#booktraces

Not a Fan

Such a distinguished volume. Yet someone wasn’t impressed with Rev. Kunad’s work!

This book actually circulated in our library until the mid-twentieth century, so it’s not at all clear when all the marks were made. The script looks older, but it’s also possible more than one person contributed to the modifications of this portrait.

“Beauty seen is never lost, God’s colors all are fast” -John Greanleaf Whittier

"Defeat on every side— But Oh, Not here the end is: think it not!"

Back to school! A bevy of somewhat garbled quotations (perhaps hastily written down during lecture) added by Louise Patricia O’Malley of Simmons College in this copy of A History of Education (1900). 

“Wherever a man’s place is there he ought to remain at the hour of danger with no thought of death.” -Socrates “Nothing is ever worth learning that you can get through with[out?] Education is a life job.” -Dr. Moore. “Education is not a process of putting things into the soul. It is a process of showing how to use the power of the soul but” -Dr. Moore

As specialists in medieval and early-modern eras know well, books reflect the multiple hands of their makers and users: the contingencies and processes, the tactical moves, the errors and accidents, the exfoliation of possibilities—the texture of the communicative circuit. They are temporally layered objects, variable from other copies at the point of production in myriad ways, and accruing meaningful evidence of use chronically throughout their individual existences in the world (they are sort of like people, in those ways).

Spotlight: Fourth Folio Inscription

We thought this might be of interest to @booktraces, as well as to some of you. We hold two Shakespeare Folios: the second, published in 1632, and the fourth, published in 1685. Our Fourth Folio was apparently owned by a woman, who inscribed instructions for the volume’s disposition on the page before the first play.

The late Dr. Virginia Haas, who was one of the principle researchers for the MLA’s New Variorum Shakespeare Project when it was centered here at the UWM Libraries, describes the passage:

“Just because two books have the same OCLC record does not mean they have the same value.”

Cutout of a lady (or a clerical gentleman?) found in a French dictionary.