“Much scholarship depends on devoting a disproportionate amount of attention to relatively small details” -- James Thorpe,
Principles of textual criticism.
In most library cataloging, even with the exacting standards applied to rare books, the small details which may provide grist for a scholar's mill are often omitted from bibliographic descriptions, either for reasons of economy or through the cataloger's non-comprehension of unfamiliar or even perfectly baffling elements. Further, it is currently thought that the recording of details is unnecessary, given the certainty that every page of a book will soon be digitally captured, allowing a scholar to see at a glance those unique features which might require hours of painstaking work for a librarian to describe in words.
In the vast majority of library cataloging records, physical features of a book have usually been overlooked, with stress laid on the information needed for retrieval of a given text. Only in the last three decades have rare book catalogers begun to develop protocols for recording and making retrievable the physical features of books, most notably with the
RBMS Thesauri of ALA's Rare Book & Manuscript Section. Provision is now made for recording binding characteristics, former owners' names, and other visible features of a book. But even so, some elements such as marginalia, dog-earing, shelf-marks, and other evidences of provenance may not make the cut. Sometimes these features elucidate the book’s history but just as often they are difficult to describe and may raise more questions than they answer, leading the cataloger on an exciting if time-consuming chase after names, literary allusions, and mystifying abbreviations, all of which might be evidence of some sort for scholarship of some kind, but probably a kind unrelated to the text of the book.
A case in point is this recently cataloged volume from the Clementine Library.
Unprepossessing in appearance, this book on architectural terminology has been personalized in a variety of ways. The title is scrawled on the cover: Francesco Mario Grapaldi’s
De Partibus Aedium (Parma, 1516). The cover also bears, in the same hand, the engaging announcement of ownership: “Melchioris sum” or “I belong to Melchior.”
Goodbye Cruel World
Even more interesting are the two unrelated verse quotations written inside the vellum cover. The first verse reads "Inveni portum spes et fortuna valete / Nil michi vobiscum ludite nunc alios", roughly translated, "I have reached the harbor; farewell Hope and Fortune. To me you mean nothing; now go make sport of others."
The lines are a Latin translation of one of the most famous epigrams (in this case really an epitaph) from the
Anthologia Graeca or
Greek Anthology. Books have been written on the
Anthologia, which occupies five volumes of the Loeb Classics. Once better known than at present, the
Anthologia was an important source in European literature from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. Notable translations into Latin included that by the Dutch legal scholar Hugo Grotius and portions of the
Anthologia were translated or mined by other famous literary figures, including Erasmus and Thomas More. In 1518 when the second edition of More’s
Utopia was printed in Basel, the volume included the first printing of More's Latin
Epigrammata along with a preliminary section of
Progymnasmata, containing verses by More and his friend, the grammarian and Greek scholar William Lily (1468-1522).
Progymnasmata 6 includes both More's and Lily's Latin renderings of the Greek epigram on Fortune. However it is not the translation by More which was copied into our binding, but word for word the text by Lily, varying only in the medieval spelling
michi rather than the classical
mihi. It would be interesting to know for certain the source for the manuscript lines, to learn whether the owner of the 1516 Grapaldi book copied into it the published epigram two years later, or whether he relied on a different unknown source.
I am Borage
The second verse is more difficult to decipher but seems to read:
“Ego sum Borago qui[?] tria dona ago / et gratias semper ago et semper viresco, et in omni tempore cresco." ("I am Borage who brings three benefits: I always bring good cheer, I'm always green, and grow in every season.") This little Latin jingle seems to be a fairly accurate description of the herb borage (
Borago officinalis), a common blue-flowered plant which grows around the Mediterranean, in Europe and in other temperate climates. The leaves are used in salads and the flowers are among the few naturally-occurring blue species which are not poisonous to humans. Used as a summer spice for wine, borage has been reputed to have mood-elevating properties, and indeed the most common variant of the poem "Ego Borago gaudium semper ago" reflects this belief, as do several vernacular texts. The plant's extracts, now marketed in health food stores, are used to treat arthritis and hot-flashes, and borage is a favorite "companion" plant of gardeners, requiring little maintenance. After five-hundred years the Latin doggerel penned in the old binding is still relevant, and possibly the writer felt it to be a cheerful counterpoint to the epitaph he had written above it. In any case, no researcher looking either for the epitaph or the homage to borage would think to find it by searching for a book on architecture.
On the endpaper opposite these verses are later and more extensive manuscript notations, beginning with six lines of Italian verse and continuing with citations to various topics within Grapaldi's architectural treatise, noting relevant page numbers.
An educated guess places these lines in the period of Albani ownership of the book, and they remain the subject of further investigation.
But a mysterious abbreviated note at the very end of the book on the lower pastedown (which, like the upper, was never actually pasted) seems to be in an earlier (16th century?) hand and is rather more interesting. What does it mean? It may be a date, 5 July. "Completed Jul. 5" perhaps? On close inspection it has the appearance of two pens at work, a light ink with a darker heavier hand superimposed. In any case the presence of the neatly cut out window on the leaf preceding it adds to the mystery. Normally one sees cut-outs of this sort when a signature is clipped from a leaf. But this missing corner seems somehow related to the notation on the next leaf. Perhaps a pattern like this is known in other books, but it is not easy to alert scholars to the presence of such an anomaly, either in a verbal catalog description, or by digital means.
