By Elise Breton^*

McGill Rare Books and Special Collections has long held a collection of about 50 framed religious pictures, of which there has been no complete record. This situation is now being improved with the creation of a detailed descriptive list of the collection contents, still in process. The majority of the images are chromolithographs, which means that they were made using a technique of color printing from a stone. This technique is rarer today but was very widely used 150 years ago.

Some of the pictures are classic representations of Christian imagery (the Virgin Mary, Christ, scenes from the Bible) and were probably hung in Quebec kitchens or living rooms at the beginning of the twentieth century. The image of the baby Jesus, shown here, is an example.

The collection also holds more singular items, and the RBSC staff was particularly intrigued by two remarkable and outstandingly shiny pictures.

After some research, we discovered that these gilded and silvered covers are called “rizas” or “oklads”, Russian terms respectively meaning “robe” or “casing”. A riza or oklad is a shaped gilt or silver metal cover over the surface of an icon, which usually leaves spaces for the hands and face of the subject to show through. Its purpose is both to protect the icon by covering it, and to embellish it, sometimes by the addition of precious stones to the metal cover.

The two shown here represent Saint Nicholas, as attested by the Greek inscription shaped in the metal: “ΑΓΙΟΣ ΝΙΚΟΛΑΟΣ” (Agios Nikolaos). Relief ornaments are made using metalworking techniques in which the designs are sculpted by pushing the metal up from the back side (“repoussé”) or down from the front side (chasing).

The list of this fascinating and varied collection will soon be available for researchers to consult.

^{* Elise Breton is an intern in Rare Books and Special Collections from École nationale supérieure des sciences de l’information et des bibliothèques↩}

Some of the earliest editions of Shakespeare’s plays can be consulted in Rare Books and Special Collections, including, notably, a copy of the Second Folio (1632) of collected plays, and two copies of the Fourth Folio (1685).

Like the rarer Third Folio (1663; 1664), the Fourth Folio includes seven plays not part of the First (1623) or Second Folios, most of which are now considered spurious. This fourth and last of the great seventeenth-century folio publications of Shakespeare’s plays was an important source for later editions.

All four can be compared side-by-side in the facsimile editions produced by the London publisher Methuen in the early twentieth century.

An interesting difference between the First and Second Folios is the addition, in the latter, of a poem by John Milton about the Bard (shown below): “An epitaph on the admirable dramaticke poet, VV. Shakespeare.”

As Milton commemorated him then, we commemorate him today, on the 450th anniversary of his birth.

By Elise Breton^*

Perhaps because of his distinctive writing style, as well as his great popularity, Voltaire was often imitated as an author. Questions of dubious Voltaire authorship were an area of interest for Voltaire scholar J. Patrick Lee, whose library was recently acquired by McGill. In his article “The Apocryphal Voltaire: Problems in the Voltairean Canon,” Lee discusses several such titles that are now held in this new collection to McGill.

As Lee noted, Voltaire had himself complained about the many works that were wrongly attributed to him [translation ours]:

On ferait une bibliothèque des ouvrages qu’on m’impute. Tous les réfugiés errants font de mauvais livres et les vendent sous mon nom à des libraires crédules. […] On me répond que c’est l’état du métier. Si c’est cela le métier est fort triste.¹
[One could make a library with all the works that are attributed to me. Every wandering refugee makes a bad book and sells it under my name to gullible booksellers. […] I am told this is simply the state of the profession. If so, the profession is very sad.]

Among Voltaire’s imitators, the abbot Henri-Joseph Du Laurens was not the least talented. He copied Voltaire’s style so well that many of his works, the most famous being Le Compère Matthieu (of which Lee owned two copies), were attributed to Voltaire by his contemporaries. Other works of Du Laurens held in the Lee Voltaire Collection include editions of Les Jésuitiques, which was also for some time attributed to Voltaire. In this copy we can see that an early reader added “par l’abbé du Laurens” in manuscript on the title page.

Voltaire knew about du Laurens, as he wrote in 1768:

Il y a un théatin qui a conservé son nom de Laurent qui est assez facétieux, et qui d’ailleurs est instruit : il est auteur du compère Matthieu, ouvrage dans le goût de Rabelais, dont le commencement est assez plaisant, et la fin détestable.²
[There is a Theatine, who kept his name of Laurent, who is quite mischievous, and who is actually educated: he is the author of Compère Matthieu, a work in the style of Rabelais, of which the beginning is quite pleasant, and the end odious.]

“Perhaps in an ironic revenge for this exploitation of his name,”³ says Lee, Voltaire decided to return the favor: Voltaire’s Relation du bannissement des Jésuites de la Chine is attributed to “l’auteur du Compère Matthieu” on the title page.
These kinds of malicious false attributions of authorship are interesting to track as they are often connected with fascinating stories. And our thanks go to the rare books catalogers, who have to deal with these complicated publishing contexts!

^{* Elise Breton is an intern in Rare Books and Special Collections from École nationale supérieure des sciences de l’information et des bibliothèques↩}

<sup>1. Letter to Damilaville, dated 17 December 1766, in Mémoires secrets (Londres, 1780), VI, 203, quoted in J. Patrick Lee, “The Apocryphal Voltaire: Problems in the Voltairean Canon,” in The enterprise of enlightenment, ed. Terry Pratt and David McCallam, (Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2004), 272.↩
2. Correspondence and related documents in The Complete Works of Voltaire, ed. Theodore Besterman, (Banbury and Oxford, 1974). Letter no. D14838, quoted in Lee’s “Apocryphal Voltaire,” 268.↩
3. Lee, “Apocryphal Voltaire,” 268.↩</sup>

In anticipation of tonight’s total lunar eclipse, we went to the stacks and found these beautifully illustrated 17th, 18th, and 19th century astronomy texts.

‘Blossom’, which depicts a woman seated under a blossoming cherry tree, is one in a series of three prints, Furyu meisho setsu-gekka (Snow, Moon and Blossoms in Celebrated Places). This woodblock print by artist Kikugawa Eizan (1787-1867) is part of the RBSC Japanese Print Collection, available for on-site consultation during opening hours.

Two major figures from the history of New France were canonized on April 3rd 2014 by Pope Francis: Marie Guyart, better known as Marie de l’Incarnation (1599-1672), and Francis-Xavier de Montmorency-Laval, or François de Laval (1623-1708). Marie de l’Incarnation came to New France as an Ursuline nun in 1639, and helped to establish and run Canada’s first school, and François de Laval was the first Roman Catholic Bishop of New France, arriving in Quebec in 1659.

The library holds many titles both by and about these two historical figures. Especially notable among McGill’s holdings are the published letters of Marie de l’Incarnation, printed in 1681, shown here. The book was published by her son, Claude Martin (1619-1696), who was still a young boy when she left him in France to come to the New World, and many of her letters are to him. Martin had also written, in 1677, a biography of his mother (see en electronic copy).

The life of Marie de l’Incarnation interested her contemporaries, including historian and explorer Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix (1682 –1761). His 1724 biography of her, La vie de la mere Marie de l’Incarnation, can also be consulted in Rare Books and Special Collections.

Both of these titles are part of the Lawrence Lande Canadiana Collection.

Jacques Le Goff (1924-April 1st, 2014) was a leader of the French Annales school of history, paying close attention to social and anthropological questions in his study of the Middle Ages. Author of a vast oeuvre, Monsieur le Goff was a tireless communicator, bringing history to a broad public through his weekly radio show on France Culture, “Les Lundis de l’histoire” which lasted from 1968 until this year.

A giant who encouraged new generations of researchers, students, and all who were interested in history, Jacques Le Goff will be sorely missed.
Nos hommages, Monsieur Le Goff.

Titles by Jacques Le Goff in McGill Library

Among the different kinds of leathers used to bind books, pigskin can often be recognized by a distinctive creamy colour and a hardness that can look almost like plastic. As one of our in-house experts noted about the sixteenth-century binding shown here, “it just screams ‘pig’!”.

Books from this period were generally acquired unbound, allowing owners to bind volumes according to their tastes and budgets. Sometimes owners bound several books together, and this book is an example. The volume contains two titles: Persicarum rerum historia in xii. libros descripta, a History of Persia by sixteenth-century historian and spy Pietro Bizzarri (dates uncertain); and Rerum Scoticarum historia, a history of Scotland by Erasmian humanist George Buchanan (1506-1582).

This cover decoration is of special note, with its panel stamp of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (1500-1558). Panel stamping was popular in sixteenth-century Germany, often with famous historical figures featured in the central panel. Henry Coutts and George Stephen, in their 1911 book, Manual of Library Bookbinding Practical and Historical, comment on this stamp, which was used to decorate several books, as a particularly fine example of the technique. Coutts and Stephen describe the decoration as follows :

The emperor is clad in a rich suit of armour and has an uplifted sword in his right hand, and an orb, surmounted by a cross, in his left. By his side is his helmet surmounted by a radiated crown. Above his head is a shield bearing the arms of Germany, and in the corners are two smaller shields bearing the arms of Aragon, Aragon-Sicily, and Spain. Round the pillars of Hercules at the sides is a ribbon inscribed, PLVS VLTRA, CAROLVS QVINTVS, and below is a tablet with the inscription, CAROLE MORTALES DVBITANT, HOMO SISNE DEVSVE : SVNT TVA SCEPTRA HOMINIS SED TVA FACTA DEI (O Charles, mortals doubt whether thou mayest be man or God: the sceptre of man is thine, but thy deeds are of God). Books adorned with this stamp on one cover usually have on the other an equally beautiful one of John Frederic, Duke of Saxony, with sword and helmet. (p.189)

The McGill front panel is an exact match of that description.  The back cover (though less well preserved and more difficult to make out) seems to show the Duke of Saxony mentioned by Coutts and Stephen, which would be fitting given that Bizzarri’s book was dedicated to Augustus I, Duke of Saxony. The Duke’s coat-of-arms faces the dedication page.

The first owner of this volume is not known (though likely had the initials P.L.D., as seen on the cover), but the book is among those previously in the Aylwin Library, part of the heritage of the Morrin Centre and the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec. The signs of provenance include T.C. Aylwin’s signature and the Aylwin Library stamp. (More about this provenance…)

rev. 15/03/2021

Many of the books held at McGill are part of the larger history of Quebec libraries and readers beyond the university. Several of the named special collections held in Rare Books and Special Collections reflect this, and we find local names including Sheila Bourke, Norman Friedman, Rodolphe Joubert, Raymond Klibansky, Lawrence Lande, Max Stern…

But there are many less visible examples. One such can be seen in the dozens of books that were previously owned by the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec (LHSQ).

The LHSQ was founded in Quebec City in 1824 by George Ramsay, 9th Earl of Dalhousie, governor-in-chief of British North America 1820-28. It was open to francophones and anglophones from its beginning, and is the oldest learned society in Canada that is still in existence.

Volumes at McGill previously owned by this library, or likely to have been held by it for a time (e.g. from other libraries known to have been acquired by the LHSQ), date from the 15th to the 19th century on topics ranging primarily across history, literature, philosophy, religion and science. They offer a glimpse of the interests and acquisitions of earlier Quebec readers, and preserve part of the history of personal and institutional collections through various signs of changing ownership and use.

Indications of LHSQ and related ownership.

From 1868, the LHSQ library was housed within Morrin College, now the Morrin Cultural Centre, where it remains today. The library continued to grow through gifts from personal libraries as well as by absorbing other libraries. It had already absorbed in 1866 the libraries of the Quebec Library Association and the earlier subscription library called simply the Quebec Library, formed in 1779.

The LHSQ also took over the supervision, in 1916, of the separate “Aylwin Library” of Morrin College, which had been established some years earlier through the donation of the private library of Quebec lawyer, politician and judge Thomas Cushing Aylwin (1806-1871), an original member of the LHSQ and grandson of Thomas Aylwin (c. 1729-1771), one of the early British settlers in Quebec.

Books from these libraries can be identified in a variety of ways: there are more than two dozen titles with LHSQ-related provenance, identifiable through a variety of provenance evidence types recorded in the notes of catalogue records*. Types of provenance noticed to date are shown below.

*In order to search only the Notes fields of catalogue records for terms like “Literary and Historical Society”, “Aylwin”, “Morrin” or “Quebec Library”, use the Advanced Search of the Classic Catalogue.

Let us know if you notice these signs in books for which the provenance is not recorded!

Oval stamp [1] of the LHSQ	Oval stamp [2] of the LHSQ	Oval stamp [3] of the LHSQ
Round stamp of the LHSQ	French LHSQ bookplate	Morrin College stamp
Aylwin Library stamp	Signature of T.C. Aylwin	Embossed stamp; Aylwin family arms(?)
LHSQ, in manuscript	Manuscript presentation to Morrin College	Quebec Library Association shelf mark style
Quebec Library Association embossed stamp	Quebec Library Association stamp	Quebec Library Association in manuscript
Quebec Library embossed stamp

 

 

 

Postcards, Rare Books and Special Collections