For the Christmas Season, Special Collections will be showcasing its collection of Bibles and its Hebrew Bible, with Hanukkuh this year starting at sundown of 1 December and lasting until 9 December of the Gregorian calendar. Christmas has been associated through the Christian church with the birth of Jesus and the traditional nativity scene, though many of our Christmas traditions do in fact originate from older pagan rituals that have been adapted to fit in with the theme of Christmas. Many scholars have arrived at our date of 25 December1 for celebrating Christ's birth because of its proximity to the equinox, when a winter festival would commonly take place in many pre- and non-Christian societies, and for its proximity to the Roman Saturnalia, from where many of our peace and goodwill associations with Christmas come. Gift-giving at the Yule, too, seems to originate from the ancients with Greek Libanius writing, "the impulse to spend seizes everyone. He [sic] who the whole year through has taken pleasure in saving and piling up his pence, becomes suddenly extravagant".2 The much-anticipated break from school seems to have ancient connexion as well, as he continues: "from the minds of young people it removes two kinds of dread: the dread of the school master and the dread of the stern pedagogue"; in modern times this break is much deserved after the first semester of school, usually culminating in a Christmas pageant, often with a play based on the nativity story (though, more recently in Canada, these are starting to be replaced with non-religious winter concerts or multi-religious holiday celebrations). Whatever Christmas is, it has been connected with the birth of Jesus (and thus the birth of Christianity) and so the printing of the Holy Bible enabled the church to spread the Good Word.
Our earliest English Bible was printed in 1541 by Edwarde Whitchurch, which predates the more commonly known King James Version (1611), itself superseded by the Revised Standard Edition in the 20th century. The Bible was first printed in English by John Wycliffe in 1382, and he was posthumously burned as a heretic for his trouble. Wycliffe predates Luthur, who famously began the Protestant Revolution in part based on the ethic that anyone should be able to read the scripture in his or her native tongue, and without such rebellious spirits like these there may not have been vernacular Bibles at all at such an early period.
Special Collections has an edition of the Biblia Sacra, or the Vulgate, or Latin translation of the Bible done largely by Saint Jerome in the 4th century; our copy dates from 1522. The Jerome translation replaced the old translation and became the versio vulgata, or "commonly used translation," and was the official Latin version of the Bible used by the church until 1590 when it was replaced by the Clementine Vulgate, itself replaced in 1979 with the Nova Vulgata.
The Special Collections's Hebrew Bible dates from 1869. This Hebrew Bible is published in New York, but is largely in the Hebrew language (though there are a few English titles) and, as Hebrew is read from right-to-left instead of left-to-right as English is, the book itself seems "backwards" to English or most other Western readers. The spine, when the book is before the reader, faces to the reader's right and thus what looks like the back cover is actually the front cover. Hebrew Bibles are not in the sequential order of events, as the Christian ones are, but instead are in chronological order of composition excepting the Torah, or Pentateuch, which comprises the five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), which has the same order in both and begins both Bibles.
As you can see, the First Book of the Hebrew Bible, Genesis, is next to what would be the end cover in an English book, but is in fact the front cover of a Hebrew one.
There are many other Bibles in Special Collections not seen on this page. You can find the Bibles in Special Collections; they are searchable in the library catalogue.
1 25 December on the modern Calendar; "Old Christmas" took place on 6 January until the Gregorian Calendar was adopted by England in 1752, about 170 years later than the Catholic parts of Europe.
2 Sansom, William. Christmas. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968. pp. 33.
To celebrate Remembrance Day, the first University of Saskatchewan Library Rare Book Showcase will feature our collection of The Left Book Club, donated to the library by former prominent professor of English and Vice-President of the University of Saskatchewan, Dr. Carlyle King. The Collection is housed in the Special Collections Rare Books Collection.
The Left Book Club was established in May 1936 by Stafford Cripps, Victor Gollancz, and John Strachey. Gollancz, Strachey and Harold Laski chose a book to be supplied to members of the club - at its peak at the outbreak of the war over 57 000 strong - on a monthly basis and sold for the extremely low price of two shillings and sixpence. The club's aim was to deal with three fundamental fears of those times: 1) Fascism, 2) the threat of war, and 3) poverty. The Club originally had some works that championed Communism and some early chosen works even extolled Stalinism though initially these choices were in the interest of war prevention. In November 1939s Left News Gollancz wrote:
If we had had half a million members, the Government would have been replaced by a People's Government long before the war came and the Anglo-Soviet alliance would have been consummated. Hitler would have been overthrown ... and the war would never have happened.
Images showing the orange soft-cover books from 1936-38, the red hardcover books from 38-48, the Left Book Club Logo, and the typical "Not for Sale to the Public" that grace the covers of all LBC editions.
After the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939 and when Gollancz broke from the Communist Party soon after, the tone became generally democratic socialist, publishing diverse works including those sociological, philosophical, biographical, literary, political, and to do with current affairs, until 1948 when the club published its last work Meaning of Marxism by G. D. H. Cole, which it was forced to do because membership had declined to lower than 7 000 people. 
Images showing the cover of the last book published by the LCB in 1948. The Library's collection of approximately 150 LCB titles are a gift from Dr. Carlyle King.
The years neatly bookend the years of World War II, and during the years of the conflict the LCB published many works about the war, including this look at the Nazi regime in 1941, which finds condemns the Nazi's ideology and foreign policy. Many of the works condemned fascism and strongly resisted Nazism, although others were more passive in nature.
For further information see Notable Works and Collections Number 6 (page 14) and click here for a list of the LCB books held in our Special Collections.
Comments to: Special Collections (spec.coll@usask.ca)
