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Thanks to the generous support of donors to the Friends of the MU Libraries Adopt-A-Book program, conservator Jim Downey has been able to treat and repair a number of books from Special Collections. Below is a sampling of before and after pictures from the latest batch of adoptees; click over to the Adopt-A-Book web site for more. A sincere thanks to donors George Justice, H. & D. Moore, B. Winfield, M. Nagar, W. Oshinsky, P. Collins, J. Schweitzer, R. Drake and M. Correale.
September 24 marked the beginning of Banned Books Week, a yearly celebration of the freedom to read. Books in Special Collections are no stranger to banning and censorship – most were subject to some form of official approval, and many were banned at some point in their history.
By the seventeenth century, book publication in most European countries was regulated by a licensing board made up of Church or state officials. Fail to get a license to print, an imprimatur, and your book was effectively banned. Legitimately printed books featured the imprimatur prominently, often on the verso of the title page.
Of course, books were still printed without a license – and these often included a false imprint, to make it look like they had been printed somewhere else. Printers used this bit of subterfuge to publish texts seen as subversive, heretical, or immoral.[2]
The book on the right is a work by Christopher Sandius promoting Arian and Socinian beliefs. It was published in Amsterdam by Christoph Petzold. However, Petzold issued it with a false imprint identifying a publisher in Köln. The false imprint protected Petzold, and to some extent Sandius as well, and it enabled the publication of beliefs condemned by Protestant and Catholic authorities.
Underground publications like that of Sandius presented a challenge to religious and state officials: censorship wasn’t enough to keep dangerous ideas out of public circulation. Authorities responded with outright bans of books already in print.
Special Collections has a version of the Index accompanied by an edict issued by Philip II of Spain. This version of the Index was released in 1570 in response to an uprising in the Netherlands, a territory Spain had recently acquired. Issued in French, Dutch, and Latin, Philip’s Index was meant to eradicate political protest and Protestantism in the Netherlands, a goal he never achieved. It's interesting to note that this Index was printed by the renowned Christopher Plantin. Modern scholars have discovered that Plantin himself was involved in surreptitious printing of heretical and scientific texts.
The Index was updated and re-issued periodically, and authors were added or removed as opinion changed. Galileo Galilei’s heliocentric, for example, was condemned as heretical and banned shortly after its publication in 1632; by 1758, however, works dealing with heliocentrism were removed from the Index. Pope Paul VI abolished the Index in 1966.
Book banning was certainly not limited to the Index, and it has been practiced in the United States for hundreds of years. In 1650, only twelve years after the first printing in North America, Puritans in Boston held the continent’s first book burning. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, United States Customs and the U.S. Post Office regularly confiscated shipments of books under the auspices of anti-obscenity legislation, including James Joyce’s Ulysses, Voltaire’s Candide, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
In schools and public libraries, attempts to ban books continue. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been banned periodically in American schools since its publication, as have childhood favorites such as James and the Giant Peach and A Wrinkle in Time. This summer, a high school in Republic, Missouri, drew national attention for banning Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. For more information about current attempts to ban books, see Mapping Censorship from the Banned Books Week website.
Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. New York : Cambridge University Press, 1980, c1979.
Heresy and Error: The Ecclesiastical Censorship of Books, 1400-1800. Digital exhibit, Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University, 2010.
Hans J. Hillerbrand, “On Book Burnings and Book Burners: Reflections on the Power (and Powerlessness) of Ideas.” J Am Acad Relig (September 2006) 74 (3): 593-614. doi: 10.1093/jaarel/lfj117
Joan Stack, ed., The Art of the Book: Manuscripts and Early Printing, 1000-1650. Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri, Board of Curators, c2003.
We get this question a lot – and we posed it as a multiple-choice trivia question this week on our Facebook page. Now it’s time to reveal the answer. Which is the oldest item in Special Collections?
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).
This tablet is one of eight held in the Special Collections department. Although the other seven tablets have been translated, this one has never been deciphered. If you read any of the ancient Near Eastern dialects, we’d love to hear from you!
For more information about the cuneiform tablets in Special Collections, see the online exhibit Cuneiform Tablets: Records of Ancient Mesopotamia see the list on our website [digital exhibit retired; link updated 11/10/2014].
This was a tough question, because all of the items were the oldest in one way or another. More information below.
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.
In most of the Western world, the codex replaced the scroll gradually, from around 300 to 500 A.D. However, among Jewish communities, the scroll retained its place as the primary form for storing and transmitting information. Jewish congregations still use temple scrolls produced to strict specifications in their rituals of worship.
Although it’s old, this parchment scroll is far from ancient. It dates from the 1600s, contains the Book of Ruth, and was probably not produced for temple reading. It fits conveniently into the hand, the perfect size for personal study.
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.
The binding of this manuscript was done later than the text, but it is also interesting because it’s a good example of a fifteenth-century German binding in blind-tooled pigskin. The back board still shows discoloration from the former site of a metal clasp.
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.
Papyrus is a plant that grows along the marshy banks of the Nile River, and the ancient Egyptians used it to make a paper-like substance for writing. Papyrus became one of Egypt’s main exports and was used throughout the ancient world, in Greece, modern-day Turkey, and the Middle East.
This semester, get acquainted with Special Collections and Rare Books by playing Tuesday Trivia! Each week, we’ll post a question on our Facebook page. Be the first to leave a comment on Facebook with the correct answer, and we’ll send you a Special Collections bookmark. At the end of each month, the person with the most correct answers will win a “grand prize” – including packs of Special Collections notecards, publications, and more.
We’ve designed these questions to challenge you, but a hint: most of the answers can be found on the Special Collections website, in the MERLIN library catalog, or in the UM Digital Library.
Stay tuned for the first Tuesday Trivia question!
Fall is in the air, and students are everywhere! As we welcome members of this record-breaking freshman class, it may be interesting to see how their predecessors dealt with the first weeks of classes at MU twenty-five, fifty, and even 100 years ago.
The Savitar yearbook published a fictitious freshman's diary in 1911, which describes in humorous and exaggerated terms the experiences of a bumbling new student from rural Hemlock, Missouri. He describes his first sight of the Quad, and the now-defunct tradition of freshman beanies:
The schoolhouses are all set around just like the town square at Hemlock except that there are six pillars covered with vines in the middle. As soon as I came up on the walk on the square, some fellows grabbed me and made me shine shoes. There are big signs pasted all over telling the freshmen to buy caps. They tell me that I'll have to wear a red one but I won't do it because my hair is red. [see source online]
The university bulletin for 1911 records a total enrollment of 2,956 students in the Columbia campus. One hundred years later, enrollment at MU is more than ten times that number.
The current student newspaper, the Maneater, was in publication by 1955. In the first week of classes in 1961, it reported that the new Arts and Science Building was nearing completion and would be in use later that semester. The new building would feature a language laboratory, increased classroom space, a public address and intercom system, and a special classroom equipped with closed-circuit television. And – perhaps most importantly – air conditioning.
The Arts and Science Building was home to the departments of English, History, German and Russian, and Romance Languages when it opened in 1961. Classrooms and office space for these departments had previously been in Jesse Hall.
During the first week of classes in 1986, the Maneater documented registration delays. Long lines of students snaked through the stairwells and corridors of Brady Commons, and the newspaper commented:
Director of Admissions Gary L. Smith said when the first online computers were used for registering students in April of 1985, approximately 40 to 50 students could be registered in five minutes. But things were going a lot slower this week at Brady.
Student registrations were taxing the processing power of MU's relatively new computer network, causing the slowdown. Over the past 25 years, various computerized registration systems have made waiting in line at Brady Commons obsolete – and Brady itself has become part of the new Student Center.
Records of of past student life, including documents, publications, photos, and memorabilia, are at the University Archives. Special Collections also holds the student publications mentioned above, and over 100 years of the Savitar (1891-2000) are available in the University of Missouri Digital Library.
Don’t forget! Special Collections is offering information sessions for instructors and new faculty in Ellis Library in the coming week. Topics will include:
Preview the workshop and register online, or contact Kelli Hansen to schedule a session for specific departments, groups, or courses.
The Bastille: “a place even the innocent must be afraid of.”[1] Parisians whispered of the prison’s rat-infested dungeons, torture machines, bread-and-water rations, and secret murder-rooms from which no prisoner ever emerged.
The Bastille embodied the French monarchy’s despotic rule, and as such, it was the first institutional casualty of the French Revolution. On today’s date in 1789, a mob of insurgents stormed the Bastille, liberated the few prisoners that remained, and massacred the guards, prison directors, and other staff.
Although the Bastille could only hold around 50 prisoners, the rumors and mystery that surrounded it caused the prison to loom large in French culture. Rebellious subjects, religious dissenters, journalists, common criminals and those who simply incurred the king’s displeasure were all confined there. No one really knew what happened in the Bastille; prisoners were forced to take an oath of secrecy, promising never to divulge anything they saw or heard while inside the walls.
In 1715, Constantin de Renneville, a spy who was imprisoned in the Bastille for eleven years, was the first to break the oath. Writing from the safety of England, Renneville published a dramaticized chronicle of his sufferings entitled L'inquisition Françoise, ou, l'histoire de la Bastille.
Following Renneville’s example, former Bastille inmates published tell-all pamphlets at sporadic intervals throughout the eighteenth century. These tales fueled the fear and speculation surrounding the prison. Were the pamphlets simply the sensationalized stories of a few unfortunates? Or did they tell of typical experiences at the Bastille? No one knew.
In 1774, a different type of pamphlet was published: Remarques historiques et anecdotes sur le château de la Bastille. The anonymous author described the Bastille in “seemingly objective terms, systematically and with exact figures (including a ground plan), and presenting individual cases only in an appendix.”[2]
Like earlier anti-Bastille pamphlets, Remarques historiques was soon translated, becoming Historical Remarks on the Castle of the Bastille in English. For the first time, Europe saw, in relatively matter-of-fact terms, the treatment to which state prisoners were subject.
All the towers are closed below by strong double doors, with large bolts let into enormous locks. The dungeons under the towers are filled with a mud which exhales the most offensive scent. They are the resort of toads, newts, rats, and spiders. In a corner of each is a camp bed, formed of iron bars, soldered into the wall, with some planks laid upon them. In these are put prisoners whom they wish to intimidate, and a little straw is given them for their bed. Two doors, each seven inches thick, one over the other, close these dark de
ns: each has two great bolts, and as many locks. … There are five ranks of chambers. The most dreadful next to the dungeons, are those in which are iron cages or dungeons. Of these there are three. These cages are formed of beams lined with strong iron plates. They are six feet by eight.[3]
Torture chambers and murder rooms fail to appear in this description of the prison, and the author notes that “It sometimes happens that prisoners die in the Bastille by secret means; but the instances are rare.”[4] Historical Remarks also includes precise descriptions of the prisoners’ furnishings, provisions, health care, and communication with the outside world.
Remarques historiques was quickly banned in France, but not before it had an effect. The precise details in the pamphlet injected a dose of reason into sensationalist anti-Bastille journalism and galvanized the underground press into a more radical and intense criticism of the government.
In the rest of Europe, the pamphlet gained acceptance as a true and accurate depiction of the Bastille. English editions of the pamphlet came out in 1780 and 1784, and a new translation was issued after the storming of the Bastille in 1789. The English criminologist and reformer John Howard endorsed it as “the best account of this celebrated structure ever published” and included content from the pamphlet in his survey of European penitentiaries.[5]
The revolutionaries that conquered the Bastille in 1789 paraded through the streets of Paris with keys, weapons, and the heads of prison guards and officials on pikes. Demolition of the hated structure began that very night, and within six months, the prison had disappeared. Today, only the foundations remain.
Historical Remarks on the Castle of the Bastille. London: Printed for T. Cadell and N. Conant.
1780 Edition | 1784 Edition | 1789 Edition
Hans-Jürgen Lüsenbrink and Rolf Reichardt. The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom. (Durham, NC, 1997). DC167.5 .L8713 1997
Christopher Prendergast. The Fourteenth of July. (London, 2008). DC167 .P74 2008
[1] Extract from a letter, 15 July 1789, quoted in Lüsenbrink and Reichardt, The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom (Durham, NC, 1997), 13.
[2] Lüsenbrink and Reichardt, 18.
[3] Historical Remarks (1780), 5-6.
[4] Historical Remarks (1789), 55.
[5] Historical Remarks (1789), title page.
Did you know today is International Geek Pride Day? Here in Special Collections, we’re celebrating with a selection from the Comic Art Collection. This collection contains over 3,500 catalogued comic book titles and hundreds of pieces of original art from cartoonists like Mort Walker, Frank Stack, and John Tinney McCutcheon, ranging in date from the 1850s to the present.
The Comic Art Collection unites fun and fandom with serious scholarship. It has been used by faculty and students for everything from freshman composition assignments to studies of the history of popular culture. In 2008, scholars, comic enthusiasts, artists, and students of all interests demonstrated the collection's broad appeal by convening at Ellis Library to celebrate 75 years of the comic strip Alley Oop. Special Collections holds the papers of the comic strip's creator, V.T. Hamlin.
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The Comic Art Collection is open to the public in the Special Collections Reading Room. All patrons – geeks and non-geeks alike – are welcome to make use of these materials.
The Special Collections and Rare Book department recently acquired four incunables,[1] and we’ll be featuring them individually on the blog. This post highlights Sermones de adventu by Roberto Caracciolo (Venice, 1474), a book interesting for what it can tell us about religion and technology.
The author of this book, Fra Roberto Caracciolo de Lecce, was one of the most successful preachers of the fifteenth century, hailed as a “second St. Paul” for his oratorical talents.
As a preacher, Caracciolo’s crowd-pleasing specialties were melodrama and spectacle; he even boasted that he could reduce any audience to tears. His career started early. By 1450, when he was only in his mid-twenties, he was well-known enough to be chosen by Pope Nicholas V to deliver the official canonization eulogies for Bernardino of Siena. Later in his career, when asked to preach a crusade sermon against the Ottoman Turks, he did so in full knight’s armor, complete with a sword. It’s no wonder that large, enthusiastic crowds flocked to hear him wherever he went.
Eager to capitalize on the popularity of Caracciolo and his colleagues, printers issued vo
lumes of their sermons in Latin and vernacular Italian. Caracciolo alone had at least eight different editions of his sermons printed throughout Italy from the 1470s until his death in 1495. By the time the sixteenth century drew to a close, over one hundred editions of his works had been printed throughout Europe.
This volume contains Caracciolo’s sermons on Advent, St. Joseph, the Beatitudes, divine charity, and the immortal soul, as well as a sermon by the canon lawyer Dominicus Bollanus on the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary. It preserves the words Caracciolo’s audiences heard and read so that we can access them today. Thanks to this copy’s scattered marginal notes in sixteenth-century handwriting, we can even know how they responded.
As Caracciolo’s career as a preacher reached its height, Italy stood on the brink of a technological revolution. Gutenberg had developed movable type in Mainz around 1455, but it took about a decade for the technology to reach Italy. Venice had to wait even longer – until 1469. That’s the year that Johannes of Speyer emigrated from Mainz, got a five-year monopoly from the Doge, and set up shop as the city’s first printer.
Unfortunately for the Speyers, Johannes died around eighteen months later, invalidating the monopoly. His brother Vindelinus attempted to carry on the business, but Johannes’ death touched off an equivalent of the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. Within three years, there were at least a dozen printing shops in Venice, all producing the same Greek and Roman texts – over 80 different editions of them by the end of 1472. By 1473, the book market was so glutted with classics that the bottom dropped out.
This was merely the first in a series of market collapses, but most of Venice’s new high-tech start-ups went out of business as a result. The Speyer press survived – barely. Vindelinus sold a large stake in the company to two new investors: Johannes de Colonia (also called Johannes of Köln or Cologne), and Johannes Ma
nthen de Gerresheim. Colonia and Manthen became the senior partners in the business; Vindelinus’ name disappeared from the company until 1476.
Colonia and Manthen were prolific printers, producing 86 editions from 1474 to 1480. They gave up on the Greek and Roman classics after 1475 and shifted their focus to the more profitable market in law, theology, and philosophy. This book is an example of the output from their reinvented company, produced during their first year of business.
Although the Speyer brothers are sometimes credited as the originators of Roman type, this book was printed using their space-saving but 
elegant Gothic. Like many other early printed books, the printers left space for initials and ornament to be added by hand. In this copy, several of the initial Ns are written backwards, for what reason we do not know.
There’s much more this book could tell us; a book is never just a book when it’s in Special Collections. As its own history shows, this particular book has been an active participant in a tradition of study that has continued for hundreds of years.
The following resources are available at MU Libraries.
Aguzzi-Barbagli, Danilo. “Roberto Caracciolo of Lecce,c. 1425-6 May 1495.” In Contemporaries of Erasmus: a biographical register of the Renaissance and Reformation. Ed. Peter G. Bietenholz, Thomas B. Deutscher, associate editor. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, c1985.
Gerulaitis, Leonardas Vytautas. Printing and Publishing in Fifteenth-Century Venice. Chicago: American Library Association, 1976.
Telle, Emile V. “En marge de l’éloquence sacreé aux XVe-XVIe siècles: Erasme et Fra Roberto Caracciolo.” Bibliothèque d’humanisme et Renaissance. Travaux et Documents 43 (1981): 449-470.
[1] The word incunabulum (plural incunabula, or incunable(s), if you prefer English) means in the cradle in Latin. It is generally applied to printed books produced prior to 1501, in the earliest years of printing.
Controlling Heredity: The American Eugenics Crusade, 1870-1940 has recently been mounted as a permanent exhibit on the website of the Special Collections and Rare Books department. This virtual exhibit explores the intersections between ethics and the pseudo-science of eugenics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was originally mounted as part of Ethics and the Brain, the seventh annual symposium sponsored by the Life Sciences and Society Program at the University of Missouri in March 2011.