College Record 2013

Wolfson’s Early Printed Books
by John Sellars (JRF 2004–7, MCR 2007–).
In the Library’s Hornik Room there is a small collection of old books, locked away
behind metal grilles. The books came from the collection of Marcel and Tessa
Hornik, after whom the room is named. The Horniks were émigré intellectuals who
settled just outside Oxford at Boars Hill. Marcel Hornik had run an antiquarian
bookshop in Vienna in the 1920s, before studying at the University of Vienna and
then at Oxford. Once settled at Boars Hill the Horniks set up the ‘Lincombe Lodge
Research Library’ in 1952. They issued a number of short pamphlet publications,
one of which describes their library as ‘an independent research body’ devoted
to integrating modern psychology with ‘traditional views on myth and religion,
language and art’. Part of their aim, it seems, was to develop an integrated study
of Man, reconnecting scientific psychology with the traditional humanities. The
Horniks were keen for their library eventually to find an academic home, and in one
of their pamphlets they expressed a desire for it to be ‘incorporated in an Institute
of Higher Education in Israel’. But in the end the books did not travel so far, and
they came to Wolfson in the 1980s.
The collection is a mixture of classical authors, works of theology and history, and
items connected to the history of scholarship. Although there are no incunabula
(books printed before 1501), there are a number of important sixteenth-century
books produced by the most important publishers of the day, notably Aldus
Manutius and Robert Estienne. Some of the oldest and most interesting books in
the collection are editions of ancient philosophical texts, including the first printed
editions of a number of ancient philosophical commentaries.
In December 2012 Richard Sorabji (HF) organized a three-day conference devoted
to the ancient commentators on Aristotle, celebrating the publication of 100
volumes of translation into English under his editorship, and the final day of the
conference was held at Wolfson. In conjunction with the conference I organized
a small display of the most relevant books from the Hornik collection, writing a
few notes about them which were printed as a pamphlet. In March 2013, the book
display was repeated and I gave a short talk based on the text in the pamphlet. A
revised version was published in the April 2013 issue of the Bodleian Library Record.
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