home

HOME PAGE / WELCOME
This site, an outgrowth of my class on the history of the book at the Rare Book School in Charlottesville during the summer of 2010 (professors: John Buchtel and Mark Dimunation), offers a brief explanation of the Huguenot Society of America (SOCIETY HISTORY) and approaches two books in the Society's library. This project will continue to grow (now that I've set up a system for chronicling the material), and I hope to make the members of the Society, and bibliophiles in general, aware of the noteworthy holdings of this private collection that was started over 125 years ago. It is also my desire to create an exhibition at some point, and this site will allow material to be recorded as my research into the collection expands.

The two books that I've chosen for initial review are different in several aspects. The first book (FRENCH BIBLE) is a French-language translation of the old and new Testaments from the original Hebrew and Greek, an updated version of the earlier 1535 translation of the Bible by Pierre Robert, dit Olivétan. The Bible was printed in 1567 by François Estienne and includes liturgical material and a //calendrier historial//. The second book (ROMAN FORGERIES), an often intemperate discussion on the validity of the records used to dictate Roman Catholic Church doctrine, was written by English scholar and clergyman Thomas Traherne and published anonymously in 1673.

The former book has a visual elegance in design and quality of printing, in tune with Olivétan's high-minded desire for the accessibility of the teachings of the Bible in one's own tongue. The latter, an example of the somewhat coarse output of seventeenth-century English printers, matches the bold and excessive voice of the text. Obviously understanding that the content of a book is not always (or seldomly) manifested in the look and literal texture of its pages, I could not resist the extended metaphor from word to object that these books afforded.