Tag: Rare Books
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Take Note(s): A New Indulgence
A former owner of the Edgar Fahs Smith Memorial Collection‘s copiously annotated copy of the medico-pharmacological magnum opus Polyanthea Medicinal (1716) by Portuguese physician João Curvo Semmedo (1635-1719) left this note containing what appears to be a recipe of his or her own on a small sheet of paper. Of equal interest is the printed…
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“A Book Is Best! Absolutely!”
Presented without comment, jacket copy from the first American edition of Australian writer Charlotte Jay‘s thriller The Voice of the Crab (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), held in the Caroline F. Schimmel Fiction Collection of Women in the American Wilderness at Penn’s Kislak Center (Schimmel Fiction 6057): A Book Is Best!Absolutely! It really is.…
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Postcard from Ramonaland
I recently cataloged an early twentieth-century postcard in the Caroline F. Schimmel Fiction Collection of Women in the American Wilderness of potential interest to both deltiologists and aficionados of the mythology of Southern California. The image on the card is a square sepia photograph of a Native American woman seated with her hands in her…
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Unexpected Music: Binding Waste of Folio GrC Ar466 Ef54 1537
The use of manuscript waste in bindings has been a delight to me ever since I first encountered it. As a print cataloger, my professional commerce with manuscripts is largely limited to these fragments, but fortunately the Kislak Center’s Incunable Collection and Culture Class Collection have put more than a few instances of such waste…
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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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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…
Unique at Penn 