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

Miller, Glimpses into the Past

Getting to work in Saint Mary’s Rare Book Room this past semester has been an exciting and fascinating experience. Before this semester, I had never known Saint Mary’s had a rare book room, but it has been so exciting to get to work with the collection. Being an English literature major and lover of classic literature, including Dante’s Divine Comedy, it was so special to get to browse the shelves of 100+ year old publications. This experience has helped me think about books in a very new light. Whether looking at a medieval manuscript, a cuneiform tablet, a collection of old maps, or one of the numerous copies of Dante, each book has an intriguing history far beyond the contents of the pages. Working with my selected items was probably the most time I have spent with a book and not focusing on the published words. Marginalia reveals a former owner invested in the text on the page, their thoughts and feelings about the contents. Layout, design, illustrations, and the like hint at a book’s purpose and intended audience. Unsteady scribbles on a page tell the story of a child who got hold of their parent’s book on leading a good Christian life. These humanizing details were surprising and most interesting, offering a glimpse into the past lives of the rare books.

I specifically worked with three books: Poor Cock Robin, a children’s book published in 1869, Mother Play and Nursery Songs, Freidrich Froebel’s collection of nursery rhymes and children’s games, published in 1896, and Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, Vivant Denon’s 1803 record of his travels in Egypt with the French army. Poor Cock Robin caught my eye because the subject, Cock Robin’s murder and funeral, seems incredibly dark for a children’s book. I thought it would be interesting to highlight just how different children’s culture is now from how it was in the 19th century when the modern world first started to develop. As for Mother Play and Nursery Songs, the overwhelming surplus of marginalia interested me. A former reader had filled the pages with commentary, particularly of the lessons they could find woven into the songs. I looked particularly at the entry for “Pat-a-Cake” because the title is familiar to modern audiences, but the book’s entry includes a different version of the nursery rhyme, but the song would be a more familiar basis on which I could present some of the marginal commentary. Finally, I chose to explore Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt because I have always had a special interest in Egyptology. I had explored the maps of the book, which was published in two volumes, for an earlier project this semester, the StoryMap linked on the page for the book. While working on that earlier project, I had to find the locations of different images, but I quickly discovered the maps in the books contained archaic place names. I ultimately chose these three books to examine because they are all pieces of history which fascinate me. The two children’s books hail from the same time period as many of my favorite classic novels, so I was interested to learn more about 19th century western culture in a new way. As for the book on Egypt, while I am not majoring in history, anthropology, or archaeology, Egyptology and the history of the field have fascinated me for years.

I hope viewers of my work on this project might at least understand, at most begin to share my interest in these pieces and the rest of the Rare Book Room. As an education major, I have a passion for sharing knowledge and hope I might be able to spark a similar excitement for my interests in others. Furthermore, I believe cultural history is useful to explore and understand, as our lives stand on the foundation laid by the past. Looking at the past can help us understand why things are the way they are, how things have changed, how things have stayed the same. Such comparisons can help us begin to ask if we are moving in a desirable or undesirable direction as a society. What better way to begin examining the past than through actual pieces of the past, such as these rare and wonderful books.

Marykate Miller
Majors: English Literature, Secondary Education
Class of 2027

 

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