Paradise Found: Rutgers is Home to Top Collection of Rare John Milton Books
The collection is open to the public and contains many surprises – including annotations by famous writers and possibly Milton himself
‘People often find old books intimidating, but they are very accessible – and Milton is relevant to today’s readers.’– Thomas Fulton
John Milton wrote more than Paradise Lost.
Venture into Rutgers University’s Alexander Library in New Brunswick, and you’ll discover how much more. On the basement level, visitors will find a treasure trove of early editions of the iconic English author’s books, most of which focus on freedoms in government, speech and the press.
Rutgers owns the fifth-largest Milton collection at a public American university – 56 books in a temperature- and humidity-controlled vault in the Special Collections and University Archives Department. Thirty-two of the titles were printed before 1700.
The collection is open to the public. “People often find old books intimidating, but they are very accessible – and Milton is relevant to today’s readers,” says Thomas Fulton, associate professor of English and a Milton scholar. “He was born in 1608 to a century of revolution – in politics, in print media, in science and the arts. By the time he died in 1674, Britain had experienced many different types of governments. There are similarities in his writing to how our founding fathers thought. Reading Milton is like learning about the roots of our own ideas of personal, religious and political freedom.”
Special Collections librarian Fernanda Perrone says that visitors are often surprised by the excellent condition of the 17th- and 18th-century books. “Books from this time period are better preserved than those from the late 19th century since they were made from rag-based paper, which doesn’t deteriorate,” she explains.
Rutgers collected rare books aggressively in the 1930s through 1960s, growing its Milton collection gradually through donations and judicious acquisitions. In 1937, it founded the Associated Friends of the Library of Rutgers University to encourage gifts of books and manuscripts and to raise funds.
Spearheading the Milton acquisition drive was the aptly named English professor and Milton scholar Joseph Milton French, who worked at the university from 1940 to 1960. Shortly upon his arrival, “Milton,” as he was known, advised Rutgers librarian George Osborn on acquiring books by Milton. Some books were obtained from Barnet J. Beyer, a New York book dealer whose bookseller descriptions have been included in each volume, but most have histories that are unrecorded.
Although some of the books in the collection are duplicate titles, each is unique, bearing markings by previous owners – and some perhaps by Milton himself. “When you look at the marks and annotations that the readers made in the books, you get a window into what interested them,” Fulton says.
For example, flipping through the library’s copy of Areopagitica, an important tract written in 1644 about freedom of speech, reveals many manicules – typographic or reader marks that resemble a tiny hand with an enthusiastic pointy finger – in the margins to call attention to important passages. “Manicules are a valuable record of how an early modern reader responded to a contemporary text,” Fulton says.
The book also contains a handwritten textual change in the term “wayfaring Christians” in a passage describing Christian duties. “Someone crossed out the ‘y’ in ‘wayfaring’ and wrote in an ‘r,’ making it ‘warfaring Christians,’” says Fulton. “Since there were a large number of copies of Areopagitica with this mark, it suggests that perhaps Milton himself made this change before it was distributed.”
Some of the books, such as In Defense of the English People, that Milton wrote to defend the execution of Charles I and for which he was imprisoned for publishing, are historical themselves. In Defense of the English People was banned during the Restoration age and most copies were burned. “Our copy is from this period and has a note by the owner detailing when Milton was released from prison, which suggests that the owner kept the book illegally,” Fulton says.
And what about Paradise Lost? Of the 10 rare copies that the library owns of the epic blank-verse poem for which Milton is best known, two stand out for Fulton: One from 1688 that was the first illustrated edition, which secured the poem’s place in literary history, and another from 1669, which bears an inscription from writer Thomas Powell, who presented the book as a gift to the Romantic poet William Wordsworth in 1840.
“These inscriptions are valuable because they show the book’s provenance and readership,” says Fulton. “In this way, each of our books has their own character and voice.”
View some of Rutgers’ Milton collection as well as other notable Milton books from around the world through John Milton and the Cultures of Print, an online exhibition of books, manuscripts and other artifacts curated by Fulton and Perrone.
For more information, contact Patti Verbanas at 848-932-0551 or patti.verbanas@rutgers.edu