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Our Rare Books, Our SMC: An Exhibit of Items Held at Saint Mary's College

The Birds of North America

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The Rare Book Room
The Rare Book Room at Saint Mary's College houses a robust collection of more than 4200 items that includes three medieval codices, ten manuscript fragments, thirty-nine pre-1600 documents, eleven incunabula, numerous art house publications, and first editions. With the exception of one purchase in the first half of the twentieth century, this collection was acquired through decades of alumnae and benefactor gifts and donations from Sisters of the Holy Cross and Saint Mary's College faculty and staff. It thus provides serves as a witness to the interests of the Saint Mary's College community and those who have been affiliated with it over the past one hundred and fifty years.

Not all items housed in the Rare Book Room are discoverable in the online catalogue. Nearly 400 items await cataloguing and/or incorporation into standard finding aids, most notably due to recent gifts. As a result, every visit to the Rare Book Room bears with it the potential for discovery, since each item bears its own unique histories of authorship, printing, and ownership. During the spring of 2024, a group of fourteen students explored the stacks and emerged with items that evince Saint Mary's College's deep history of intellectual inquiry and devotion to the pursuit of educational excellence and truth -- and that they perceived as speaking to modern audiences regarding issues (be they pedagogical, ecological, geographic, or linguistic) that continue to resonate in our present moment.

The past can feel so distant from us, and so removed from our daily concerns. In our work in the Rare Book Room in the spring of 2024, however, we were struck by how the books we encountered, these time-traveling objects from distant temporal and geographical locations, demonstrate how humanity and human conceptions of the world have remained unexpectedly constant. It’s oddly comforting to know that the past has dealt with many similar problems as today, even as they’ve approached these topics from their own social, geographical, and historical contexts.

Books can be physically seen and touched, allowing you to participate in the pastness those objects represent. You can come to understand the story of the book and how it has moved through time to, fortuitously, reach our Rare Book Room. In our explorations, students were particularly struck by how, since they weren't "required" to read all the books we explored, they suddenly became more interested in reading them, since working with these rare items transformed into an act of self-initiated discovery.

Before this semester, many students had primarily learned about the past through textbooks. Working with archival material, however, can provide an unfiltered view of the past, as rare books are historical objects in their own rights, offering both textual evidence of past cultural, political, and social concerns and material evidence of book production techniques and practices. While it can be hard to understand the relevancy of history from textbooks, students commented, seeing these books allows you to participate in the past and see the connections between ourselves and prior generations in a direct, tangible way.
Vega. The Natural World and Our Place within it.

I have greatly enjoyed my time working with the Saint Mary’s Rare book room. I learned alot about data digitization, and the history of printed books as well as manuscripts. At first , the idea of picking 10 items from the rare book room and researching them seemed a bit daunting or overwhelming. I think this was due to the sheer amount of different rare-books that we have in the SMC Rare-book room. There were so many different genres and types of books with varying ages, I didn’t know where to start. After deciding on the different areas that I wanted to focus on in the rarebook room, finding and narrowing down the 10 objects became easier. I decided that I wanted to look more at the rare books that focused on nature and animals. My 10 rare books ended up being narrowed down to the two books De Agricultura Vulgare and The Birds of North America.
Learning about these two books was really interesting, I discovered that De Agricultura Vulgare was published in the 1500’s and was the oldest book from the books researched. De Agricultura Vulgare had amazing woodcuts and lots of interesting images that I noticed connected to a lot of modern day agriculture and or farming. There were images of people feeding chickens, fishing, and bees flying around in a village square of sorts. To this day bees and chickens are a major part of agriculture. It was really interesting to see the past and the present connect in a manner that makes them seem not so far apart from eachother. In other words De Agricultura Vulgare impacted me by making me realize that in the present we still use alot of the same methods from the past.
We learn so much from the past. Alot of what we learned from the past is contained in these rarebooks that are at risk of being lost due to their rarity and fragile physical attributes. In The Birds of North America I learned about the passenger pigeon. What I learned about the passenger pigeon really impacted me because I had never heard of the species prior to my research involving the rare book room. Passenger pigeons used to swarm the skies in millions and now there is not a single passenger pigeon alive on this planet. I was surprised and in shock that a once numerous species dwindled to none in a short span of around 44 years. In a way I was saddened that another species of animal in general had gone extinct. As I further continued my research with The Birds of North America I learned that the bald eagle species of beard could have easily met the same fate as the passenger pigeon had acts not been placed in order to protect them. After learning more about the bald eagle and how its species dwindled to around 490 birds in the 1960’s, I was disappointed to see some of the same factors that lead to the decline in passenger pigeons, also be contributing to the decline of bald eagles. This impacted me while researching and digitizing the data for this book, because to me, it’s crazy to think that maybe 40-30 years from now some of the birds we see outside could just be illustrations in a book sitting in a rarebook room. I realised how fragile nature is, and how uncareful man has been in general throughout history.
I really enjoyed getting to go through all the books in the rare book room and see the various types of prints. Some of the coolest books where printed in an entirely different language so I didn’t fully understand what the author would have been trying to convey, but I feel I was still able to learn and appreciate the art form that was printing these books during early years. I feel like there is so much value in being able to actually sit down and flip through these rare books because it is essentially like holding a piece of history in your hands. Being able to look at or read what other people during the time period of the book thought was important enough to be printed and shared was fascinating. Each book that we looked at and added to our website was like another artifact we were adding to a museum of sorts that other people would be able to enjoy. There where some learning difficulties when it came to the use of scalar, but after some practice it became easier. Arranging and organizing all of the rarebooks into our own curation of artifacts was really memorable. We got to pick what we though was important and relevant, and had the chance to share that and why we thought it was important.
Overall this project had really left its mark on the way I view printed books, and books in general. There is so much that goes into the printing of a book, and so much to be learned about digitizing books to ensure that the contents of their pages may be less likely to be lost. I say more to be learned because technology is evolving at a fast pace every day, and so there are bound to be some improvements and or adjustments to the digitizing process. I hope that viewers will be able to take away the importance of physical printed books, and the importance of what old books can teach us. There is so much knowledge in the pages of the books in the SMC rare book room, that are yet to have been translated, digitized, or read through. All of that knowledge is just sitting on a shelf, and I hope the viewer would gain interest in learning about the past history of books so that more of these pieces of history can be added to websites similar to the one we made in this class. In addition to viewers feeling a call to learning about printed books and digitization, I also hope that the viewers are able to take away just how many different voices and passions are observable through the books chosen in our collection of rare books on the website as well as through our informational texts we wrote to explain the contents of our rarebooks. If the viewer is able to recognize how we were able find our current passions present in the pages of old rare books, maybe they’ll want to give it a try too.
Amaya Vega-Fernandez
Fine Arts Major with a concentration in Design
Class of 2027
Connecting the Past and Present The past can feel so distant from us, and so removed from our daily concerns. In our work in the Rare Book Room in the spring of 2024, however, we were struck by how the books we encountered, these time-traveling objects from distant temporal and geographical locations, demonstrate how humanity and human conceptions of the world have remained unexpectedly constant. It’s oddly comforting to know that the past has dealt with many similar problems as today, even as they’ve approached these topics from their own social, geographical, and historical contexts.

Books can be physically seen and touched, allowing you to participate in the pastness those objects represent. You can come to understand the story of the book and how it has moved through time to, fortuitously, reach our Rare Book Room. In our explorations, students were particularly struck by how, since they weren't "required" to read all the books we explored, they suddenly became more interested in reading them, since working with these rare items transformed into an act of self-initiated discovery.

Before this semester, many students had primarily learned about the past through textbooks. Working with archival material, however, can provide an unfiltered view of the past, as rare books are historical objects in their own rights, offering both textual evidence of past cultural, political, and social concerns and material evidence of book production techniques and practices. While it can be hard to understand the relevancy of history from textbooks, students commented, seeing these books allows you to participate in the past and see the connections between ourselves and prior generations in a direct, tangible way.