2013, mold was discovered growing on books and bound journal volumes throughout the University of Missouri System's secondary offsite facility, UMLD2. This facility holds approximately 600,000 volumes that belong to the University of Missouri-Columbia campus. To assist with MU Libraries' response to the mold bloom, we have established the Collection Enhancement fund. Your gift will be used to treat, relocate and in some cases, replace items impacted by mold. Our goal is to ensure the MU Libraries' ability to serve the needs of our users is not compromised by this sad event. A gift of any amount is greatly appreciated!
No one cares more about preserving knowledge and scholarship than our librarians and staff. As we work through our response plan, know that we are making every effort to save items with special value and to retain ready access to information in the collection.
If you would like to help us preserve this collection, click here to donate to our Collection Enhancement Fund.
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No librarian is happy to see a broken book, but we're lucky to have eight leaves from this sixteenth-century book of hours. Two of the leaves in Special Collections were originally part of John Bagford's Fragmenta Manuscripta collection – meaning they were removed from the book by the late seventeenth century. Bagford's fragment collection passed to St. Martin-in-the-Fields in the eighteenth century. The collection was sold in 1861 to Sir Thomas Phillipps, then to Sir Sydney Cockerell in 1913. In 1957, the collection was bought by the bookseller William Salloch, and it came to the University of Missouri in 1968.
The remaining parts of the manuscript (it's not clear how much) were eventually broken around 1920. In the 1980s, Margaret Howell, then director of Special Collections, noticed a set of six leaves on the market, and she was able to reunite at least a portion of this beautiful book of hours.
All eight of the leaves are cropped in the same manner and show signs of damage from flooding in London in 1846. The manuscript was produced in the style of Geoffroy Tory, an influential type designer of the Renaissance. This humanistic script may look printed, but it's all written by hand. See more in the Digital Scriptorium: Fragmenta Manuscripta #212, #213, and the six additional pages.
For a great recent overview of the topic of book breaking and its implications for libraries, see This Just In: Breaking Bad by David Whitesell at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.
In honor of Valentine's Day, we're posting a few pages from a one-sided collection of love letters that make up a French epistolary novel called Lettres de Bendé, a Monreset. The novel has an imprint of Amsterdam (fictitious?), and is dated 1762. A researcher in France recently emailed us with a question about this book, and in the course of our investigations we found that we have the only recorded copy, according to WorldCat.
It's always exciting to find a unique copy, but there may be a good reason for this title's near extinction. This isn't a happy love story. Friedrich Melchior, baron von Grimm, explains in a review published in his Correspondance litteraire:
Ce sont les lettres d'une femme qui aime et qui n'est point aimée. Ajoutez qu'elle ne mérite pas de l'être, car elle est insipide, guindée, sans naturel, sans grâce. Si ces lettres n'étaient pas si mauvaises, on serait tenté de croire qu'elles ont été confiées à l impression par une femme qui n'avait que cette voie pour apprendre à son amant sa situation et ses sentiments.
These are letters written by a woman who loves but is not loved. What's more, she does not deserve to be loved because she is dull, affected, stiff, and ungraceful. If these letters were not so bad, one would be tempted to believe that they have been entrusted to printing by a woman who had no other way of apprising her lover of her situation and feelings.
Ouch. Are they really that bad? You be the judge. Brush up on your French, and take a look at the few, perhaps not-so-tantalizing pages we offer below; the rest will be freely available in our digital library soon.
This week we're highlighting Faith Ringgold's illustrations for Letter from Birmingham City Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr. Produced in 2007 for the Limited Editions Club, the book contains eight original serigraphs by Ringgold alongside a beautifully printed text by King. Special Collections has copies 119 and 132 from an edition of 400.
