BibliOdyssey

Thursday, October 06, 2005

Lithuanian Tidings

Crop from a Supreme Court Tribunal decree about a building sale in 1590. (details) [very large jpeg of complete parchment document - 2Mb]

Crop from letter by the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania 1649 (details) [very large jpeg]

Martynas Mažvydas published the first Lithuanian book in 1547 - Catechismus, which included hymns in addition to the religious text. It was likely that the 450th anniversary of the publication in 1997 prompted digitizing of some samples of Lithuanian works.

The cover of Catechismus, published 3 years
after Mažvydas's death in 1563

For 40 years up to 1904, the publication of any work in Lithuanian was outlawed by the Russian government. This press prohibition or knygnesiai resulted in large numbers of people engaging in book smuggling from nearby countries.

{After quite a few hours of mostly interesting perusing but with a blogger downtime induced loss of a previous draft (grr) I'll just post in a bunch of links that are worth examining. Lithuania has a proud heritage and some wonderful biblio-material. (for Ondine - you better be happy.)}

Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania Collection of Parchments
Text scans of publications by Martynas Mažvydas (including hymn sample downloads)
Scans of 16th century Lithuanian books
Early books of Lithuania - 16th to 18th century
The Year of the Lithuanian Book
Accounts about the knygnesiai (booksmugglers) (map) (map page)
The Road Travelled by the Lithuanian Book
Bookplate competition galleries 1997
Art Review of Lithuanian Artist's Association
Lithuanian cultural heritage - A Virtual Exhibition
Lithuanian resource links

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Refracting Apis

Francesco Stelluti (1577-1652) was a mathematician and founding member of the Accademia dei Lincei (Academy of Linxes - sharp eyed creatures were chosen to engender discovery) along with its leader and backer, Federico Cesi. This much seems certain.

Somewhere along the line, probably in 1624, Galileo who was also a member of the Academy, submitted the first compound(?) microscope for evaluation by his peers. The following year, Stelluti made the first scientific use of the instrument. (This is in dispute)

He observed and drew bees, as you see scattered about the page. There were a couple of notable publications associated with his drawings (he may have done the engravings himself - of this I'm not sure). It appears that Cesi had both the initial drawings plus all known information about bees issued in a large quarto format.

Stelluti refashioned the initial drawings and they were republished in ~1630 with an adjacent latin poem that was obsequiously dedicated to Pope Urban - the bee was the Pope's family emblem.

The small images here were culled from Apiarium, the publication that included all the information about bees; and the dedication to the Pope is called Melissographia (that's the large image).

The 2 works are extrememly rare and they are exhibited by the Instituto E Museo Di Storia Della Scienza Biblioteca Archivi in Florence in a partial flash interface with annoying frames (again) but the zoom is great; however there is no english, unfortunately.

The following are a sample of the documents I waded through to learn about this little episode in the history of science..

National Library of Scotland page I, page II (which has one scan of what was probably the original 1625 drawing).
Another image of the original 1625 drawing - (I'm imagining that a different scanning technique was used here).
A natural history paper by Stephen J Gould.
Short Clendening commentary.
Short amicros commentary.
A History of the the Ecological Sciences Part XIII - 2/3 of the way down the page.
Another engraving by Stelluti (I would think that there are more around, but I really got sick of all the poster selling sites getting in the way of deeper searching)
Clement Kent article - minor mention.
This is a link to a reasonable-sized jpeg of Melissographia without the interface, that took me ages to ~~steal~~ lovingly propagate under fair use principles.

American Society of Botanical Artists

The Society has a website with a members gallery.

Plakāts Latvijā

While not strictly book related (more a part of the Odyssey) I came across an extensive collection of Latvian posters which I thought were worth sharing. Despite having a framed interface, it's a fine website with english available.

So from the Latvian Digitālo Bibliotēku site, there are posters from 1899-1945 covering:

Exhibitions; Theatre, Cinema & Circus; Song Festivals; Festivals, Sports & Tourism; Press Publications, Books; War, Social Protection; Elections; Organizations, Parties; Social Issues; Food-Stuffs; Cosmetics; Tobacco; Commodities; Transport; Advertizing Agencies.

There's also a section with different headings covering 1945-2000 but I'm not linking all the individual thumb pages.

Codex Magliabecchi

[large jpeg]

Antonio Magliabecchi (1673-1714) was the überbibliophilic librarian to the Grand Duke of Tuscany in Florence and amassed a collection of more than 50,000 books and manuscripts which eventually formed the basis for the Biblioteca Centrale di Firenze.

[large jpeg]

Among his collection was an anonymous Mexican manuscript, found by archaeologist Zelia Nuttall in the late 19th century. In 1903 she published The Book of the Life of the Ancient Mexicans in which the glyphs contained in (what would come to be known as) the Codex Magliabecchi were reproduced in lithographs together with the original but incomplete spanish notations by 2 different hands. From reading the introduction, Nuttall concludes that the work must have been completed around 1529.

[the circles above the glyphs are date markers]

The J Willard Marriot Library at the University of Utah have a complete copy of Nuttall's book online as part of their Aztec manuscripts collection. [Direct link to Codex Magliabecchi]