If the silent, studying masses in Ellis Library are any indication, MU students are working diligently to improve their memories for final 
exams. Of course, Special Collections is always ready to help. This week, we’re sharing a 280-year-old secret from the Rare Book Collection on the art of making things easier to remember.
Dr. Richard Grey (1696-1771) was a clergyman in the Church of England and had imaginative theories on education. In 1730, he published the first edition of his Memoria Technica, or, a New Method of Artificial Memory, a treatise on mnemonics partially based on Quintilian’s De oratore. Special Collections has the third edition, “corrected and improved,” published in 1737.
Grey’s artificial memory system is based on a table that equates letters with numbers. Best to let him explain himself:
The first Thing to be done is to learn exactly the following Series of Vowels and Consonants which are to represent the numerical Figures so as to be able at Pleasure to form a Technical Word which shall stand for any Number or to resolve a Word already form’d into the Number which it stands for.
a
1
b
e
2
d
i
3
t
o
4
f
u
5
l
au
6
s
oi
7
p
ei
8
k
ou
9
n
y
0
z
In other words, once the learner had committed this table to memory, all he would have to do to remember, for instance, a date and a name, would be to replace the end of the name with the series of letters that corresponds to the date. Grey offers up a series of historical eras to illustrate how the system works:
A.D. The Dioclesian Æra, or the Æra of martyrs [Diocleseko] 284 The Æra of the Hegira, or Flight of Mahomet [Mahomaudd] 622 The Æra of Yezdegird, or the Persian Æra [Yezsid] 632
The words in brackets are the mnemonic devices, with the code at the end that represents the year in letters. If a student were called upon in an exam to produce an entire chronology of world events (as students often were in the eighteenth century), he could simply remember what Grey calls the “Memorial Line”: Diocleseko Mahomaudd Yezsid. Grey points out that the system is also adaptable to geography, astronomy, weights and measures, and the study of ancient coins.
Although Grey’s mnemonic devices may seem overly complicated to twenty-first-century 
readers, his work was hugely popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Memoria Technica remained in print for over 130 years, and was in fact the only pre-1800 book on memory to remain in use for so long.
Learn More
Richard Grey, Memoria technica, or, A new method of artificial memory : applied to, and exemplified in chronology, history, geography, astronomy … London : Printed for John Stagg … and sold by A. Bettesworth and C. Hitch … F. Clay, and D. Brown …, 1737. The third edition, corrected and improved.
MU Special Collections Rare BF383 .G8 1737
Richard Sharp, ‘Grey, Richard (1696–1771)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11558, accessed 12 Dec 2011]
In honor of Halloween, we're posting an excerpt from one of the horror stories in the rare book collection, 
This pamphlet purports to be "a romance, on which is founded the popular drama now performing with unbounded applause at Astley's Amphitheatre." Several plays were produced under this title in the early nineteenth century, featuring Fergus Campbell, his unfortunate aunt, and the rest of the characters in the romance. Indeed, the first of these plays was performed at Astley's Amphitheatre and ran in September and October 1820. The playbill for this production said "The Idea from which the Subject is arranged [is] taken from the Interesting Legend of St. Swithin's Chair, in Walter Scott's Popular Novel of Waverly."
As far as we know, this cuneiform tablet dates to around 2500 B.C.E., making it the oldest item held in Special Collections (it predates the next oldest item, an Egyptian scarab seal, by about 500 years).
If you guessed that the scroll represents the oldest book form in Special Collections, you were right! The scroll predated the codex (the form we usually associate with a book nowadays) by thousands of years.
This manuscript copy of De Constructione by Priscianus dates to around 1150 A.D. Although Special Collections holds manuscript fragments that are older, this is the oldest complete book in the collection. It is a work on grammar, written in Latin with passages in Greek.
Dating from approximately 1500-1100 B.C.E., this fragment from the Egyptian Book of the Dead isn’t the oldest item in Special Collections – but it is the oldest piece of writing on papyrus in Special Collections.
The current student newspaper, the 