Authors

Told you I would be posting more frequently.

Still working on the transcriptions. It's slow going, but once I get on a roll then it becomes fairly easy to get a lot of work done. Which reminds me; that letter I was having so much difficulty with. It was a capital A. The writer simply didn't allow for enough ink to complete the entire letter so it looked ridiculous. But enough whining about hundred-year-old Jesuit authors.

Anyway, a couple new interesting pieces. I found a few fascinating books on the current page I'm working on. The first is Pomponii Mela Situs Orbin descriptio (Gr.) written back in 1577. It's partially a reprint of the author's father's text with different translations thrown in. The text is designed as both an account of the works of and a description of said works that belonged to the poet Dionysius who lived in 2nd century Rome. What made me interested in this book particularly was a line of thought that developed while trying to research it. Was the original attempt at preserving the works of this poet due to his own greatness as a writer, or did the original authors of this book of Dionysius's works only preserve what he had created because he was from ancient Rome? In other words, was Dionysius's work considered something worthy of preservation on its own merits or merely because it was from the Roman Empire? I won't write an essay on the topic, but it was simply an idea that occurred to me.

In the catalog, the Jesuits commonly had books with unknown places and dates of publication. They would also occasionally have an unknown author to their book. This could be for a variety of reasons: damage to the first pages of the book that would have the name listed; revisions done later by a different author making it difficult to give credit to one particular source; etc. I discovered two such works today. Both were French in origin. The first was "Eglises de Paris," that, while listed as An. (anonymous), was written by Edouard Gourdon. The exact reasoning for it to be listed like this is unknown to me. My guess is that the author of the catalog was unable to locate it while doing the initial inventory. The second work I found was "Indisjunsable du nouveau Conducteur des estrangers dans Paris" (a more French title of a book does not exist), that I discovered was written by Auguste Péquégnot (an equally French author).

Stay tuned for more entertaining entries from the Catalog of the Immense Number of Entries which are Titles of Books held in the Jesuit Library roughly 100 Years Ago, and Often Written in 3 Languages: French, English and Latin. (Still working on a clever sign off)