Curators' Choice: The Line-up

From Roman legal indexes to first hand accounts of the discovery of the New World to English poetry, here's what the rare books curators themselves find of special interest in their collections.

Hugh Amory, an associate curator of the Houghton Library collection, calls the first Bible printed in Cambridge, Mass. in 1663 "an impressive little volume" because it was the first to be worded in an exotic Indian tongue. Amory also finds an 1827 book of colorful life size paintings by ornithologist and painter John J. Audubun "just spectacular."

A very rare reproduction of the Code of Justinian which served as the basis of "all European law and legal scholarship for several hundred years" is the choice of Edith Henderson, curator of Langdell Library's Treasure Room. Henderson keeps this book, one of the few extant reproductions in the world, secured away, out of public view.

Cultural trends in rare books are important to Ruth R. Rogers of the Kress Library of Business and Economics. Rogers pays special attention to German books of the 17th century for traces of anti-Semitism evident in the dealings of money-changers who cheated their Jewish customers by giving them worthless coins. Rogers also recommends the materials from the Bancroft Collection on the South Sea Bubble, which include posters, pamphlets, and books chronicling the speculative main which swept through England in the 1720's, when lots of financiers invested their money in tulips. "There's always something to be learned from this sort of history," she adds.

Like Rogers, Shari Regan, associate curator of special collections of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, pursues cultural trends in rare books. Letters, short pamphlets, and manuscripts by women at the MCZ provide Regan with a sense of the conflicts confronted by early women scientists.

Maria Grossman similarly finds historical value in old broadsides found at the Andover-Harvard Library, documenting the immigration and persecution of European Protestants.

By far the most priceless item in the Tozzer Library collection is the Hemenway Codex painted on barkwood, said head librarian Nancy Schmidt. "It's a pictorial record of Europeans first encountering native Americans in the New World," says Schmidt, adding, "there are lots of reproductions available, but only a few original codexes from the 16th century."

Hary Elkins Widener's personal favorite in his 3,000 volume collection was Sir Philip Sydney's 1613 work. "The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia" which was presented to the countess by the author himself. Widener considered this book to be one of the finest example of Elizabethan leather work in the world. A life-long collector, Widener died on the Titanic in 1912, returning from a book buying mission in London. Fortunately, all of the rare books purchased by Widener in England were shipped back to the U.S. separately, except for one volume which went down with the Titanic, a second edition of Sir Francis Bacon's "Essays" of 1598.