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An incredibly rare 17th century book is found in a donation bin michigan “It fell apart immediately,” said an employee at the store, State University’s Thrift Shop.
In late August, as students were returning for the academic year, MSU announced an exciting discovery made the previous fall. Employees of the university’s surplus store found an ancient Latin text covered in pigskin among the thousands of pounds of books donated every week.
“It looked and felt very different than any other book,” Chris Hewitt, the store’s operations coordinator, recently told the local outlet. wooden tv“It immediately became clear that this was something unique.”
MSU concluded that the book was moral theologyA text on moral theology by Paul Lemann, an Austrian who is part of the Jesuits, a Roman Catholic religious order. The book was produced by the printer Guillaume Auvergne in the city of Liège, Belgium in 1672, 37 years after the author’s death.
Hewitt said, “I believe this was a time when they still had to press everything by hand. So, considering how thick that book is, it was quite a labor of love to put it together.”
Layman, a popular Catholic moralist, taught theology in Austria and the German state of Bavaria. moral theologyOne of dozens of Layman’s works, it became a “cornerstone text for Catholic seminaries,” reprinted for more than a century, MSU said in a News release,
“It’s easily the oldest book I’ve ever seen here,” said Kari Schubauer, the store’s book manager. “To think that someone dropped it in the trash. It’s unbelievable.”
It’s unclear how the book ended up in the campus recycling bin. MSU said there was no marking on the library, leading them to believe it was privately owned. With such a unique discovery, the University did not put the book up for sale, but instead placed it in the Special Collections of the MSU Libraries to preserve it for years to come.
The surplus store either resells the donations at an affordable price to students and locals, or recycles them depending on their condition.
Store staff have found other rare texts and objects in recent years, including early volumes uncle Tom’s Cabinfirst edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and first digit of peanuts comedy series. They also found an old eel-skin briefcase, handmade robots, and a horse-drawn carriage.
“A few years ago, we also got the first edition of Charles Darwin’s book. It wasn’t origin of speciesBut it is a different matter that he has written about worms, which is appropriate because we also have a worm facility to compost the food waste of the campus. We thought it was a really cool kind of full circle,” Hewitt told Wood TV.