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Hi, my name is Jennifer Brannock. I am the curator of rare books and Mississippiana in Special Collections
at the University of Southern Mississippi
Today we going to highlight one of the one of the books in the general special collections
It is a 16'th century antiphoner
used by monks in their daily services.
So you can see that the cover is very detailed with leather and
brass accents.
Along the side here you just have a number three
and that's how it was on the shelf now-a-days they have call numbers
that was the early call number, I guess.
You can see along the side here, there used to be clasps to keep the book closed.
As I open it up, it's really a very heavy book, it's probably about
twenty-five to thirty pounds
and its because the front and back covers are wood.
So in the book world you call the front & back covers the boards and that's
because it is actually made with boards as you can see with this one.
With this book, it is hand illuminated and hand illustrated.
The monks would chant
from this book and so the music notation is quite different
from modern contemporary notation.
All the pages
are animal skin
so all of the illustration is done on the animal skin. You can tell the
difference in
page colors from the exterior and the interior sides of the skin.
The interior tends to be lighter than the exterior and even on the exterior you
can see a little bit of hair follicles.
Sorry to all the vegetarians out there for that, but it's really cool that you
can see this in a book.
Now also keep in mind that this is from the fifteen hundreds and it is still in great
condition, whereas a book from the sixties, the nineteen sixties
tends to be in horrible shape.
As you're looking through it, some of the pages are a little more illustrated than others
so with this one we have a huge illuminated letter that goes down the
page it is really pretty intricate for this book.
With the creation of these books you would do it in stages, so one person
would take care of doing the musical notation, another person would do the
lettering, and another person would come in and do the illustrations.
Let me show you an example from towards the back of the book
because
this book is from Spain, its a Spanish book but it is all written in Latin
because it was a Catholic services book.
But in the back you can see that it wasn't finished, the book was not complete.
So you actually have empty spaces where it has an "N" written in there
that the next person who would do the next illuminated letter would have to do an "N" in this particular spot.
It's a really cool, just different example of early history, early print, early book history.
Just a different, little fun thing they do is
when a page would tear
they actually sewed it back together, so you can here the thread where they actually went through
and sewed the book up.
But of course as with all of our materials here in Special Collections, they are
available to anyone, all you need is a picture I.D. and if you want to, you are more than welcome
to come look at this