The First Duke of Sussex, Royal Society portrait, circa 1838  (via wikimedia commons The April 20, 2020 New Yorker has a fascinating article by Rebecca Mead on everyone’s favorite ex-royals, Meghan and Harry, that compares their unconventional relationship with the rest of the royal family to that of the first Duke of Sussex (Harry is the second Duke), Prince Augustus, sixth son of King George III.  If you read the article, you were probably drawn, like me, to one of the really interesting facts about Augustus–that he “amassed a large library of valuable books and manuscript ..read more

by Fabrizio Quaglia This is the third in a series of posts by Fabrizio Quaglia on his ongoing work collecting Footprints and other data from the collection of David Kaufmann, now at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. As Quaglia notes, the collection is multilayered, revealing libraries within libraries. Title Page with Aharon Ya’akov Segre inscription Moving towards Western Italy is the small city of Chieri, near Turin. The cursive Hebrew purchase note of one of its inhabitants, Aharon Ya‘akov Segre, father of Netan’el Segre (1623-1691), rabbi in Cento (Ferrara), is readable on t ..read more

Molly Pocrass has been working with Columbia’s Footprints project for about 10 months. “I can honestly say that before then, I didn’t really think about the history of the books I read or even handled. That has changed now, due to the materials I have been privileged to catalog and my work tracing where they’ve been before.” Molly Pocrass has been cataloging sixteenth-century Hebrew books printed in Venice that are part of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America’s (JTS) collection of rare Jewish books. While cataloging these books, she has been entering records into the database Footprints ..read more

by Fabrizio Quaglia This is the second in a series of posts by Fabrizio Quaglia on his ongoing work collecting Footprints and other data from the collection of David Kaufmann, now at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. As Quaglia notes, the collection is multilayered, revealing libraries within libraries. Abraham Joseph Salomon Graziano (1619-1685) Mevakesh H. with Graziano inscription (Venice 1596, f. 1v. [Kaufmann B 413] ) The Mantuan origin of the owners of many of the items in the Kaufmann library is of course not the only geographical point of departure from which it grew. Th ..read more

by Fabrizio Quaglia This is the first in a series of posts by Fabrizio Quaglia on his ongoing work collecting Footprints and other data from the collection of David Kaufmann, now at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. As Quaglia notes, the collection is multilayered, revealing libraries within libraries. Figure 1: Emanuel Porto, Ḥoḵmatḵem we-binatḵem le-‘einei ha-‘amim = Porto astronomico, Padua 1636; verso of the front flyleaf. [Kaufmann B 288] Italian bibliographic note by Marco Mortara about the author. Lower, David Kaufmann’s signature. Like a traveler crossing a world of old ..read more

Inscription showing ownership of a copy of Isaac ben Moses Arama’s Akedat Yitshak (1522, Salonika) by Moshe Balsani in Morocco in the 16th century. EARLY MODERN HEBREW PALEOGRAPHY WORKSHOP, May 22-23, 2023 Footprints: Jewish Books through Time and Place, in conjunction with the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, invites applicants for participation in a two-day workshop in New York City devoted to the study of Hebrew paleography after the inception of print. This two-day intensive workshop in New York (Monday morning May 21, 2023 through Tuesday afternoon May 22) will offer training in ..read more

The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary seeks a Research Fellow/Cataloger to catalog and research sixteenth-century Venetian imprints in the collection as part of a collaboration with Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place. This is a part-time, grant-funded position for 10 months. The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary holds the foremost collection of Judaica and Hebraica in the Western Hemisphere, with a collection of approximately 400,000 volumes including significant special collections, a comprehensive general collection, and large digital collections. The Library s ..read more

Haim Gottschalk is a Hebraica and Judaica cataloger at the Library of Congress, currently working on the LC’s collection of Hebrew incunabula. He is also entering provenance data for the incunabula into Footprints. The views in this blog post are not representative of the Library of Congress or its staff. In June of 2013, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which bills itself as the “definitive record of the English language”, added the word “Crowdsourcing” to its lexicon. The OED defined the word as “the practice of obtaining information or services by soliciting input from a large number of ..read more

Things may have seemed quiet for the last few months on the Footprints front while the development team and the co-directors were all busily attending to some new upgrades behind the scenes.  Now that they are live, we are thrilled to tell you about them. Teaching with Footprints is a new tab on the site that describes how Footprints can be used in the classroom.  We pulled together many examples (and a few sample teaching tools) on how teachers in diverse fields can use Footprints for a hands-on classroom experience (whether in-person or virtual) . The Teaching page includes “Tips a ..read more

Ed. note: When we began our work on Footprints, we quickly realized that William Popper’s Censorship of Hebrew Books was going to be critical to identifying expurgators, and the places and dates where they operated.  Although over one hundred years old, Popper’s seminal work identifies many censors by their dates and locations, and includes images of their signatures in printed books. Kate Cornelius, a student at the University of Pittsburgh, thus created a spreadsheet of the censors found in Popper, and we refer to it constantly in Footprints research. Over time, though, we have found er ..read more