Tag Archives: Doctrina

Penman No. 298: Books with Back Stories (1)

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Penman for Monday, April 16, 2018

 

AS I’VE been chronicling here these past few months, my fascination late in life with antiquarian books and documents has led me to some wonderful, intriguing, and often serendipitous discoveries. And as I’ve been saying, I’m a scavenger, not a scholar, so I will just as likely come across and even pick up junk as I will, now and then, a jewel. My most recent acquisitions have included a gorgeous Atlas de Filipinas from 1900 in very fine condition, early editions of the Noli and Fili published in Spain, a booklet of original sketches by one of the illustrators of Puck magazine from 1889, an illustrated travel book on Luzon and Palawan from 1887 by Alfred Marche, and a signed first edition of a book by one of my most admired authors, John Updike.

As much as possible, I seek out books that have some connection to the Philippines and its history and culture. If possible—and when I can afford it—I choose the first or earlier editions, signed by the authors, to establish some personal connection to the work at its very origins. It’s a fancy fetish, for sure, more than anything; you can often legally download the entire text for free online, and gain as much scholarship from that file. But there’s nothing like holding a book that the author himself or herself held and even scribbled his or her name on with a fountain pen (or a quill pen, in the case of my 300-year-old volumes with marginal notations in fine sepia ink). It returns you to how personal the act of writing and publishing can be, in this age of e-books and PDFs.

A few weeks ago, for example, I jumped on a book that turned up in Texas, a 1948 facsimile copy of the 1593 Doctrina Christiana, the very first book printed in the Philippines (a personal encounter with which I reported on here four years ago, at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC). Facsimiles are interesting but generally passed over by collectors—you can still get a facsimile of the Doctrina locally for P250—but this one had a very special value. Not only was it published by the LOC very soon after the book (the only copy known to exist) resurfaced in Paris after the war and was donated to the LOC, proof that the LOC knew exactly how rare it was; but this copy was inscribed in green ink by Lessing J. Rosenwald to George L. McKay. Rosenwald happened to be the book collector who acquired the Doctrina and donated it, along with many other rarities, to the LOC; McKay was another well-known bibliophile. So this copy shows—against a suggestion I’d heard that Rosenwald didn’t know what he was buying—that Rosenwald prized the Doctrina highly enough to gift its facsimile to his collector-friends.

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That Doctrina facsimile has joined my collection, but another outstanding book didn’t, just when I thought it would. I’d won the bidding for a first edition, with dust jacket, of William Pomeroy’s The Forest (International Publishers, 1963). This is the book that, whenever I’m asked “Which book has influenced you the most?”, I give as an answer. It was my reading back in high school of this American GI-turned-Communist guerrilla’s lyrical and moving account of his time with the Huks in the mountains of Luzon that inflamed me to join the nationalist movement. Pomeroy met and married the Filipina Celia Mariano; they were captured, imprisoned, and later led a long life of exile in the UK, where they died not too long ago in their 90s. I already had a first edition of The Forest, but this copy was inscribed by Pomeroy to their friends Bill and Ranjana Ash—another storied couple, dedicated Marxists whose lives are well worth Googling. Sadly I later got a note from the seller that he could no longer find the book in his shop, and refunded me. What a loss!

Sometimes I don’t buy the book, but take note of some very interesting details about it. For example, I came across a work on Philippine fisheries, “Bangos Culture in the Philippine Islands,” taken from an April 1929 issue of the Philippine Journal of Science. It was co-authored by Albert W. Herre and Jose Mendoza, two pioneers in the field. But the bookseller noted that “This copy is unique in that the primary author, Albert W. Herre, has crossed out the name of the second author, Jose Mendoza, on the credit line of the first page, and written alongside it, ‘This name [Jose Mendoza] was added and my paper altered after I had sent it in for publication, all without my knowledge. Herre.’ On the second page, Mr. Herre has crossed out the second paragraph (‘Description of the Bangos’) with a few pen lines (it is still very legible) and written alongside, ‘Added without my knowledge or consent. Herre.’… given that the primary author made the aforementioned annotations, it appears that he donated it to Harvard (and wanted to make sure that Harvard understood that he was the real and only author).” Are we looking at an example of professional jealousy in the sciences?

More on these discoveries next week.

Penman No. 125: A Date with the Doctrina

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1024x1024-1510204Penman for Monday, December 1, 2014

 

NO VISIT to Washington, DC would be complete without looking into the Library of Congress, which stands behind the US Capitol, perhaps in a symbolic juxtaposition of knowledge and power. The library was, in fact, originally lodged with the Congress, but had to be rebuilt when British troops sacked and burned the Capitol in 1814, starting with the wholesale purchase of Thomas Jefferson’s personal collection of almost 7,000 books for about $24,000.

The LOC has come a long way since then; Jefferson’s volumes are still on display, but they have been joined by 36 million more books, not to mention more than 120 million more non-book items such as photographs, manuscripts, recordings, and sheet music. It’s easily the world’s largest library, adding some 12,000 new items to its roster every day, largely because of the copyright registration process. According to the LOC, half of its collections are in languages other than English—about 480 languages all in all, including nearly 3 million items from Asia.

A simple search of the LOC collections shows that there are more than 40,000 items here related to the Philippines (including, should you want to hear it, a recording of William Howard Taft talking about the Philippines shortly before he became President in 1909). The LOC has early editions of Jose Rizal’s Noli and Fili, which, along with other important Rizaliana, were put on special display at the Asian Reading Room in 2011 to commemorate Rizal’s 150th birth anniversary.

Last week, thanks to the combined efforts of the Filipino-American community in Washington and former LOC librarian and Fil-Am activist Reme Grefalda, I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the crown jewel of the LOC’s Philippine holdings—the only known copy in the world of the 1593 Doctrina Christiana, the first book published in the Philippines.

The Doctrina is essentially a catechism, a collection of common prayers, including the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. Being basic prayer books, there had been other Doctrinas published earlier in other countries. The Philippine version was put together by Fray Juan de Plasencia, a Franciscan friar who helped found many Philippine towns, including Antipolo, Lucban, Meycauayan, and Tayabas. In 1585 he wrote King Philip II of Spain that he had already written several religious and scholarly books that could help spread the faith in the islands—including the Doctrina and studies of the Tagalog language—and asked for royal assistance in funding their publication.

But the good friar died in 1585, and it wouldn’t be until some years later, in 1593, when we see Governor General Gomez Perez Dasmariñas writing the King to present him with copies of the Doctrina in two versions—Tagalog and Chinese—and to explain that he had granted a license for the printing of these books (under Dominican auspices) because of their great value to the evangelization effort. And then, so the story goes, all copies of the Doctrina vanish, until the Tagalog one reappears—presumably the royal copy—in Paris in 1946, where it’s bought by an American dealer, who then resells it along with many other books in a lot to the American book collector and onetime Sears Roebuck chairman Lessing J. Rosenwald (1891-1979), who then bequeaths his collection, including the Doctrina, to the Library of Congress upon his death.

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So the LOC’s copy, as far as we know, is the only one of its kind, and it was with great anticipation that Beng and I joined a group of ten Filipino and Filipino-American scholars and advocates who were kindly admitted by the LOC’s Rare Books Division to a private viewing of the Doctrina, with LOC librarian Eric Frazier doing the honors. (While waiting for our appointment, we had taken in a few of the LOC’s other prime offerings including the Gutenberg Bible, which is on permanent display near the stupendous main lobby that welcomes visitors, and the Magna Carta, on loan from the Lincoln Cathedral.)

I should’ve read up more on the Doctrina before we went up there, but I was surprised by two things I realized only when I saw the book up close: its relatively small size, and the fragility of its paper. It’s only about 9 by 7 inches, not much bigger than a contemporary textbook. It was a further surprise to hear Eric say that “As far as I know, among the millions of books we have at the LOC, this is the only one whose every page is sheathed in Mylar.”

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I had asked Eric about the condition of the book and the paper, having seen and even handled other books from the 1600s (many of which, printed on stout, crisp linen paper, look good as new, and have survived in much better shape than the acid-lined paper of the 1800s and 1900s). The Doctrina, as it turns out, was printed xylographically—like a woodblock with the letters carved out—on mulberry paper (other sources say rice paper, although that term may have covered other papers made from mashed material). I’m not a professional historian, so I stand to be corrected on these presumptive facts by people who know vastly more about the Doctrina Christiana and about the history of books than I do (two immediately come to mind, our foremost book historians: Dr. Von Totanes and Dr. May Jurilla).

It was with the greatest of care and respect that we flipped those pages, and we saw what generations of the faithful must have seen (that is, if they saw the book at all): a syllabary, followed by prayers and other articles of faith, presented in Spanish, Tagalog, and baybayin, that pre-Hispanic script that survives in our consciousness only in the Katipunan “ka.” What’s remarkable is how fundamentally familiar the text of the prayers is: “Aba guinoo Maria matoua cana, napopono ca nang gracia. ang panginoon dios, ce, nasayyo. Bucor cang pinagpala sa babaying lahat….”

And so it went, a cry of praise and supplication across the ages, come to life again at our trembling fingertips.

I can only hope that, perhaps through an arrangement with a responsible Philippine institution, the Doctrina can be brought back to the Philippines for a special exhibition (the forthcoming Papal visit would have been the perfect occasion), or at least that more Filipinos in the US could see it, along with the other Philippine holdings at the LOC. It does take time and effort to arrange for a viewing, but in the meanwhile, the full digital copy of the book, provided by the LOC, can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/knpzkn5. For more information on the Doctrina Christiana and this particular copy, see the notes of Project Gutenberg editor Edwin Wolf at http://tinyurl.com/p6uqlvr.