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The Wayfarer’s Prayer in manuscript: Karp BVIII.7
The Abraham J. and Deborah Karp Collection of Judaica at the Penn Libraries is in part a collection of manuscripts and pamphlets collected by the late Rabbi Dr. Abraham Jacob Karp (1921-2003). Upon cataloging multiple items of manuscript ephemera from the collection, one item caught my eye – something very uncommon. What I mean by […]
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Lions on the Clock II: Six Owners, Five Marks of Provenance, One Book (and Two Lawsuits)
Lions are primarily pursuit predators, although “ambush behaviour has been observed … mainly during daylight when stalking prey is more difficult” (“Predatory Behaviour”). I presume this accounts for the way three more books from the press of sixteenth-century Swiss printer Nikolas Brylinger—he of the clock-watching lions—leapt out at me from the Kislak Center’s holdings after […]
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Outstanding rabbinical provenance in the Kaplan Centre Collection, part 1: Ḳorban reshit (Frankfurt an der Oder, 1777)
This volume was formerly in the rare book collection of the Isaac and Jessie Kaplan Centre for Judaic Studies at the University of Cape Town and donated to the Penn Libraries in 2019. There was a major figure in the world of rabbinic leaders of the Ashkenazic Jews – R. Aryeh-Leib Günzburg of Metz. He lived […]
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A Native American Provenance Enigma
A Philadelphia-area collector recently contacted curators in the Kislak Center about acquiring an unusual work in his collection, namely a copy of 1842 edition of the Book of Common Prayer in Mohawk and English, including, according to the Preface, “the Collects and some of the offices of the Church which were never before printed in […]
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Two Unrecorded Woodcuts from Urs Graf’s “F.M.S.” Cycle
In the spring of 2019 the Penn Libraries acquired for the Henry Charles Lea Library a German Hortulus animae or Seelengärtlein (BX2085 .S44 1515), a type of lay prayer book that enjoyed a brief burst of popularity in western Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century.1 The first known Hortulus animae—Latin for “little garden […]
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Scent of the Orange
We usually only see the labels for fragrances once they have been attached to the bottles, which makes this recent acquisition so wonderful. It is an engraved sheet with two apothecary labels for eau de cologne, one for a larger bottle, the other for a smaller bottle. They were printed from a single plate and […]
Unique at Penn 