5000th Image Uploaded

An 1828 edition of Collet’s Treaty on the Holy Mysteries

We are very proud to have reached an important milestone this past week: we uploaded the 5000th image on our Flickr site.  It has been a little more than two years since we began tracking down and photographing books.  I don’t think any of us expected to have accomplished as much as we did in the intervening time.  The 5000th image is of A Treaty on the Holy Mysteries, a work on the Lord’s Supper by prolific French Vincentian Pierre Collet (1693-1770). Collet wrote theological treatises, ecclesiastical law texts, biographies, spiritual guides, and Anti-Jansenist works. A biography of St. Vincent de Paul by Collet was also in the library’s collection.

Back in December 2015 we reached another milestone: we completed tracking down and photographing the 1750 titles that had been identified as books possibly in the original library catalog. We are still editing these images and generating metadata for them, and we will be posting them on the site for months to come.  Analysis of these titles will take a little longer.  We are also thinking about the second phase of the JLPP. More to come on that later!

Saying Goodbye, Saying Hello

The Fall 2015 semester saw the largest number of undergraduate and graduate students yet — seven in total — working on topics related to the JLPP. Aaron Kinskey and Gustav Roman tracked down the final volumes from the original St Ignatius College library which Michael Albani processed, generated metadata, and uploaded. Kyle Jenkins, Brendan Courtois, Dan Snow, and Melanie Zagorski all undertook mentored research projects on topics as diverse as secondary education curriculum development, the history of library classification, and Jesuit financial systems.

Aaron graduated at the end of the fall semester, but the other team members are continuing their work in the Spring semester. All current students will present at Loyola’s Weekend of Excellence in April. They are joined by two new team members: undergraduates Roman Krasnitsky and Erik Berner. Roman is working with Gustav on an exciting new project to uncover heretical books in the original library collection.  Intrigued by the books in the Legislation Division, one of six divisions in the original library catalog, Erik is exploring those books on secular and ecclesiastical law to better understand why they might have been collected.  Check back for updates on this site about how their research is progressing.

JLPP on the Road: New York and Washington, DC

The last week of January is always Book Week in New York, where bibliophiles from across the country and around the world descend on the city for a series of programs.  The JLPP was ably represented at at a symposium at the New York Society Library on January 27th entitled Library Records in a Digital Age: A Symposium on Teaching and New Research.  Project Director Kyle Roberts gave a presentation on the ways in which the JLPP has offered a range of experiential learning opportunities for Loyola undergraduate and graduate students interested in book history, library history, and the intellectual and spiritual history of Jesuits. Undergraduate intern Kyle Jenkins, a History and Secondary Education double major, presented on his project to develop curriculum that brings the JLPP into the high school classroom. His curriculum will be published on this site later in the spring. Both presentations were well received.

The next day, Kyle Roberts made a longer presentation on the JLPP at Georgetown University as a precursor to the Jesuit Heritage Week celebration.  You can watch a video of the presentation below:

Lauinger Library holds two important historic collections of Jesuit books: the original Georgetown Library, which is held in the Booth Family Center for Special Collections on the fifth floor, and the Woodstock Theological Library on the first floor.  Both collections are filled with historic books with fascinating provenance marks. Karen O’Connell, Preservation Coordinator, and Asheleigh Perry, Metadata Librarian, shared a cover of a 1676 edition of Paolo Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent from the original Georgetown Library with a fascinating piece of marginalia at the bottom!

1676 edition of Paolo Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent with some handwritten advice about where the book should be shelved!

St. Ignatius College also had a copy of this edition of Sarpi’s text which you can see here.  It also had marginalia in it, but of a different kind.

Two Belgian Events

Readers of the JLPP blog who will be in Belgium this month will find there is an exhibition and a talk that may be of interest.

The Provinciaal Cultuurcentrum Caermersklooster in Ghent is hosting the exhibition, The Call of the Rockies – Pieter Jan De Smet and the Indian Tragedy, from 2 February to 1 May 2016.  The exhibition focuses on De Smet (1801-1873), the pioneering Belgian-born Jesuit missionary who was one of the founders of the Missouri Province. This exhibition, which features items that were included in the groundbreaking 2014 exhibition Crossings and Dwellings at the Loyola University Museum of Art, explores De Smet “not only as a missionary, but also as defender of the Indians themselves, an advocate for peace and a mediator with the American government.” De Smet at first had attempted to establish the Rocky Mountain missions on the model of the pre-Suppression Paraguayan reductions, as Frederic Dorel explains in the forthcoming volume from the conference that closed the Crossings and Dwellings exhibition.  That model failed, but De Smet spend his life working on behalf of native peoples. Admission to the exhibition is free.  Thanks to David Miros, Archivist of the Jesuit Archives Central United States for a copy of the exhibition brochure.

On 25 February 2016, Heinz Nauer of the University of Lucerne will be giving a paper in the Religion and Society Seminar Series at KU Leuven. Nauer’s talk is entitled “Pious industry: The modern production of the Benziger publishing house in its international context, 1800-1920.”  The Benzinger publishing house specialized in the production of Catholic prayer books, devotional images, and religious magazines.  Initially based in Einsiedeln, Switzerland, the firm later opened branches in the United States, Germany and France.  A leader in the mass production of Catholic media, Benzinger employed more than one thousand people in the nineteenth century.  The JLPP Interns who have been studying the 1840s St Louis book trade ledger have uncovered that Jesuits ordered books from the Benzingers at Einseilden on seven different occasions.  Each transaction lists the quantity, author and short title, and price paid for every book. One transaction alone goes on for seven or eight pages.