By: Pat Olsen

Those who have visited Special Collections are likely familiar with the exhaustive material on Charles Dickens and Napoleon Bonaparte.  But how many know about the impressive collection of early printed books that has been lying in waiting for the last few decades?  Over the summer, Special Collections undertook an ambitious six-week cataloging project that finally has made these rarities available in the online catalog.

In the course of cataloging these books—which included two manuscripts, sixteen incunabula (books printed before 1501), and more than one hundred other early printed books—a number of important details have come to light.  Uncertain publication information, labyrinthine histories of former ownership, and critical copy-specific attributes have been investigated and documented.      

One of the most fascinating books (and certainly one of the most valuable) is a first-edition copy of the canons and decrees of the Council of Trent, Canones et decreta sacrosancti oecumenici et generalis Concilii Tridentini, published in Rome in 1564 by the famous Venetian printer Paolo Manuzio.  Not only is DePaul’s copy in a binding crafted by one of France’s greatest binders, it is one of just a handful that bear the authenticating inscriptions of Bishop Angelo Massarelli, the general secretary of the Council responsible for preparing the text, and Marcantonio Pellegrini and Cynthius Pamphilus, the Council’s two official notaries.  

As if these original inscriptions were not enough, the list of individuals that DePaul’s copy has passed through reads like a Who’s Who of famous book collectors.  Not long after its publication, it wound up in the house of Noailles, one of France’s oldest and most influential families.  In 1835, the book finally relinquished its ties to the Noailles family, when Antonin-Claude-Dominique-Juste, Comte de Noailles, oversaw the dispersal of the collection at auction in London.  From there, it soon entered the collection of Antoine Augustin Renouard, whose bibliography of books printed by the Manuzio family remains a standard reference work.  It then passed to George John Warren Vernon, who sold a large part of his collection, likely including the Canones et decreta, to Robert Stayner Holford.  Holford’s son, George Lindsay Holford, inherited his father’s collection, which was eventually sold at auction in 1927.  Bernard Quaritch, one of the oldest rare book businesses still operating, purchased the Canones and later sold it to Raphael Esmerian, a noted collector of fine bindings.  The copy next went to Francis A. Kettaneh before being purchased, presumably at the 1980 Kettaneh auction, by the Chicago collector Abel Berland, who generously donated the book to DePaul.

To learn more, come see it for yourself in Special Collections on the third floor of the library.