Rare Material in MU Libraries Special Collections (Collection)
Pages
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Pages from the past (Collection)
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Jump to Collection | History of the Pages | Portfolio Set I | Digitized Collection | Tips | Additional Resources History of the Pages from the Past Collection This collection, entitled Pages from the Past: Original Leaves from Rare Books and Manuscripts, is an excellent example of history through leaf books. The leaf book was initially used as a way of collecting and combining relics. Creating a leaf book involves removing leaves from an array of damaged or incomplete books and creating a new and often rare book by combining the pages. This practice dates all the way back to the Middle Ages, and was especially popular among religious texts. This is result of religious texts being one of the main things printed in this time period, which can be seen in the collection below, as it features numerous bible and daily devotional pages. Special Collections and Rare Books received this portfolio set from Alfred Stites, who was a diversely successful business man. He purchased the company G.M.L Brown Foliophiles, Inc. in 1963, and later changed the name to Foliophiles, Inc. When he purchased the company, he had a 10,000 leaf collection, and in just 6 years he doubled the amount and included approximately 400 rare books and manuscripts. Stites then created Portfolio Sets, and sold them to many major universities and collections around the country. Portfolio Set I: History of the Written Word Ellis Library's Special Collections has Portfolio Set I: History of the Written Word, which is just one of several editions of this portfolio. These combined pages had the original purpose of being used as a didactic tool that showed the progress of book printing over the centuries, and because of this, several institutions have included Pages from the Past in their catalogs. The portfolio set in Ellis Library's Special Collections and Rare Books houses original leaves from books, manuscripts and artifacts aged as early as 1000 B.C. all the way to the 19th century. The collection includes a varied range of countries and languages, including Egyptian hieroglyphics and Dutch calligraphy. Each leaf includes a label giving researchers the basic information about the leaf, which allowed the Digital Library to organize them into online categories for easy use.
Digitized Collection As of right now, after having digitized approximately sixty percent of the portfolio, dates range from 1500 B.C. to 1873, and feature 13 different countries of publication and 13 different languages. When organizing the digitized leaves, we used the information given to us on the label. These usually provided date, location, author, publisher and any interesting facts. When doing more in-depth research, which has been done on a few selected leaves, we used many resources such as OCLC WorldCat and the Internet Archives to find complete versions of the books. These resources allowed us to find and match bibliographic records to further our knowledge about the pages in our portfolio. Tips for Using the Collection
Below you will see the collection split into country of origin, date published, and language. The collection has also been mapped, showing the spread of the pages across the world. More details regarding the map and how to use it can be found in that collection. In addition to these collections, local genres have been added to narrow the collections further, identifying Religious, Illustrated, and Handwritten manuscripts. By using this collection, we are able to see trends in publishing around certain time periods, which varies greatly with location, and see how things have advanced into the printing we know today.
Additional Resources
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Paisa Akhbar (Collection)
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The Paisa Akhbar (Penny Paper) was a popular Urdu newspaper published in Lahore, British India. Lahore is now located in Pakistan. The paper was established in 1887 by Maulana Muhammad Hussain Azad and Nisar Ali Shohrat. These dailies published news stories and editorials aimed at a general readership and supported nationalistic causes.
This collection includes dailies from 1891, 1892, 1894, and 1898 bound into four incomplete volumes. The print volumes are available in MU Libraries Special Collections.
The tight binding of these volumes resulted in some unreadable text, page curvature, and crooked pages.
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Private Collection of Antiquarian Books and Manuscripts
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The University Libraries and a private collector are partnering to make an extensive collection of medieval and early modern materials available to scholarship through digitization. These materials do not belong to the Libraries, but the scans are freely available for use in research and teaching. For questions about the collection and image use permissions, please contact SpecialCollections@missouri.edu.
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Registrum huius operis libri cronicarum cu[m] figuris et ymagi[ni]bus ab inicio mu[n]di
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Leaves 12-13 missing.
Illustrated by Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff.
Leaf [1a] (woodcut title): Registrum huius operis Libri cronicarum cũfiguris et ymagibus ab inicio mũdi.
Hain. Repertorium (with Copinger's Supplement) *14508. Brit. Mus. Cat. (XV cent.) II, p. 437 (IC. 7451) Schramm. Bilderschmuck d. Frühdr., v. 17, p.6, 9, and illus. Goff S-307., Digitized by Libraries, University of Missouri, 2022. To avoid damage from the scanner, most pages with double-spread illustrations were not fully captured towards the book's gutter. Due to the thickness of the book, many of the pages' text and illustrations have a slight curve near the book's gutter.
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Russkīĭ v︠i︡estnik : [tables of contents]
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You will find here copies of the tables of contents and related pages from the Russkīĭ v︠i︡estnik volumes held by the Ellis Library at the University of Missouri--Columbia. Most of the pages are annotated to indicate whether the pages were from the front, middle, or back of the volumes. Our MERLIN catalog record contains information on the location of the set: http://merlin.mobius.umsystem.edu/record=b2800018.
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Secret and Lily Hart
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On t.p.: The secret and Lily Hart, two tales by Lord Charles Willsby, Verdopolis, 1833., Manuscript signed at the end : Haworth, 1833, Charlotte Brontë., Presented to the University of Missouri Ellis Library by U.S. Senator W.S. Symington on May 9, 1975, among the papers of his wife, E.W. Symington.
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Specimens of some of the written languages of the world
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This manuscript dating from between 1817 and 1848 contains Robert Gilmor, Jr.'s transcription of the alphabets of various world languages with some accompanying brief descriptions and additional information. Several translated versions of The Lord's Prayer using these various languages are also found throughout the text. Languages he includes are Arabic, Armenian, Bali, Barman, Bengalley, Bulgarian, Chaldean, Chinese, Dalmatian, Egyptian [multiple forms], English [multiple forms], Ethiopic, Etruscan, Flemish, Georgian, German, Gothic, Greek, Hebrew, Huns, Japonese [Japanese], Irish, Italic, Lampoon, Latin, Malabaric, Nagari, Anglo-Norman, Persian [multiple forms], Phenician [Phoenician], Rejang, Roman, Runic, Russian, Samaritan, Saracen, Saxon, Sclavonian, Servian [multiple forms], Siamic [Thai], Syriac, Syro-Gallilean, Tamoulic [Tamil], Tartaric, Teutonic, Thibetan [Tibetan], Tyrian, Turkish, Welsh., Date range of publication derived from watermark on paper (1817) and death date of author (1848), Probably handwritten, includes blank pages between specimen pages., Robert Gilmor, Jr. (1774-1848) of Baltimore, Maryland was a merchant, ship owner, East-Indian importer and collector who collected art, rare books, autographs, coins, antiquities, stamps, minerals and rocks.--Archives Directory for the History of Collecting in America.
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T.M. Rooke’s notes of Edward Burne-Jones’ talk
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Photocopy of a transcript of a notebook in which Thomas Rooke documents conversations with Edward Burne-Jones. The conversations were held from 1895 to 1898. Georgiana Burne-Jones created the transcription in the early 1900s. The photocopy was made for research conducted by Mary Lago for her book, Burne-Jones talking (published 1981). Thomas Rooke (1806-1858) was a studio assistant to Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), an English artist. Georgiana Burne-Jones (1840-1920) was married to Edward Burne-Jones. The notebook and original transcript are presumed lost. The photocopy is part of the Mary Lago Collection at the University of Missouri Libraries.
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Vater unser
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holzschnitte von H. M. Pechstein., "Die auflage beträgt 250 numerierte exemplare... nummer 64."
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Vetusta Monumenta
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Jump to volumes 1-7.
Vetusta Monumenta (Ancient Monuments), the print series published from 1718-1906 by the Society of Antiquaries of London, is now a monument in its own right: it offers the richest record available of transformations in the study of the cultural past over those 200 years. Artists, scholars, and amateur researchers relied on the visual technologies perfected in this series for envisioning the past, and as their focus shifted over time to different kinds of artifacts and new ways of understanding, the beautiful images in Vetusta Monumenta continued to provide a foundation for new visions of antiquity.
In addition to the complete set of scans available here, there is also an ongoing digital edition of Vetusta Monumenta, that aims to make the original images and texts accessible through both interactive digital facsimiles and new scholarly commentary. For the digital edition, see http://vetustamonumenta.org.
The first seventy engravings in the series were bound into a volume by the Society in 1747. The decision to consolidate the prints in this way and recirculate them in the form of a plate book proved to be a crucial step toward their preservation. (Not coincidentally, the antiquaries saw engraving as integral to their mission of preserving the monuments themselves, many of which were already decaying at the time of publication and some of which are now altered or lost.) Most readers of Vetusta Monumenta over the last 100 years have only encountered the work as a set of seven bound volumes in a library. The University of Missouri library, where this digital version was created, is fortunate to be one of eleven libraries in the world to hold a complete set. Although they are rare, these volumes have provided far better access to readers and scholars than the few scattered individual prints that survive in various private and public collections. As an open-access digital edition, the online Vetusta Monumenta expands that access to many more users worldwide.
To a reader of the bound volumes in a modern library, it is not readily apparent that the prints they contain were published one by one over a period of years. Yet the idea of combining them into a book only came up after the series was well established. The digital edition allows the user to approach each individual plate either as a freestanding work, as the original audience did, or as part of a larger whole assembled after the fact. Our international team of expert contributors has provided commentary on the occasion that inspired each print, including the choice of subjects--which ranged from Roman mosaics to ruined castles, from ancient maps to modern portraits to fragments of buildings and manuscripts in just the first three decades of publication--along with zooming and other tools to promote close scrutiny of the individual print. We have also noted changes in method resulting from the gradual drift toward book publication, including verbal explanations of the depicted objects that gradually spilled over from the plates into lengthy letterpress essays printed alongside them. Digital reproduction encourages the close study of each print in its immediate context; the full edition also provides navigation to clarify the connections established--historical, geographic, and aesthetic, among others--when prints were collected into volumes at intervals (1747, 1789, and 1796 for the first three volumes).
The uniform appearance of the bound volumes belies the remarkable diversity of monuments and styles represented by the individual plates. As early as 1784, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries named John Fenn recognized the need for a system of classification to understand what kinds of objects were being chosen for inclusion in Vetusta Monumenta and why. This edition provides a similar kind of thematic overview, but from a twenty-first-century perspective it is also clear that the diversity of subjects reflects change over time in the techniques of visual reproduction and in the organization of knowledge. The Society of Antiquaries itself received a royal charter in 1751 and grew to 800 members by 1820, but even the small group of founders brought a wide variety of skills and interests to the task. If the gifted engraver George Vertue had not joined the society very early in its history, the group could hardly have defined their mission as “collect[ing] and print[ing] . . . all the ancient Monuments that come into their hands.” Several other founders, including John Talman and William Stukeley, were skilled draftsmen who supplied preparatory drawings for several of the early prints. Other members of the society influenced the choice of subjects for Vetusta Monumenta by providing access to objects or drawings from their collections, by using their local influence in regions where antiquities were located, or by using their positions in other institutions that held artifacts or monuments, such as the College of Heralds and the Tower of London.
By the nineteenth century, this network had expanded greatly and an increasing number of professionals contributed to Vetusta Monumenta, making it a superb record not only of antiquities found in Britain but also of methods and techniques for the discovery of the past. Fenn’s classification of the prints in 1784 registers this historical sense of the print series as a record not only of objects but of evolving methods in the discipline. His survey of seven included types of monuments, though slightly haphazard, still provides the most compact introduction to Vetusta Monumenta: I. Antiquities (British, Roman, Saxon, Danish); II. Coins, Medals, and Seals; III. Castles, Palaces, Gates, Crosses; IV. Abbeys, Churches, [and related architectural features]; V. Portraits; VI. Historic Prints and Processions; VII. Plans, Maps, and other Prints.
A digital scholarly edition of Vetusta Monumenta Volume I is available at vetustamonumenta.org
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Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson
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MU: Library's copy bound with decorated endpapers, gilt turn-ins, and gilt edges. Fore-edge painting of a British ship.
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