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Archive: "New acquisitions" Category

New acquisitions in Spanish and Portuguese

In 2020, BYU Special Collections acquired a significant collection of early modern and Baroque books in Spanish and Portuguese from a private collector. These materials are now available for researchers. Highlights include literary, historical, and religious titles, and early dictionaries and works on composition. A few examples are shown below:

New Acquisitions in Renaissance printing

The L. Tom Perry Special Collections has a long history of collecting the output of the major French humanist printers of the 16th century. Our vaults hold extensive collections of the work of the Estienne (Stephanus) family, Simon de Colines, Josse Badius Ascencius, and Christophe Plantin. These printers helped spread Renaissance and humanist learning throughout …

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Gothic novels and other tales of terror

Looking for some Halloween reading suggestions? We bring you a grim and grisly new addition to the Victorian Collection: the 1847 anonymous Gothic novel The Mysterious Avenger. Issued by a Yorkshire publisher, this cheaply produced “penny dreadful” features everything a reader might expect in a modern horror thriller. Spooky locales? Sinister characters? The supernatural? Revenge? …

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New Acquisitions: 19th Century Women Travel Writers

March is Women’s History Month, and today we examine three recent acquisitions of travel narratives written by women. A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince (1853). Nancy Gardner Prince was a free-born African-American woman from Massachusetts. She traveled to Russia with her husband, Nero Prince, who worked for several years as …

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Special Collections acquires a copy of the first complete Spanish translation of the Bible

Special Collections recently acquired a copy of the earliest edition of the complete Bible in Spanish, known as “La Biblia del Oso” because of the printer’s mark, an illustration of a bear seeking honey. The Bible was translated into Spanish by Casiodoro de Reina, a former Catholic monk turned Protestant reformer, possibly with collaborators. “La …

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New acquisitions: Printing proofs for the Kelmscott Chaucer

Special Collections recently acquired five printing proofs of wood engravings from William Morris’ masterpiece, the 1896 Works of Chaucer. The illustrations were designed by Victorian artist Edward Burne-Jones, and then would have been transferred to blocks of wood by Robert Catterson-Smith and then engraved by William Harcourt Hopper. These proofs would have been created as …

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Early music in Special Collections

Special Collections recently acquired a fine art facsimile of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a 13th century Galician manuscript which contains a large collection of songs and hymns to the Virgin Mary. The original (known to scholars as the T manuscript) is held by the Biblioteca de El Escorial. The surviving Cantigas manuscripts are highly …

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Shipwreck accounts from Tokugawa Japan

One of the more recent additions to BYU’s Rare Japanese Collection is a manuscript which recounts the adventures of Japanese sailors shipwrecked in Vietnam in 1794. The 16-man crew of the fishing vessel Daijomaru spent a year in Vietnam before making their way to Nagasaki via Macao, Canton, and Saho. The manuscript describes the shipwreck …

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Meet a book artist: Thomasina Taylor

Special Collections recently acquired several miniature books published by Thomasina Taylor, a Utah County-based printer and bookbinder, for our Fine Press Collection. As an undergraduate, Taylor worked as a student employee in L. Tom Perry Special Collections. Her experiences sparked an interest in books which led her to pursue a joint Master’s of Library Science/Master’s …

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Rediscovered works by Whitman

A PhD candidate, Zachary Turpin, made headlines in 2016 and again this year when he announced the discovery of two long-forgotten works by Walt Whitman: a series of newspaper articles entitled “Manly Health and Training” and a short novel, The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: an Auto-Biography. Both texts were recently published in the …

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