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Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Deaccessioned from... (?)

In the freshman honors seminar that I am giving in the fall, I am really looking forward to teaching about the Ottoman Hebrew translation of some of the Spanish-language New World chronicles as a way of demonstrating the continuing connections between the Judaeo-Islamic universe and Spain even as it moved forward from its increasing catholicization and oppression and expulsion of religious minorities. I ordered a copy of the Hebrew text from a British bookseller featured on ABE Books.

It arrived with the unaltered mark of it former owner:


I wish that either the library, when it sold off or donated surplus books, or the bookseller when he acquired it, had marked it as "deaccessioned" or in some other way defaced the owner's mark. This makes me just a teeny bit nervous that perhaps it was removed improperly from the library and somehow ended up illicitly in a secondhand bookshop.

Of course, given that I'm currently working on a question of owner's marks in late medieval and early modern books, I'm probably overthinking this.

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