Roman de la Rose incunables at the Library of Congress

This past Friday I visited the Library of Congress, where I met with Daniel De Simone, curator of the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection. We met in the Rare Books reading room and looked at three early print editions of Roman de la Rose (LC call numbers Incun. X .R75 , Incun. X .G974, and Rosenwald PQ1527 .A1 1503) to consider them for inclusion in the Rose Digital Surrogates project. Mr. De Simone and Mark Dimunation, Chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the LC, have graciously granted permission to include these books on the site, and they are currently in the LC’s digitization queue. These will be interesting additions to our site, not only because they’re print copies and we currently have only manuscripts, but also because they show variety among printed versions of the Rose. One prints the text in verse with woodblock illustrations and another prints the text in prose format in two columns (also with woodblocks). The third (the 1493 edition) is a truly spectacular book. It is printed on vellum by Antoine Vérard, and every effort was made to make this look like a manuscript – guide lines were drawn in under the text and there is lots of hand decoration. Wonderful miniatures have been painted over the wood blocks. The only catch with this book is that it was rebound in a binding that is far too tight, and thus they won’t be able to photograph most pages, as it is impossible to open the book wide enough, or to get it flat enough, even to photograph one leaf at a time. Mr. De Simone offered to photograph the beginning of the book, however, as it opens readily, and I took him up on it since this book is a wonderful example of the transition from manuscript to print. Because of work currently scheduled for digitizing, it will probably be several months before we get the images.