Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Recent Acquisitions

- The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at St. John's University has acquired a copy of the Ostrih Bible (1581), "the first complete printed Bible in Church Slavonic, the common liturgical language of Slavic Christianity ... The HMML copy was originally owned by the Orthodox Bishop of L’viv, Ukraine, Hedeon Balaban (bp. 1569-1607), and was only recently discovered in northern Romania by a European bookseller. This is an extremely rare book, with only a handful of copies in North America. HMML’s copy is in unusually good condition: most copies are very worn, and often are missing pages." HMML also recently acquired a first edition of The Dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great (Strasbourg, 1472-3) in a BozĂ©rian le Jeune binding.

- Holdings at the Lilly Library at Indiana University will now include a copy of an 1811 book detailing the origins of Ocktoberfest. The work, just 46 pages long, "describes the harvest festival first held to celebrate the 1810 wedding of the [Bavarian] crown prince Ludwig to princess Theresa von Sachsen-Hildurghausen."

- A small library in India recently received a bequest of some 400 books from the estate of a college professor, The Telegraph reports. Uttam Chandra Bhattacharya's family donated the books - which included "rare volumes on the Upanishads and Vedas, as well as four volumes of Rabindranath Tagore’s Geetanjali in Sanskrit" -to the Dhubri Sakha Sahitya Sabha’s library.