RBSC News & Info – Page 36

Recent Acquisition: A curious hieroglyphic Bible

by George Rugg, Curator, Americana

Title page and frontispiece of A curious hieroglyphick Bible (Worcester : Printed at Worcester, Massachusetts, by Isaiah Thomas and sold ... at his bookstore, 1788). — Title page and frontispiece.

A curious hieroglyphick Bible, or, Select passages in the Old and New Testaments, represented with emblematical figures, for the amusement of youth: designed chiefly to familiarize tender age, in a pleasing and diverting manner, with early ideas of the Holy Scriptures: to which are subjoined, a short account of the lives of the Evangelists, and other pieces: illustrated with nearly five hundred cuts. Worcester, Massachusetts: Isaiah Thomas, 1788.

Isaiah Thomas’s hieroglyphic Bible of 1788 is both a landmark piece of American children’s literature and a newly ambitious use of woodcut illustration in an American printed book. The idea of a hieroglyphic Bible, in which select scriptural passages were presented in a combination of words and images, was consistent with Thomas’s interest in works for children that simultaneously instructed and amused. He based his book on an English edition first published in 1783. In his preface—dedicated to the “parents, guardians, and governesses of the [newly constituted] United States of America”—Thomas notes the “considerable expense” involved in commissioning the hundreds of woodcuts that fill the book. Some of these, to the modern eye at least, seem a bit opaque; fortunately, Thomas printed the full text of each passage at the foot of the page. The present copy is a first edition, with all of its pages intact. It was acquired by the Libraries in January 2015.

The nativity story as told by Luke from A curious hieroglyphick Bible (Worcester : Printed at Worcester, Massachusetts, by Isaiah Thomas and sold ... at his bookstore, 1788). — The nativity story as told by Luke.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Recent Acquisition: Malton’s Picturesque and Descriptive View of the City of Dublin (1791)

by Aedín Ní Bhróithe Clements, Irish Studies Librarian.

Over two hundred years before Google Maps photographed the buildings of Dublin, architectural draughtsman James Malton (c.1765-1803) depicted the grand public buildings of Dublin in his book, A Picturesque and Descriptive View of the City of Dublin Described. In a series of the most Interesting Scenes taken in the year 1791.

While the etchings from this book are well-known, both as framed reproductions and from the 1978 Dolmen Press edition, original editions, with their large and detailed prints, are very uncommon.

James Malton accompanied his father, an English architectural draughtsman, to Ireland and was employed for a time by the famous architect James Gandon, who was then working on Dublin’s Custom House. He was dismissed and later worked on a series of drawings of Dublin buildings, first published in six parts between 1792 and 1799 and later, in 1799, published in one volume.

The detail shown above is of the south end of Capel Street, looking across Grattan Bridge (then Essex Bridge) towards Parliament Street and City Hall.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Welcome

I would like to welcome readers to Hesburgh Libraries’ Rare Books and Special Collections Blog. The postings will include highlights from our rich and diverse collections, news about acquisitions, events, and exhibits, our services, and behind-the-scenes looks at the work of our curators and conservators.

Hesburgh Libraries at the University of Notre Dame holds diverse collections of rare and unique materials that range from a Babylonian cylinder from the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II to Jean-Pierre Hébert’s In Visible Cities—a twenty-first century artist book that meshes the poetry of Italo Calvino with data landscapes generated from computer code based on the artist’s interpretation of Calvino’s writings. Our holdings include manuscripts, archives, rare books, periodicals, photographs, artist books, ephemera, and other materials with particular strengths in Roman Catholic Studies, Medieval Studies, Irish literature, Italian literature, Latin American history and culture, 20th-century Russian history and culture, Botany, and American sports. Every year, we welcome undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, other researchers, and the general public to our department to use our collections and attend our exhibitions and programs.

For more information about our department and collections, I invite you to visit our website and subscribe to our RSS feed (http://blogs.nd.edu/rbsc/feed/).

–Natasha Lyandres, Head, Rare Books and Special Collections