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Rare Books

Through the century long development of the Museum Library, the collection of rare and valuable books has resulted in an impressive collection of books and images chronicling the development of cultures across the globe. Because of their rare and, in some cases, fragile condition, these books, pamphlets and folios are shelved in the library's Locked Cases and may only be viewed upon request.

Some of the highlights of the Museum Library's Locked Case collection include the nine-volume set Antiquities of Mexico by Edward King Kingsborough. These folios published between 1830 and 1848 contain facsimiles of ancient Mexican paintings and hieroglyphics, preserved in the royal libraries of Paris, Berlin and Dresden, as well as the Imperial Library of Vienna; the Vatican Library; the Borgian Museum at Rome; the library of the Institute at Bologna; and the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

Monument de Ninive d'ecouvert et d'ecrit by Paul Emile Botta and illustrated by Eugene Flandin is a five-volume set meant to fully describe and illustrate the French excavations at the Assyrian site of Nineveh. The books are arguably the most elaborate publication ever devoted to Mesopotamian archaeology, an ancient Near Eastern successor to the Napoleonic Description de l'Egypte. Begun soon after the initial discoveries, the publication was the result of extraordinary outlays of time and money by France's Louis-Philippe's government in 1849-50 that spent almost three times as much on the publication as it did on excavations the books were meant to describe!

One of the works in the collection seminal to the anthropology of North America is The North American Indian: being a series of volumes picturing and describing the Indians of the United States, and Alaska, by Edward S. Curtis. This 20-volume is the result of what Curtis characterized as a mission “to form a comprehensive and permanent record of all the important tribes of the United States and Alaska that still retain to a considerable degree their...customs and traditions.” Like most scholars of early 20th century, Curtis believed that Native American communities would inevitably be assimilated into white society and lose their unique cultural identities. He wanted to create a scholarly and artistic work that would document the ceremonies, beliefs, customs, daily life, and leaders of these groups before they “vanished.” Curtis visited more than eighty Native American in the United States, Alaska and parts of Canada taking more than 40,000 photographs, made over 10,000 recordings of Native speech and music while developing lectures and slide shows for the public. Working alone or with various assistants, Curtis funded the project by soliciting donations from diverse sources including President Theodore Roosevelt and the railroad tycoon J.P. Morgan as well as subscriptions to the series itself. When the last two volumes of the series were published in 1930, only 272 complete sets had been printed.

The Locked Case collection also contains a copy of the multi-volume Griechische vasenmalerei (Greek Vase Painting) by Aldof Furtwängler published in 1904. Furtwängler is regarded as one of the most important and influential German archaeologists in the 19th century. He died in 1907 at the age of 54 as the result of illness contracted during an archaeological excavation but, during his short 20-year career Furtwängler published 20 major works including Griechische vasenmalerei which are considered standard references in Classical archaeology and art history.

Of interest to Egyptologists is the major work of Karl Richard Lepsius the Denkmaeler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien (Monuments from Egypt and Ethiopia). In 1842 Lepsius was commissioned by King Frederich Wilhelm IV of Prussia to lead an expedition to Egypt and the Sudan to explore and record the remains of the ancient Egyptian civilization. This Prussian expedition, modeled after Napoleon's earlier exploration of the country, enlisted the services of surveyors, draftsmen, and other specialists which devoted three years to its study. Lepsius' expedition reached Giza in November 1842 and spent six months making some of the first scientific studies of the pyramid fields of Giza, Abusir, Saqqara and Dashur. The major product of this expedition was the publication of the Denkmaeler, a twelve-volume folio compendia of nearly 900 plates of ancient Egyptian inscriptions, with accompanying commentary and descriptions published between 1897 and 1913. These plans, maps, and drawings of ancient Egyptian temple and tomb walls became a chief source of information for Western scholars well into the 20th century, and are useful even today because they are often the sole record of monuments that are now destroyed or reburied.