Incunable Week (cross-post from Pennrare)

Tags

Inc G-644 (3768867), Inc H-135 (3223586), Inc H-151 (3223596), Inc H-439 (3223862)

Editor’s Note: Today’s post by Regan Kladstrup is cross-posted here and at the Penn Rare Books Cataloging blog. Regan and her team do an amazing job with our unique items and I’d encourage everyone to check out their ongoing provenance identification project here.

One week a month is devoted to cataloging incunables, the first books printed after the invention of movable type in the second half of the 15^th century. Incunables are a joy to catalog. There is so much to describe: rubrication and other ornamentation, illustrations, binding, paper size, text measurements, etc. Cataloging an incunable is also a great opportunity to do some serious provenance research.

This month, Incunable Week brought some of the best incunables in Penn’s collection to Liz Broadwell’s desk. The standout was H-151 (we use Goff numbers to identify our incunables), a 1474 edition of Hierocles’s commentary on the Golden Verses attributed to Pythagoras. This is a pretty common incunable—lots of institutions have one.

But nobody has our H-151.

Colophon signed by Johannes Cuno (1463-1513)

Penn’s copy was owned by the humanist scholar Johannes Cuno (1463-1513). In a very pleasing hand, he has supplied several pages of missing text and written marginal notes throughout. Cuno has also signed the colophon and included the price he paid for this book.

But what really makes this copy special is Cuno’s transcription of the original Greek text and Latin translation of the Golden Verses inserted on four leaves at the end. Cuno’s Greek and Latin penmanship is beautiful … at first. By the end, his writing is nearly illegible. Why?

Both Unique and Recent

Tags

DVD 020 227, DVD 020 229

When we think of an item or a book being ‘unique’ we tend to immediately associate this with age – indeed, every item featured so far on this blog has been at least 80 years old. To change pace a bit I wanted to feature something from the last 5 years in today’s post.  The rise of Amazon, ebooks, and other electronic publication venues over the last 20 years have made finding and acquiring new media extremely easy for many of us. This embarrassment of riches conceals the still immense amount of  publication that is not readily available to most in the Penn community or the U.S. broadly. This is especially true of books printed in languages other than English and in countries outside North America and Europe as well as video and audio materials from all over the world. The team of subject specialist librarians here at Penn works hard to make sure we acquire these hard-to-get items.

Screen capture [5:40] from Padharo Mharo Des

You might think that winning an award at a prominent film festival would ensure the availability of the film for interested researchers. However, in the case of Padharo Mharo Des [a road trip through Rajasthan] that won the Best Documentary Film Award at the 2nd Dadasaheb Phalke Film Festival in Delhi this year is ‘unique’ to Penn in that it is not available at any other library in North America. It is not for sale through any usual internet channels and distribution networks. Dr. Pushkar Sohoni, our bibliographer for South Asia, acquired a copy of the film by personal communication with the film-maker, after he realized that her prize-winning films were not represented in our collections or those of other universities. In addition to Padharo Mharo Des, Dr. Sohoni also acquired Silent Ghungroos...a documentary about the traditional Lavani dancers of Maharashtra, also made by Gauri Warudi and also not in any library in North America [1].

Items produced in the past five years, found only at the Penn libraries, are unique for several reasons. Locally produced items for small fields of circulation and consumption are often ephemeral, and can only be collected in the field. Such material, otherwise difficult to acquire through regular channels of vendors and distributors, can sometimes be requisitioned through networks of dealers and vendors with whom personal relationships have been established. Rare, local, ephemeral, unusual and occasionally unique items might be brought back and gifted by faculty and graduate students in areas of their research. But as opposed to such passive collecting, it takes a lot more to pro-actively acquire primary source material unique to the libraries.

Dr. Pushkar Sohoni contributed to this post. For more on his research interests and areas of expertise see here.

————

[1] Silent Ghungroos was similarly acclaimed, winning not only the Best Documentary Film Award in the IDPA-Nautanki.tv Online Film Festival (2007), but was also nominated at the Pulotsav Short Film Festival, Pune (2006), the Golden Gate Film Festival (2007), the Pen Thirai Film Festival, Madurai (2007), and the Capetown Bollywood Film Festival (2007).

A Special List

Tags

LJS 431

Returning from a mid-summer hiatus I thought I would highlight a unique item from our collections which was digitized this July. Over the past several years thanks to funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities the Penn libraries have been hard at work digitizing the majority of their pre-1800 manuscripts and putting them online on a special “Penn in Hand” site. Part of this project involves digitizing all of the manuscripts generously given by Larry Schoenberg and Barbara Brizdle  as part of their landmark gift to Penn libraries.

Many of the Schoenberg manuscripts are ornate and beautifully illustrated – the kinds of manuscripts whose value strikes even the uninitiated viewer. Schoenberg however had an eye for collecting manuscripts which went beyond just the glossy and visually appealing to those which had real intellectual value or which captured the intellectual history of a particular moment in time. In some ways, it is often harder to find quotidian manuscripts produced to serve an immediate purpose and unlikely to survive due to their visual appeal and value. The manuscript fragment featured today is one of these rare glimpses into the everyday past.

Penn LJS 431: Manuscript list of manuscript and printed books, circa 1545

This one manuscript leaf provides a window on several intertwined layers of cultural and intellectual history both in its content and its history as a material object. The two images above show the front and back of the leaf, torn from a larger volume. In fact, if you look closely you can see the page number “136” written in the right hand corner of the front side. At first glance this is clearly a list, complete with bullet points like we might use today. But what kind of list?