Welcome to our first post in a series celebrating the Spring 2025 Special Collections & University Archives interns and their projects. This semester, USF students worked hands-on with incunabula leaves, poetry broadsides, fine press imprints, wood engravings, and archival collections, uncovering the many ways print culture connects art, literature, and history across the centuries.
This post was written by Brooke Schneider, an English Literature major with a Politics minor, who will be graduating in May as part of the USF Class of 2025. In her internship, Brooke delved into Konrad Haebler’s incunabula leaf books, creating an inventory that highlighted unique features like rubrication and marginalia, before scanning the leaves for inclusion in the library’s Digital Collections. Thank you, Brooke!
This semester I have had the pleasure of working with incunabula leaves from West Europe, Italy, and Germany compiled by Konrad Haebler. Incunabula describes any early printed book before the year 1501, and the leaves in USF’s Special Collections range from the years 1469–1500 and cover a large variety of languages, printing styles, and content.
Konrad Haebler was a German librarian and historian who compiled leaves into volumes by region, including descriptive texts for each leaf detailing the printer, the type of text, the manner it was printed, and information about the location of the printer. Prior to this semester, the library catalog showed only that we had these incunabula volumes in our collection; the hope for my project this semester was to collect data about each leaf and scan them to upload to the library database making it much easier to utilize these leaves for research or just pure curiosity!
One of my favorite discoveries from these volumes is a leaf from West Europe. Printed by Philippe Pigouchet in 1499, the leaf from “Heures a L’usage” or “Hours in Use” is a page from a book that we actually have in our collection. In the Rare Book Room and Digital Collections, we have a 1497 edition that includes an incredible array of illustrations, rubrication, and decorative wood-cut borders. I had taken note of this leaf, printed in Paris and a part of the West European Haebler volume, because of the intricacies in the illustrations. Although I can not read the Latin text, any observer can tell there is clearly an interesting story being told through the imagery: the Christ figure, the sacrificial tones of the illustration, the troll-like figures. It was so cool to pull out both forms and be able to compare the 1499 leaf to the 1497 book.
This is just one example of the discoveries and coincidences that can occur in libraries full of so much rich history and literature. There is so much value in exploring what rare collections and archives have to offer, especially in a time where libraries and other public services are under attack.
You can get a closer look at Brooke’s work by viewing the digitized copies of Haebler’s leaves in Gleeson Library’s Digital Collections. To see any Special Collections & University Archives material in person, stop by the Donohue Rare Book Room on the 3rd floor of Gleeson Library or contact us to schedule an appointment.