
Trimble Book Display
Rare Book Display from the Niels Bohr Library & Archives at the May 8th, 2024 Trimble Lecture with Elly Truitt at the American Center for Physics (D.C.), featuring books by Roger Bacon.
On Wednesday, May 8th, 2024, the American Institute of Physics (AIP) had its first lecture of the 2024 Lyne Starling Trimble History of Science Public Event Series
For those of you who missed the lecture, it is available on the AIP History YouTube Channel
Before the talk, representatives of the Niels Bohr Library & Archives (NBLA) hosted a book display with two volumes by Roger Bacon from our rare book collection related to Professor Truitt’s talk. In this blog post, we are going to give you a behind-the-scenes look at the unique, centuries-old books featured at the lecture!
Trimble Book Display
Trimble Book Presentation
The books featured were versions of 13th-century philosopher and scientist Roger Bacon
Opus Majus 1750
Opus majus ad Clementem IV. pontificem maximum. Primum a Samuele Jebb M.D. Londini editum MDCCXXXIII. Nunc vero diligenter recusum. Accedit prologus galeatus in reliqua opera ejusdem autoris.
Opus Majus (Latin for “Greater Work”) was Roger Bacon
Here at the Niels Bohr Library and Archives, we have a copy of the 1750 reprint of Jebb’s edition of Opus Majus: Opus majus ad Clementem IV. pontificem maximum. Primum a Samuele Jebb M.D. Londini editum MDCCXXXIII. Nunc vero diligenter recusum. Accedit prologus galeatus in reliqua opera ejusdem autoris
Let’s take a closer look at our copy to see some of the cool features of this edition!
Opus Majus 1750
Above you can see the cover of our copy; it is bound with leather and is a quarto size, meaning that the pages of the book were formed by folding sheets of printing paper into fourths. Quarto sized books are decently large and were designed for reading and studying rather than portability. While the binding of the book is not contemporary (likely rebound by an owner in the 19th or 20th century), the inside title page gives us a sense of our copy’s history, also called provenance. Below, on the bottom left of the title page you will see two stamps with religious symbols. These are library stamps from two different Franciscan Order libraries in Poland and Central Europe who owned this book at some point in the last 300 years, before it passed into the possession of booksellers, contemporary owners, and eventually us at Niels Bohr Library. Since Roger Bacon himself was part of the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor in the 13th century, it is particularly fascinating that our copy spent much of its life centuries later being used by fellow members and scholars of his faith. It is also fun to think about how far this book has traveled in its lifetime, from Venice to Poland to Florida to Maryland, and those are just the places we know of!
Opus Majus 1750 Title Page
Another fun thing to note about this edition is the presence of some decorative typographical elements. On the title page there is a vignette, or an engraved emblematic image, depicting cherubs in a garden tending a bush. Vignettes were sometimes used in books of this era to invoke the subject or purpose of the book through allegory. The edition also has “floriated initials”
Title Vignette in the 1750 edition of Opus Majus.
Floriated initial in the 1750 edition of Opus Majus.
However, despite the ornate decorative aspects interwoven with the text at the start of the book, the scientific figures and illustrations for the Opus Majus do not actually occur in line with the text. Instead, they were printed separately as a large foldout chart often included at either the front or back of the book. This was a common practice in that era, since the printing of figures was done using a different illustration method (engraving) than the decorative elements (which used the older woodcut method). Engraving required a special type of printing press that was not compatible with the movable type printing press, so the figures would be printed on a separate sheet that would be inserted into the book after it was printed. Our copy is unfortunately missing the three pull-out charts of figures meant to be in this edition, so to remedy this, a previous owner took photographs of a different edition that did include the figures as pullouts, and included prints of those pictures with our copy.
Printed photographs of the figures meant to be folded charts in the 1750 edition of the Opus Majus included in the copy held at the Niels Bohr Library & Archives.
Perspectiua : in qua, quae ab aliis fuse traduntur, succincte, neruose & ita pertractantur, vt omnium intellectui facile pateant.
Now, on to the Perspectiva! As mentioned earlier, although the complete work of the Opus Majus did not come into print until much later, individual sections of the work were printed separately and gained popularity in these small portable editions, sometimes mixed with other texts. The Niels Bohr Library and Archives has an example of such a book, printed in Germany in 1614, over a century before Jebb’s edition! This book contains the fifth part of Roger Bacon’s Opus Majus, known as Perspectiva (Latin for “Optics”), and is illustrated with figures throughout. The book also contains an additional work attributed to Roger Bacon, known as De Speculis Comburentibus (Latin for “On Burning Mirrors”) which delves into refraction and the use of mirrors to focus and amplify light. The book was purchased by the Niels Bohr Library & Archives in 2021 with the help of the Avenir Foundation (see our blog post about it
Title page of the 1614 first edition of the fifth book of Bacon’s Opus Majus. It also contains another treatise by Bacon not from the Opus Majus, but also sent to the Pope in 1267-68, on burning mirrors, De speculis comburentibus.
Above you can see the title page of the Pespectiva, which was printed in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1614. It was edited by Johannes Combach, a professor of philosophy and theology at the University of Marburg, and represents the first time Bacon’s treatise on optics from the Opus Majus was published in print (nunc primum in lucem editum). From the title page we can also see that book was type set (typis) by Wolfgang Richter and published (sumptibus) by Antonius Hummius. It is also worth noting that the title of the work, Perspectiua : in qua, quae ab aliis fuse traduntur, succincte, neruose & ita pertractantur, vt omnium intellectui facile pateant
The scientific diagrams in this edition were produced by the woodcut method
Our copy of this edition however has some extra special features and annotations that make it unique!
First, the cover! While they say don’t judge a book by its cover, who wouldn’t want to read this beautiful volume if you saw it sitting on the shelf! This book is bound with leather and paper boards dyed using the marbling technique, which creates the colorful and vibrant pattern (learn about the marbling technique and see other examples from our collection in this blog post from 2019: “Magical Marbled Paper
Our copy of this book is particularly fascinating because it has notes and annotations by previous owners, known as “marginalia.” While we don’t know who or when these previous owners were in possession of this volume, we know that at least two people owned and used this book before it was rebound, since their handwritten notes in the margins remain. Interestingly, the engagement with text for both of these readers was only with the second work in the volume, De Speculis Comburentibus.
The first “scribal hand” wrote in pencil. They seemed mainly engaged with the text by highlighting important passages and occasionally writing a word or two in the margins. They liked to draw manicules, or little hands pointing a finger at interesting lines. If you have ever seen symbols like these in old-timey posters or books or the Wingdings font, ☛☞☜☚, they actually come from a tradition of readers drawing little cartoon hands in medieval manuscripts!
Here is an example of our pencil-wielding reader highlighting a passage:
Marginalia in pencil in the left hand margin of a page in De Speculis Comburentibus
In the left hand margin you can see the reader using a variety of annotation methods including quotes “””, a manicule ☞ pointing to “apparebit”, and writing the slightly cut off “... de speculis” next to where it appears in the text.
Another manicule ☜ pointing to an important passage next to an illustration.
The other reader, who used iron gall ink, likely came before our pencil scribe, which we can surmise through their use of Latin and older scribal abbreviations. They included a wide range of annotations and spelling corrections to both the text and images, particularly the set of full page illustrations at the back of the book.
First, this reader notes at the top of the page that while this section is presented in the edition as Tractus de Speculis (A Treatise on Mirrors), it is also known by the title De Speculis Comburentibus.
Annotation to the title identifying that this section is Bacon’s De Speculis Comburentibus.
Next we see the reader correcting the spelling of the word vmkefi in the text to “mukefi”, which occurs four times within this chapter. “Mukefi” is a Latin transliteration of the Arabic term for parabolic (مكافئ) which was misspelled as a result of a typographer’s error. (This page also shows the pencil reader drawing another manicule!)
Annotations by both scribal hands: Correction to “mukefi” and a manicule.
Lastly below, with these full page plates, we see the reader both annotating images directly and describing what they depict in Latin. The figures of interest depict how images are perceived by the eye (oculos)
Annotated woodcut figures from the back of the 1614 edition of Perspectiva.
Being able to see how actual readers engaged and responded to these texts is one of my favorite things about working with special collections. You get the sense you are reading over someone else’s shoulder and it helps bring the past to life. This book is not just the transmission of a text from the 1200s, but also a living, breathing work of history in its own right. It allows us a glimpse into the adventures it underwent – globetrotting, changing hands, and fascinating readers - until it reached us here at the Niels Bohr Library & Archives for the next chapter of its story. It is a reminder that we are stewards of these objects and just one stop on their centuries-long journey of existence.
We hope you enjoyed getting a glimpse at these gems from our collection. Be sure to check out Elly Truitt’s book Marvelous Inventions: Roger Bacon, the Middle Ages, and the Making of Modern Science when it comes out, and join us for the next Trimble Lecture on June 5th, 2024, with astrophysicists John Mather and Mark Clampin
Opus Majus 1750
Opus Majus
Opus majus ad Clementem IV. pontificem maximum. Primum a Samuele Jebb M.D. Londini editum MDCCXXXIII. Nunc vero diligenter recusum. Accedit prologus galeatus in reliqua opera ejusdem autoris.
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Perspectiva and De Speculis Comburentibus
Perspectiua : in qua, quae ab aliis fuse traduntur, succincte, neruose & ita pertractantur, vt omnium intellectui facile pateant.