Margaret A. Pitts Distinguished Director Bo Adams provided updates on the new acquisitions in and research activities using the Richard C. Kessler Reformation Collection at Pitts Theology Library. Highlights included discussion of the Collection’s copy of the German Nuremberg Chronicle, a hand-colored pre-Luther German translation of the New Testament, and woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer.
okay I never think I have anything important enough to say to be Amplified but we do have people online so we will uh do that um thank you all for being here my name is Bo Adams uh I have the great privilege of serving as director of pits theology Library it’s wonderful to see some old friends here and some new friends um the real star of the evening is later and our presentation later but you guys are the early folks and so I don’t want to miss the opportunity of a captive audience to brag a bit on the Kessler collection uh and the work that my colleagues and I have been doing um over the last uh year or so it’s been a while since we’ve gotten the the gang all together um and if you’re a regular uh attendee you may know that spring is an odd time for the hestler collection Gathering um we tend to gather in the fall uh around Reformation day and we have the awesome opportunity that this year Reformation day will fall on October 31st so we can actually officially celebrate uh Reformation day on that Thursday um am I doing something wrong my colleague Brady um turn me down thank you um speaking of my colleague Brady I want to thank some of my colleagues D Roberts you see in the back taking pictures you met my colleague Liz Miller earlier Brady beard Armen s letky um the whole pit staff that does an amazing job of um all of the work that we’re going to talk about today but also the behind the scenes work that makes um some of our um presentation and public events um work so well um so what today is is I said a bit off cycle for us in terms of presenting the work that the Kesler collection has been doing and there are a couple of reasons for that one is we did not meet last fall uh and there are a couple of reasons for that one is we had this amazing new Morgan collection that I’ll talk about in a second that we celebrated in the fall and the school had to go through this little thing called reaccreditation which uh any of you who have been through that know that is a Year’s worth of work in about a week and that uh the reaccreditation visit fell exactly during Reformation day they clearly were not aware of the lurgical calendar um the good news is I think I can say the school has been re accredited so this is uh it all worked out but the real reason we’re here is we had the amazing opportunity of Professor Andrew pedigree joining us um and this worked out for his schedule and our schedule and so I’m so excited to have him here um we will talk a lot more about him later and hear from him and learn uh quite a bit from him but I do want to let you know that Reformation day in October will be back on and so we will resume regular scheduled programming in October with the Kessler Reformation uh day you may have seen that our table outside we still use the tablecloth of reformation day at Emory I hope that didn’t cause any great um confusion um what I want to do today is um continue a tradition that my former colleague Pat Graham who was here started which was to use an opportunity like this to highlight some of the new acquisitions that we uh have had had the great privilege of working with this past year um on the one hand that is of course to show off some meat stuff but on the other hand it is to give the community some sense of what we’re doing with the great resources that we are privileged to be stewards of we are a library of course and so that means we collect old things um but I think we would fail in our duty if all we did was collect old things um and so I hope what you will see through some of my remarks today is that we are quite committed to doing things with the old things and those are both scholarly Endeavors as well as public engagement um and it is the great privilege of my job that I have colleagues who allow us to do this and so I want to spend some time giving you a little sense of what we’ve been up to and then maybe close with some thoughts pontifications and and really questions for you about what does it mean to do this work in an increasingly digital age I think all of us recognize that the old way of Library may be under pressure or under change um and my colleagues and I are keenly aware of that um and so while we try to honor what we’ve done in the past and continue to build great collections like this try to think about them a little bit differently and what becomes possible um in the new digital age so if everyone’s agreeable with that as a kind of General orientation I’ll talk for a little while hopefully not too long um then we’ll retire to Em’s Canon Chapel where we will hear from Dr pedigree and then we’ll have a a reception following um so let’s just talk about what the Richard C kessle Reformation collection is this was started in 1987 with donations of materials by Richard and Martha Kesler who are Lutheran L people and great friends um of the Lutheran Church and of pits theology library and their donations combined with books already held by pit theology Library formed the early seed um of what we now call the Richard seed Kesler Reformation collection I always like to show this graph because I find it quite remarkable this is just charting the annual Acquisitions um of the collection um since the early 90s you can see the Inception was actually 1987 so you see we started pretty healthy but you can see tremendous steady growth um and that really points to two things one is amazing resources that have been provided by our supporters and donors um and then great stewardship of a collection um my former colleague chenning Jesy my former colleague Pat Graham and all those who have hand have had hands in building the Richard C kessle Reformation collection key to the success I I believe has been Focus right lots of libraries collect lots of things but we with the Kessler collection have defined a fairly tailored collection development policy and really tried to to that um and I’ll talk in a little bit about how that’s sometimes challenging but I think that is reason that you’ve had the success here because you’ve had a donor base and a supporter base that is on board with what we’re trying to do and we’ve tried to um stay true to that now you may remember that we had a fun opportunity a couple years ago to celebrate the 4,000th item in the collection so we started with less than a thousand and we built over to 4,000 and we had a fun fundraising campaign and raised quite a significant amount of money for us to make a real Landmark acquisition for that that 4,000th item doesn’t look that exciting but this is what it was um this is a 1517 publication from vitberg that was in some ways Luther’s very first publication so likely issued in March or April of 1517 preceding the October uh 95 feces it is his um translation and and notes on the seven penitential Psalms um and I always like to point out you know it has the LR spelling of Luther’s name um which was common at the time um and before the L T that we uh know um and as we often do with new acquisitions like this we try to engage scholarly activity to celebrate these Acquisitions um and our good friend uh Timothy wingert who many of you may know was here last fall wrote a wonderful author and article in Lutheran quarterly kind of marking the significance of this acquisition and what it tells us about kind of um early Luther theology if we want to call it that now as I mentioned the Kesler collection has built a really significant Holdings materials that we tend to date between 1501 and 1570 um in roughly defined German speaking territories at the time focused around Luther and the conversations that Luther um started and as I always like to say outside of Germany you may not find a better collection focused on Luther now Dr pedigree May disagree with me and we could have some arguments but the point is we’ve done a really good job now we’re never going to compete with some of the great libraries um across the world and that’s okay because for from from the beginning the Kastle Reformation collection has not just been about building a collection that is it’s not just about having books on the fourth floor above us our goal has been to be the premier Reformation collection because of Engagement with the collection that is to find opportunities for people to learn from these materials and this 4,000th acquisition was for many of us who worked with the collection a real kind of so what moment we’ve done it we collected 4,000 items so what where are we going to move forward with that and I’ve spent the last few weeks kind of thinking about and I encourage you to look at Reformation notes which is our kind of annual description of what’s going on you have a copy with you that we provided this was the original Reformation notes you can see fall uh 1992 and while I would argue that our graphic design has gotten slightly better no offense to Pat and some of the work that was done um here it’s a fun read to see that since the beginning since the early 90s we’ve really been focused on how to get people engaged you can see that the the uh concert there used to be a big a Reformation Day concert going on and so again an attempt to use the collection um to teach people throughout the years we’ve had some of the leading Reformation Scholars here in person some of you may recognize some of emy’s own Timothy alre and John witty um but just a kind of slideshow in my mind of some who’s who Nick Wilding here yet he came back yeah thanks Nick um and so Reformation day has been a great way to bring Scholars and I always choose Scholars hat tip to the two that are here today who are great Scholars of course but can speak to a public AI audience and that’s really important to us and that is to kind of make the connection between why this old stuff in a contemporary context we’ve been very proud of the scholars that we’ve brought in we’ve been very proud I pulled some of these old photos Pat we got some beard bearded Pat photos here I think um but and then there is chanting right there yeah chanting dky right there um to bring people in to really have a kind of Hands-On approach for the collection and some might say that we’re a little Cavalier with our materials and leaving them out with people but we think it’s important that people engage with this materials there’s the Engles some newer uh photographs there um we have a very active K12 program so in many days when you come here in the library it’s a lot louder because there are a lot of kids running around and so my colleagues you can see for example my colleague Brandon Wasson up here has refurbished an old printing press so we get the kids involved in the process of making books again as a way for kids to have a touch point with why do I care about these old pamphlets or things like that the collection has also been engaged in scholarship so we always Herald and um promote scholarship that is coming out of the collection so these are just some examples of recent um articles and Publications that have been based on items from the kler collection so with all of this I just want you to recognize that we are not content with just building collections though we’ve been very successful with that but we always have an eye toward engagement so what I want to do as we do every year is to show you a few of the things that we have added to the collection uh in the last year now continuing to build this collection within what is a fairly narrow collection development policy and a collection that is already 4,000 items gets more and more difficult every year and it’s a great problem to have my colleague Armen and I spent a lot of time leaving through auction cataloges and book sers offerings often to be disappointed with that exciting thing we were ready to buy that we already have that probably particular Edition uh of the work so again a a very wonderful problem uh to encounter and people often ask me how do you decide what it is that you’re going to buy and of course we’re often at the mercy of the very inefficient bookmarket right we decide to buy what is offered for sale oftentimes but we do of course keep in our back pocket a list of kind of the wish list items and we’re slowly ticking off that list and making our way acquiring the things that we um feel that a library and a collection of this uh stature should have so I’m proud to share with you one particular item that we added year that had been long on our list and that is in the gallery today and that is the German nurburg Chronicle you see the title page of it here um if you go to our Instagram feed you won’t be able to see this because we’re not connected to the internet right now we had a fun like unboxing video where it came in this nurur chicle came in this box that was larger than I was and we got to unpack it and um kind of reveal it on Instagram it was some of my colleagues are a little more Whimsical and fun than I am and so um they had a good time with that so uh if you’re not familiar I encourage you to see it in the gallery U we have our German copy the neur chronicle 1493 publication originally a Latin work that was translated in the same year into German the print run of the German uh Edition was a little bit smaller and therefore it is tends to be a little bit more rare but we had the great privilege of borrowing Emmer’s Rose libraries copy of the Latin so we had the Latin and German displayed right along one of them uh the nurur chronicle is essentially a history of the world up into that point divided into various ages of history as you might imagine it is largely a kind of Biblical history telling of the world um famous for its many woodcut images over 1,800 images um really only about 645 unique woodcuts but a lot of those people get reused over and over again so the same biblical figure can look uh like someone you’ve already seen before in the book um it’s a large folio book it’s over 18 inches tall and it’s printed on Imperial paper which was the largest standard paper size um at the time and you see it has some wonderful wonderful images it’s famous for these large cityscape that it has so here is nberg which is right in the center of the book um when you open it up um here is the kind of seventh day of creation it walks through the various days of creation dep ficts them as such um here is uh Christ enthone surrounded by the apostles um here is one of its famous kind of genealogies or depictions of the descendants of Noah these kind of wonderful graphic depictions again these are the kind of people that will appear later in the show um as the same um image uh so this is again an example of one of those things that we have been looking for for many many years and to be candid looking for one that we could afford over many many years um and we had the great Fortune of it coming to us um this year so we’re excited to show that uh in the gallery this past year has also been um an amazing year for Bibles within the Kesler collection um of the 4,000 or so items in the collection about a quarter of the Kesler collection consists of biblical texts or commentaries or sermons explicitly on uh scriptural texts and the collection of course contains some of the most significant Bibles of the early print uh period including uh Luther’s September Testament his first translation of the Greek New Testament into German 1522 um it includes all five editions of the Greek New Testament edited by arasmus during his lifetime the first two editions of the renic Bible 1517 to 1524 the complutensian polyglot and so on so we we already start in a pretty good place um with Bibles but one growth area for the collection has been German translations of scripture other than Luther that is before Luther uh and this year we landed a really nice one here um think I have it yeah so it’s this book here um so before Luther’s translation of 1522 um there were a number uh up to maybe 17 or 18 translations of uh scripture of course German translations of the Latin vgate um Luther goes back to the Greek and to the Hebrew and they’re important not only for understanding the Bible and how it was interpreted at the time but also for understanding the very German language that was kind of evolving uh in the late 15th and early 16th century so an exciting acquisition this year was this 1516 German gospels and Epistles with flosses printed in Hagan by Thomas enome which you see uh here um it includes these wonderfully uh hand colored uh images you see here on the title page then as you uh flip through you see uh stories so here Jesus pointing to the signs from Luke uh 21 you have the young Jesus the beard Jesus right teaching with the um scholars in the temple um you have Jesus with the Canaanite woman so all these wonderful wood Rich woodcut images that have been handcolored by an early owner of the book um this book is also I think interesting because it was previously owned by the 19 century Bavarian printer Carl hog who have to say has one of the alltime Wikipedia pictures of all there’s our boy Carl really fantastic so I like to think I’m sitting down with Carl and reading this book with him so that’s the 1516 German uh translation of the gospels and Epistles a second Bible acquisition from this past fall is a Luther translation in fact um as I noted earlier Luther 1522 uh translation of the New Testament from Greek um his his Old Testament translated from Hebrew took significantly longer um he published the pentat the next year 1523 printed by m Lauder also in vitberg a work that the collection does hold um but it would not be until 1534 that Luther would issue the full translation of the Bible into German printed by Hans LOF and venberg a book we don’t own quite yet that’s another one on the list in between though he issued portions of the Old Testament in Translation uh including what we have here which is this um yeah here which is the 152 4 so 1523 was the first pentat 1524 translations of Genesis through Song of Solomon the addition as you’ll see and I hope you’ll come up and see it is beautifully Bound in a blind tooled pig skin and includes really some magnificent magnificent woodcut images preceding each section of the translation so here is the beginning of the uh Bible here is the depiction of Joshua here and then my favorite is the crucifixion scene here um this woodcut uh done by master of all Masters Alber dur um and is thought to be perhaps the only dur woodcut that actually appears in a Biblical text um I like this image too because we always play the fun game with dur of like where is the cool dur signature if you may know he has a very neat ad so this is another dur woodcut that we have it’s actually in the gallery of the martyrdom of St Katherine you can see down here this is his little cool stylized ad so let me go back and see if you can find it in here not a great impression so you may have a little bit of struggle we sent this out on the library slack Channel and nobody could actually find it so no it’s all the way down at the bottom you see it now there it is right there yeah so um Alber was here I guess is what it says yeah so um just a couple of Bibles that I hope you’ll come up and see um but beyond Bibles uh one of the focus I recently in the Kesler collection has been works that Define the context for the Reformation so what was going on in these territories leading up to um Luther and again this year we added a really significant work that helps us understand a major influence on Luther and his companions it’s a collection of sermons by Johan Gyer Von kaiserberg printed by noblock and strawberg in 1511 so guer was one of the best known preachers of his day um long before the great preacher of Luther and his contemporaries there had been a bit of a Resurgence of pre preaching in the Middle Ages and the one David Steins has called quote Prince of the pulpit in the late 15th and early 16th centuries was Johan Gyer Brandon Watson and I always talk about this idea of the like celebrity preacher has been with us for many many many centuries it’s always kind of been a thing um he was for 32 years the people’s priest um in strawberg and I think like a lot of celebrity preachers then and now the consistent theme in his preaching was moral Improvement amongst the clergy the Ley the world’s gone to heck right we got to really pick things up here um interestingly his preaching of course was for the people in contrast to some of his contemporaries and though he would write his manuscript sermons in Latin he would preach them in the people’s German and and the um addition we have here is clearly a a um a a writing down of his sermon as it was received and heard as steinm mat’s notes of G’s approach quote the preacher cannot be an instrument of Reform if he restricts himself to the delivery of learned and from the standpoint of the common people at least generally incomprehensible essays and lack so again this sounds like something we might attribute to the reformers of maybe a decade later but this was something that was already going on guer himself trained as a Catholic priest was a strong internal critic of the church um and is sometimes credited for laying the groundwork for the reception of some of Luther’s reforms particularly in Strasburg um which of course guer did not live to see the collection now has over a total of five of his works and this uh newest edition uh has six of the sermons together it’s called The Book of the pomegranate drawing on the name from one of his sermon images um this particular copy is bound in blind tooled ckin with a 14th century manuscript on the endpapers which is quite lovely uh and beautiful what I love about this book beyond the sermons is that it includes six wood cuts by Hans baldon green who was one of the master artists at the time um you can see for example here Martha and Mary and Lazarus um you can see uh St Elizabeth uh sewing for the poor um and then my absolute favorite here anybody know this scene we always tell the students the guy with the horns right who’s the guy with the horn Moses right standing over the Red Sea with the vanquished Pharaoh’s Army right here fantastic image that I hope you’ll come and check out um this book also has really interesting provenance for it Bears the book plate of you see here Gilbert R red grave um 1844 to 1941 well-known British architect and book collector who uh has annotated you can see this work uh extensively um he served as president of the bibliographical society from 1907 to 1988 then uh it was through the society that he became involved in a project to produce an authoritative list and brief description or short title catalog of all English books published before 1640 which eventually came out in 1926 and is often referred to by the names of its two principal authors Hollard and Redgrave so continuing the theme um context for the reformation and what I find to be interesting imagery we also recently added an apocalyptic work by Joseph grune uh who lived 1473 to 1532 printed by George stooks in nberg in 158 so here is an image uh from that work the Kesler copy up here is bound in a 15th century antiel Vellum manuscript Lea uh grune was a professor of rhetoric and englot uh he later became the secretary and chaplain to Emperor Max and bilan first um he’s a really fascinating guy who works not only on theological issues but also on science and medicine including some important early 16th century works on infectious diseases uh he actually got a bunch of infectious diseases and then decided I need to write about this stuff so we can figure out what’s going on um later in life he wrote a number of prophetic and rather dark Works including this one where among other things he predicts the collapse of the church and Society in general this genre of dire prophecy was popular and profitable at the time and several of the works like this ended up on the Council of Trent index of band books you can probably see why from some of the images here you see the church running over people um the house on fire here the church burning down and being destroyed um this the work that accompanies these images is grun peek’s kind of lamentation of the violence and breakdown in order of society that he thought was character of of characteristic of his time I suspect this may be something that some of us can relate to I try not to psychoanalyze myself when we were making these Acquisitions about why I thought this might be appropriate to get at the time time um but I do and I put this in here it’s a little ridiculous I think of this as the 16th century equivalent of the famous meme from KC green that you probably see on the internet um I find some comfort in knowing that we who lament that the world is burning and on fire have some companions from 500 or so um years ago so anyway wonderful Kesler items that you will come up I hope you will come up here and see but I also want to spend a moment to talk about what I call Kesler ancillary work because despite that the Kesler collection really constitutes about 2.5% of our rear book it’s numerically not a big portion of what we collect but it has kind of a a lot of inertia for the work that we do for a whole number of reasons and so what I mean is that we always keep our eye on the Kesler collection when we are collecting outside of the Kesler collection with thought that there will be connections for research for exhibitions for presentations these kinds of things so I have for a minute to take a few examples of things that we’ve successfully acquired over the last year outside of the Custer collection just to give you a sense of how that works the first example is this book here which is from our incunable collection they just a fancy word for books published kind of in the 15th century in Europe um this is um and I should say I’m really kind of proud of the fact that over the last six years we have grown The incunable Collection by 20% it did not start huge but it has started to get big and for those of you in book collecting know these books are expensive and not easy to acquire so it’s been um quite a thing for us to do um this here is the title page of a 1489 um Latin Vulgate printed by Johan prce and strawberg and the Bible itself and I hope you’ll come look through it is is you know it looks like a lot of incunable Bibles and is rather uh non-descript but we are quite interested in it because of this you can see the inscription on the title page here so I’ll Zoom back out so you can see um where can see that it says uh 1489 which is the indication of the date uh that the book was published and then it says note that Martin Luther uh was born in 1483 and in 1518 he apostasis or committed apostasy and then he died in isban in 1546 this is quite a kind of curious thing here for a couple of reasons first 1518 as the date of apostasy is in interesting right um so if we might think that the 95 Theses were posted in 1517 though I think that’s a date that probably started being celebrated much later as a kind of marking of the beginning of the Reformation Luther was officially excommunicated by Rome in January 1521 the leig disputation between Luther and the e was held in 1519 Leo the 10’s papal bull condemning Luther was 1520 1518 while certainly a significant year in Luther’s developing fight with the the church um was still really a time of negotiation marked by his meeting with kyoten perhaps 1518 as significant because it’s the year that Luther publishes his sermon against indulgences um but I’d be very interested and I I Look to You gentlemen here as to why 1518 it seems a little bit strange to me um but also it’s just kind of odd to have this inscription on the title page of a 1489 Bible what is he trying to tell us here right is he a fan of Luther probably not he calls him an apostate um but why is he taking his Bible to Mark these dates now Professor McFarland who I trust with all things came up here and suggests that he’s he’s marking here that all the way back in 1489 we were doing biblical stuff that Luther make take credit for am I capturing your yeah so we had already done all this this stuff was already happening way back 1489 but just kind of a curious thing so um again when we look at books and we see Luther’s name that t of jumps out and we um put it uh alongside the kler collection so uh we’re excited to kind of play around with this a little bit more um we also collect uh 16th century items that may not fit strictly within the Kessler collection but help us under understand the reforms of Luther in their context and their impact within the broader church and one of these is perhaps my absolute favorite acquisition of the past year it’s back in the gallery so I don’t have it here but it really has been the one book that I’ve been searching for since I’ve worked at pits theology Library so if you look at this Bible here this Latin bulate you’ll notice that there are no verse numbers in the text of course printers in the Bibles printers of Bibles in the 15th and early 16th centuries had no standard way of indicating section of the text chapter numbers had been around for a while and though they had a system of using marginal letters to indicate blocks of text and and if you see this kind of chapter number mixed with a c marking blocks of text people are able to rough kind of cross references in these kinds of things um but as greater Focus fell to the interpretation of scripture and the translation of scripture if people are starting to compare versions as was common in the 16th century you might imagine how maddening that would be if you don’t have precise indications of particular parts of the text right if we’re trying to compare a Latin verb and I’m like look over in section B and people are like what are you talking about section B it becomes really quite challenging um and so um as you will see in the back of the gallery this created the necessity for a technological innovation that we know as ver numbers so the gentleman that of course gets credited with this is Rober Tien Latin named stephanus who was the prolific Parisian printer in the middle of the 16th century ATN is is very much a favorite here at pitz and many of his additions of both the church fathers and of the biblical text are key parts of our collections including his famous so-called Royal edition of the Greek New Testament from in 1550 um this was the first real critical edition of the New Testament be printed where ATN had developed a system of indicating where different manuscripts differed in their readings of the Greek text now this particular Bible the 1550 um sparked great Madness amongst the Parisian theologians at the sbon and ATN fled Paris that year in 1550 uh running to Safe Harbor in Geneva where he continued his printing career after that and it was there in Geneva in 155 one that he issued the Greek New Testament that was his fourth Greek New Testament that he had done that is the prize acquisition that I’m so proud of because this is the first New Testament that has the verse numbers that we are familiar with now you’ll see in the back of the gallery there had been earlier Bibles that had numbered verses but for whatever reason their Innovation didn’t catch on but ATN hit it at the right moment and therefore he was the one uh that gets credit for this um you can see there’s the title page here and here here’s uh uh it’s a very binding so the photographs are really challenging but you can see it’s a three column text um where you can see e so this is erasmus’s Latin translation um this is that critical text the 1550 uh Greek text that ATM put together and then he has the Vulgate here running on the inner column so you can compare them and then you can see the verse numbers that are appeared here now what I love about this book is so he’s run out of Paris in 1550 runs to Geneva and in 1552 publishes his reply to the Parisian theologians and because he’s developed his verse number system he’s able to go verse by verse and point out to them all of the places where he’s right uh and they are wrong there’s also of course the famous story about how he ended up putting the verses where they are um 1594 his son produces a concordance and tells this story in the intro to the concordance where he he says famously that his his father did the verse numbers inter equat andum right while on Horseback and so uh you know the joke goes that he as the horse went up and down so the pen went up and down and marked the places of the um uh verses there are some weird places where verses Break um most likely it means between his horseback rides he would take his time and and write his verse number system but um anyway this is h a very exciting discovery that we uh were privileged to take advantage of and so I hope you will go see it um back in the uh Gallery one last Bible that I want to point out to you that doesn’t fit anywhere within the kler collection but I think shows how uh the influence of the Kesler collection has um many of you may have known that we recently launched last year the J Michael Morgan English Bible andom collection which was the result of our great friend Michael Morgan here he is attending Reformation day uh in 2018 or something like that Michael who was a local musician who had amassed one of the America’s great private collections of English Bibles um sadly passed away on Christmas day of 2022 and donated his entire collection to us some 5600 volumes dating from some of the most significant English Bibles of the 6 Century all the way through contemporary Publications um and we’ve had great fun combining the Morgan collection and the Kessler collection together and thinking about how these two can draw on one another and I want to just give you one example of that and it’s this book that I have over here these are a couple of examples from Michael’s collection this is a wonderful one this so he was a big Isaac Watts fan so this is one of watt’s uh early um metrical Salters where he’s uh inscribed it to a Mrs hartop Who is the first person to give Watts a job when he was looking for a job so just kind of lovely connections that Michael had put together um but this is an interesting acquisition that we made within the Morgan collection um in the last year so this is a 1776 sour Bible it’s often called the gun wad Bible talk in a second about why it’s called that um Christopher SAU who was in Germantown right outside of Philadelphia um was a uh German Lutheran printer who was printing texts including Bibles for the Lutheran commun there starting in 1743 he printed what was the first Bible printed in a European language uh in the American colonies um and this is the 1776 so the Third Edition and as I said it’s referred to as the gun wad Bible so why do you ask uh or why do you I assume you ask right um so the original print run was said to have been 3,000 copies but as I mentioned this is 1776 anybody remember what was going on in America and so yeah um and so um in 1777 um he had his print stock that he had printed but he was quite fearful that germant toown was going to be overrun by the British troops which in fact it was and so he uh relocated to Philadelphia um and he took his print industry with him but he left so the story goes this stock of Bibles here and of course the British soldiers took over German Town took over his stock and Alle allegedly ripped up his Bibles and used it um as cartridge paper for their muskets um about half of the stock was said to be true now whether this is actually true who knows but it makes for a great story for uh gun wad Bibles so I’ve run through a number of Acquisitions here and I wanted to just kind of and I’ll invite you up here uh in a second but let me pause here and ask if there are any questions thoughts concerns about the materials we’re buying I don’t care what your concerns are no I’m just kiding you I have more to say but I just want to see if there’s any other questions very good okay so the first point here on with summary of Acquisitions is we continue to add to this incredible collection and the chart that I showed you we’re going to keep building that and it’s going to keep going on but the second Point here’s where he hits you with the solicitation one way to support the collection is through donations to our acquisition collection I’m going to talk about another way it’s not the only way but the only reason we’ve been successful is the continued support of many of you in this room and many of those who have uh great interest and great passion for the work that we’re doing and if you’ve been involved in rare books in the last few years you know that rare books have gotten a lot more expensive and a lot more challenging to acquire particularly for institutions right um against another institution I can do fairly well against a private collector who’s a billionaire I have a little more challenge uh in making Acquisitions so um we are grateful and always looking for more support to allow us to continue to add incredible uh collections like this now finally and I know that’s the dangerous thing for the preacher to say because everyone Tunes out at that point but I do want to close by assuring you that our continued collecting of old Works in a digital age is ongoing and will continue though it will happen in a modified format and so one of the things my colleagues and I have been thinking about since the pandemic of course is what do we do in this new world because it is certainly a new world and a couple of the answers to that might be quite obvious there’s the gunwi Bible we digitize collections right and for the last few years we have been on a very aggressive path to digitize some of the most important Works uh in the kler collection this is our Digital Collection site that we launched several years ago where you can see that a lot of the kler items are discoverable and able to zoom in and and see all of those kinds of things which is wonderful so you can go and print off an Indulgence for yourself uh if you would like in addition to our own digital repository we also published the Custer collection into Emory’s digital repository so a bigger repository of more works that duplic licate or at least use the work that we’ve already done to make this stuff uh discoverable but as I’m sure Professor pedigree and others will say it’s not enough to Simply have your stuff in your little website right no one’s going to find my stuff by going to the EM website and so increasingly partnership and growth in discoverability putting our stuff out there with other sites has been a real priority for us an example here is vd6 which is a German database of books published uh in the 16th century couple of years ago we became an official contributor to vd6 so you can see for example here is a bibliographic record of a particular work and then you can look down here it shows the Holdings right and so you see pit theology library right here and then what’s even most important when you click on an example from pit theology Library you can click on that uh and lo and behold it will take you directly to our copy of that work so again partnering with institutions like this that have broad reach and Broad appeal and are able to present to the world a kind of unified catalog of all the books that are not only known but also have been digitized has been a real priority for us we have the expert here Dr pedre of course who runs the universal short title catalog which I suspect he will tell you a little bit more about later but they are also a new partner for us that is to publish our bibliographic records so that those who are searching in these broad databases can find our materials and can find the digitized uh versions of this so this has been a really important Outreach piece for us to get our materials out there second is we launched right before the pandemic a fellowship program and like a lot of things it got messed up by the pandemic so uh our idea was to create virtual Fellowship we didn’t want people to come and be in residence for a full year but we wanted people through the magic of the internet to be able to work with our Collections and produce good quality scholarship based on our collections so we started in 201819 with a gentleman that several of you are familiar with or bubenheim who uh actually came here and was in residence for about eight weeks but conducted most of his research virtually the following year we invited three young scholars to be our kler fellows one of whom here is Dr pedigree students um who each were able to curate digital exhibitions and do digital work from afar um the goal is to have them come to the library twice a year but as you might imagine 2019 and early 2020 that got messed up really easily and so to be candid we’ve stalled on this and so we’re excited to uh relaunch The Kessler fellowship program starting in the fall of 2024 another way to of broaden Engagement with our collection we’ve also launched through the pandemic a virtual engagement way and I hope many of you participated in our cust conversations I’m really proud of this amazing group of Scholars who have participated in this so it is um we would do three a semester and we’ve taken a year Hiatus for all of the reasons I mentioned earlier um but they’re hourlong conversations with Scholars about a particular topic and the topic comes not from the 16th century but from the 21st century so for example we began of course with plague what was plague like in the 16th century and how can that help us understand what’s going on with public health today so again taking our public our programming that’s typically in person and expanding it through the power of the internet has been a really wonderful way um you can see these conversation look there’s me um and Y and Cameron who was at Columbia um and then we have also done virtual and online teaching so this is a course that I taught in the fall at a local church it was a sixe course that was both in person but also looking there were recordings uh online where again we’re able to take materials like you see some here and both show the materials to those who are in person but also to live stream and Broad uh broadcast these um uh teaching opportunities all around the world so in closing I want you to recognize that things are certainly changing with the way that we do business around around here at pits the Acquisitions are going to continue and strong but we are always thinking creatively about how we can broaden that engagement and broaden that again the growth’s going to keep happening but going to be happening in quite a different way so let me just stop here um I am finally going to stop talking and look it’s 5:15 which is exactly what I said I would stop talking um and pause if there are any questions I invite you to come up here and uh get a Hands-On approach with the books um and then we will uh retire around the corner up to Canon Chapel where we will hear from Dr pedigree thank you