Rare Document Discovered as Paste-Down
In an Ask a Librarian question, Theological Librarian Paul Fields was asked about a 1-page document that supposedly was owned by the Hekman Library, but we didn't know it existed. The question came from Dr. David Shaw at the British Library. He had discovered through the English Short Title Catalog (ESTC) that we owned it. Paul Fields began to dig and found, with help from Dr. Shaw and ESTC cataloger Ann McDermott, that a fragment was pasted to the back cover of John Calvin's book The Sermons of M. John Calvin Upon the Epistle of S. Paul to the Ephesians (1577).
Hekman Library is one of three known libraries in the world that own this document! Canterbury Cathedral Archives also owns one, and there's another edition in the Society of Antiquaries, London. Pretty awesome!!
(Story submitted by Paul Fields, theological librarian and curator of the H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies).