Treasures from the Remnant Trust
Presented by Ivy Tech Community College
University Library of Columbus - Columbus Learning Center
August 25 through December 12, 2008

The Remnant Trust is presented by Ivy Tech Community College in partnership with IUPUC, Purdue College of Technology, University Library of Columbus, Center for Teaching and Learning, and the Columbus Learning Center.

The Remnant Trust is a public educational foundation that shares an actively growing collection of original and 1st edition works dealing with the topics of liberty and dignity with some pieces dating as early as 1250.The Trust makes this collection available to colleges, universities, and other organizations for use by students, faculty, scholars and the general public. Those exposed are encouraged to touch, feel and read the originals.Generally, titles are loaned for a semester to educational entities that choose specific displays that are tailored to each institution. Serving multiple institutions each semester, The Remnant Trust is normally booked a couple of years in advance.

Selections from the Anthenaeum

Stamp Act
Date: 1766
An act for indemnifying Persons who have incurred certain penalties inflicted by an act of the last session of Parliament, for granting certain Stamp duties in the British Colonies and Plantations in America; and for making valid all instruments executed or enrolled there on unstamped paper, vellum, or parchment. Caused Partick Henry to declare: “Are we such a doltish people to fall for such an absurd distinction between internal taxes and external taxes  --- it is a tax!”

Aristotle Libri
Title: Politici (Politics & Economics)
Date: 1543 (384-322 B.C.) 
In Aristotle’s Politics (eight books), the good of the individual is identified with the good of the city-state.  The study of human good is thus a political inquiry, as it is in Plato.  Aristotle discusses different types of government, finally preferring monarchy, an aristocracy of men of virtue, or constitutional government of the majority. 

Saint Augustine
Title: Citie of God
Date: 1610
Edition: 1st English
Early Christian church father and philosopher.  Received his early training primarily in Latin literature and earned his living  as a teacher of rhetoric in Carthage, Rome, and Milan.  He joined the Manichaeans for a number of years but became disillusioned and was converted to Christianity.

Hebrew Bible
Date: 1814
Edition: 1st, volume 2
This is the remarkably fine copy of the first Hebrew Bible printed in America.  This version, containing the 24 books of the Hebrew old Testament, is a reprint of the popular text by Everrard Van Der Hooght, first printed in Amsterdam in 1705. In 1813 the rights for this edition were transferred to the well-known publisher Dobson, famous in American printing history for producing a monumental 18-volume encyclopedia with more than 500 full-page engravings in 1799.

Illustrated Bible
Date: 1791
Edition:1st, American
The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments: with the Apocrypha.  Translated out of the original tongues, and with the former translations diligently compared and revised, by the special command of King James I, of England. The first folio Bible printed in America was also the first to be illustrated and is considered the most distinguished Bible produced in the country during the eighteenth century. Fifty copperplate engravings are interspersed throughout.  Several of the most noted American engravers were engaged for the project: Samuel Hill, John Norman, Joseph Seymour, and Amos Doolittle.  Each book begins with an ornamental initial, and there are woodcuts at the beginnings of the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha.

John Calvin
The Institution of Christian Religion
Date: 1611
Adapted from Jean Cauvin, 1509-1564) French Protestant reformer.
Calvin’s theological doctrines had tremendous influence, particularly in the Puritan religion of England, Scotland, and America. Calvin had an early background of humanism; as a student of Latin and Greek, he was familiar with the writings of Plato, Seneca, and St. Augustine.  Because of the radical Protestant views expressed in a public speech he wrote in 1533, to be delivered at an inaugural ceremony at the University of Paris, Calvin was forced to flee the capital and soon France as well.  He established himself in Geneva, strictly enforcing his theological doctrines and rules of conduct.  His greatest work is Institutes of the Christian Religion.

Thomas Aquinas
Title: Summa Theologiae
Date: 1496
2nd Edition
One of five known copies.  This is the monumental work by Aquinas (1225-1274), intended to synthesize all Christian thought, written beginning in 1265 or 1266 and being left unfinished at his death.  Using a scholastic method, and arguing with force and elegance, Thomas made statements of belief on all Christian mysteries, speaking equally from the point of view of logic and revelation.

Saint Augustine
Title: Confessions
Date: 1900
The first great autobiography in history in which personal confessions and revelations are linked with the spirit of Christian piety and devotion. Confessions was designed to show the details of the soul’s progress, from the enjoyment of beauties outside itself to a study of its own nature and finally to joy in the knowledge of God. Augustine describes his devoutly Christian mother, Monica, his life with the concubine who gave him his son, Adeodatus, his exploration of Manichaeanism and neo-Platonism, and his conversion to Christianity.

Francis Bacon
Title: Of the Advancement and Proficence of Learning
Date: 1640 First Complete edition of this work in English.  (1561-1626)
English philosopher, statesman, and essayist.  Violently opposed to speculative philosophies and the syllogistic quibbling of the Schoolmen, Bacon argues that the only knowledge of importance to man was empirically rooted in the natural world and that this knowledge should be amassed and studied in a judicious, systematic fashion.  For Bacon, a clear system of scientific inquiry would assure man’s mastery over the natural world. 

David Crockett
Title: Crockett Almanac of 1841
Date: 1842. 
Containing rows, sprees and scrapes in the west; life and manners in the backwoods; and terible adventures on the ocean.

The Federalist
Date: 1818
This is the most famous and influential American political work.  When Hamilton invited his fellow New Yorker Jay and Madison, from Virginia, to join him in writing the series of essays published as The Federalist, it was to meet the immediate need of convincing the reluctant New York State electorate of the necessity of ratifying the newly proposed Constitution of the United States.  The eighty-five essays, under the pseudonym “Publius”, were designed as political propaganda, not as a treatise of political philosophy.  In spite of this The Federalist survives as one of the new nation’s most important contributions to the theory of government. 

Johann Goethe
Title: Faust
Date: 18331st edition
Wolfgang von Goethe succeeded in attracting, as no German had done before him, the attention of Europe.  Once more it was the gospel that the world belongs to the strong, which lay beneath the surface of this romance. The crowning achievement of Goethe’s literary life was the completion of Faust.

Thomas Hobbes Works
Title: Moral & Political
Date: 1750
Edition: 1st
Produced a fermentation of English thought unsurpassed until the advent of Darwinism. First collected edition, preceded only by a partial collection printed in Amsterdam in 1668.

Thomas Hobbes
Title: Leviathan
Date: Leviathan rigorously argues that civil peace and social unity are best achieved by the establishment of a commonwealth through social contract. Hobbes’s ideal commonwealth is ruled by a sovereign power responsible for protecting the security of the commonwealth and granted absolute authority to ensure the common defense.

David Hume
Title: Essays Moral & Political
Date: 1742
Edition: 2nd
Scottish philosopher and historian.  Hume carried Berkley’s “immaterialist hypotheses” to their logical extreme.  He restricted all knowledge to the experience of ideas or impressions, maintaining that the mind consists only of accumulated perceptions.  His philosophical skepticism, and his insistence that there is no knowledge other than what is directly observable, have been of extraordinary importance in the history of modern metaphysical thinking.

Thomas Jefferson
Title: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth
Date: 1904
Extracted textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French and English.

Martin Luther
Title: Obedience of a Christian Man
Date: 1548 (Tyndale Translation)
This was one of three of the primary treatises, as they have been called, the others being An Address to the Nobility of German Nations, and On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church of God.  All of these were written at a time when Luther was fully convinced that he had broken forever with Rome.

Martin Luther
Title: Books of the Honorable Doctor Martin Luther
Date: 1563
Luther’s theology challenged the authority of the papacy by emphasizing the Bible as the sole source of religious authority and the church as a priesthood of all believers. According to Luther, salvation was attainable only by faith in Jesus as the messiah, a faith unmediated by the church. These ideas helped to inspire the Protestant Reformation and changed the course of Western civilization.

Niccolo Machiavelli
Title: The PrinceDate: 1640
Edition: 1st
Hitherto political speculation had tended to be a rhetorical exercise based on the implicit assumption of Church or Empire. Machiavelli founded the science of modern politics on the study of mankind.

Magna Carta
Title: Blackstone’s Magna Carta
Date: 1759
Until the Commentaries, the ordinary Englishman had viewed the law as a vast, unintelligible and unfriendly machine; nothing but trouble, even danger, was to be expected from contact with it. Blackstone’s great achievement was to popularize the law and the traditions which had influenced its formation. If the English constitution survived the troubles of the next century, it was because the law had gained a new popular respect, and this was due in part to the enormous success of Blackstone’s work.

Karl Marx
Title: Communist Manifesto
Date: 1888
Edition: 5th

John Milton
Title: Areopagitica
Date: 1738
Edition: 2nd
Second edition of Milton’s great defense of the liberty of the press, concluding famously with the stirring words, ``Give me liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.’’ Areopagitica was originally published in 1644 in response to controversy surrounding Milton’s pamphlets on divorce.

St. Thomas More
Title: Utopia
Date: 1624
First Corrected Editon of Robinson’s translation of More’s “Utopia”.  Utopia was published in the great year of Erasmian reform, when the new enlightenment seemed about to carry all before it.  In Utopia, More is concerned to show that the old, medieval institutes, if freed from abuse, are the best; not the new theoretic reforms, which he justly feared.  He is a saint to the Catholic, and a predecessor of Marx to the Communist.  His manifesto is and will be required reading for both, and for all shades of opinion between.

George Orwell
Title: Animal Farm
Date: 1946
Edition: 1st
First edition proof copy (pre-published).  Advance reading copy of the first edition of Orwell’s classic parable of dictatorial socialism.  A biting commentary that is accessible to nearly all ages. Orwell has presented a pointed look at political systems and at the same time allowed for insight into the human dilemma of existence.  We are given a way to overcome the problem through our acceptance of them and then continuing on.  And we are finally given the ultimate problem solving tool, our own awareness.  It may be quite trite to end with two maxims, the work can be stated with the following phrases: The virtue lies in the struggle not the prize.  The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

George Orwell
Title: Nineteen Eighty-Four
Date: 1949
Edition: 1st
Published the year before his death, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four met with a success “rare for Utopias,” or in this case “Dystopias,” and further established his “commanding influence.” “[Nineteen Eighty-Four] has been called an embittered book... but it is written with [Orwell’s] particular feeling and clarity and though it flags sometimes with his growing fatigue even the political arguments are never dull. In fact they are worked out with passionate logic. `Double Think,’ `Newspeak,’ and `Big Brother’ now form parts of the language. It is a warning against totalitarianism under any disguise--left or right.

William Penn
Title: The Great Case of Liberty of ConscienceDate: 1670Written during his imprisonment for his refusal to take the oath of allegiance, generally thought to be his most important work.  It is a defense of complete toleration.

Plato
Title: Gorgias
Date: 1475
Manuscript on paper, in Latin  by Leonardus Brunus AretinusPlato’s Gorgias consists of dramatic dialogues concerning rhetoric between Socrates and three individuals: Gorgias, Polus and Callicles. 

Plutarch
Title: Virtues of Women and the Parallel Lives
Date: 1485
Plutarch (46 – 120)  Greek biographer and miscellaneous writer, was born at Chaeronea in Boeotia.  After having been trained in philosophy at Athens he traveled and stayed some time at Rome, where he lectured on philosophy. The celebrity of Plutarch, or at least his popularity, is mainly founded on his forty-six parallel lives. 

Ayn Rand
Title: Atlas Shrugged
Date: 1957
Edition: 1st
Classic Confrontation.  (1905-1982) Russian born American novelist.  Rand’s novels, which include We The Living, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged are polemical and melodramatic vehicles for her ideas.  In her objectivist philosophy, she defends capitalism and attacks government and other controls for inhibiting the self-interested individuals whom she has pictured in her novels.

Adam Smith
Title: Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Date: 1776
Edition: 1st (First Dublin Edition)
Smith’s cornerstone of political economy contains many specific references to America, including “a great mass of information concerning the trade of this country, before the revolution, and a clear and convincing argument against the so-called `Mercantile System’ which did so much to prepare the way for that event.