The CC Authors Reception is today! We’re celebrating 70 faculty and staff authors with publications since May of 2014. It’s quite gratifying to me, as a librarian and a writer, to see the impressive scholarly output of the faculty and staff at Colorado College, a small liberal arts college with a focus on teaching. You’d think we were a big university from the amount of publications on display!

This year we’re concurrently celebrating a few amazing new acquisitions in Special Collections, since, why not, we’re just upstairs from the authors reception. We’ve mentioned many of these acquisitions in earlier blog posts, but not these two:

Themistius. Paraphrasis in Aristotelem. [Treviso, Italy]: Bartholomaeus Confalonerius and Morellus Gerardinus, 1481. Purchase. Now the earliest printed book in the library, beating out a 1484 Jacobus de Voragine for the honor. With bookworm damage (not affecting text) and a previous owner’s marginalia throughout.

Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher. Fifty Comedies and Tragedies. Second folio. London: Printed by J. Macock, for John Martyn, Henry Herringman, Richard Marriot, 1679. Gift of the National Endowment for the Humanities Professorship at Colorado College, 2015, courtesy Steven Hayward. This is the only copy of the second folio in Colorado. It contains several plays not included in the first folio, published 1647. Our copy is bound in leather over boards and has two brass clasps keeping it shut. We expect to bring it out regularly for researchers and classes studying Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

The event is co-sponsored by Tutt Library and the Crown Faculty Center.

No one had requested our copy of the first edition of The Book of Mormon in at least fifteen years, but that all changed last month. First one request, then another, and then eighty Mormon visitors in one day, broken up into four groups in order not to overcrowd the reading room.

The Book of Mormon, the foundational text of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was first published in Palmyra, NY in 1830. 5000 copies were printed, of which at least 144 are currently in libraries. Joseph Smith’s text has been reprinted hundreds of times and translated into many languages and alphabets, including Brigham Young’s Deseret alphabet (one of several alphabets developed to simplify spelling in the 19th century, including one invented by Melvil Dewey, yes, he of the card catalog system).

The first edition of the book contains a number of typographical errors, including page 487 printed as 48, and, in some copies (not ours), “rumderers” for “murderers” on page 521. (For a full list, see Janet Jenson’s “Variations between Copies.”) [Addendum, January 2016: volunteer JoAnn Hendershot has discovered that the CC copy of The Book of Mormon also has page 212 printed as 122. She went through Jenson’s list and found no other variations in our copy.]

Book values change with the times, and the monetary value of this book has increased exponentially. According to library records, Colorado College purchased our copy for $250 in 1962. It was one of the first purchases made using the Hulbert Fund, honoring Archer Butler Hulbert, CC professor and scholar of the American West. The book is now worth perhaps $100,000. Our copy, however, is not for sale.

This illustration is from E.P. Tenney’s The New West, published 1878. It shows — or purports to show — the western facade of Colorado College’s Cutler Hall (also known as Palmer or simply “The College,” depending on the date).

Doesn’t it look enticing? A potential CC student could picture herself sitting with classmates and faculty in rocking chairs on that big back porch, talking together about Aristotle as they gazed out at a glorious Pikes Peak sunset.

Except that the porch, indeed the whole western piece of the building, was never built.

Nothing in The New West suggests that this illustration is any less real than the illustration of the building’s eastern facade, and indeed, at the time, they were equally imaginary. In 1878 the college did not yet have a freestanding building and operated out of a storefront in downtown Colorado Springs.

The middle piece of the planned building opened for classes in 1880, looking rather lonely out on the prairie:

Around 1882, wings were added:

But the western-facing bit was never built.

Look at this gift we got from Paul Petersky, CC class of 1977! It’s a two-volume score of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, in German and Italian, published in Bonn in 1814. It’s in remarkably good condition for its age, and we know it will be fun to show to CC students in the years to come.

The first edition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in London in 1792, currently sells for about $20,000 (if you can even find one on the market). Too rich for our blood! We recently acquired a copy of the third American edition (Philadelphia, 1794) for a fraction of that price. (About a twentieth, if you must know.) Our edition was published toward the end of the author’s life: she died in 1797.

Colorado College students read this text in a number of classes (English, Philosophy, Feminist and Gender Studies). Perhaps an enterprising student will take the opportunity to compare this edition with earlier and later editions we have in electronic and paper form.