or, a mystery from the Kellenberger storage room.
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| Partial set of Francois-Marie De Marsy's Analyse Raisonnee de Bayle. |
by John B. Green III
Just off the Kellenberger Room can be found our archival storage room. Here are kept our manuscript collections, vertical files, photographic archive, and our collection of early New Bern newspapers, among many other items. Some have likened the appearance of this room and its contents to the government warehouse from the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Well, perhaps it does a bit, but while the room is quite full, our collections are properly identified and stored. I assure you that if we had the Ark of the Covenant, we'd be able to find it after a brief search.
There are, however, a few items in our collection that are a mystery. There is no one living who remembers what importance, if any, they may have had to the library or how they came to be here. In most such cases, especially if the items are books, we assume that they came in the back door as anonymous donations for some long-ago library book sale. Someone on the staff took a look at them and decided that they might be of some importance and shouldn't be sent to the sale like twenty-five cent paperbacks. We do know that the items I am about to describe have been here for at least thirty years.
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| Title page, Francois-Marie De Marsy's Analyse Raisonnee de Bayle. |
The books in question are a partial set of Francois-Marie De Marsy's Analyse Raisonnee de Bayle, a compilation and analysis of the writings of French philosopher Pierre Bayle, an influential free-thinker of the Enlightenment. Although the title pages indicate the place of publication as London, they were actually published in Paris in 1755 (volumes I-IV) and Holland in 1770 (volumes V-VIII). What makes these volumes interesting and potentially important is that volumes II, III, and IV bear the bookplate of Nicholas P. Trist, American lawyer and diplomat, and husband of Thomas Jefferson's granddaughter Virginia Jefferson Randolph.
Bookplate of Nicholas P. Trist.
Nicholas Philip Trist (1800-1874) was born in Charlottesville, Virginia. In 1803, Jefferson offered Trist's father the post of Collector of Customs for Natchez. The family moved to Louisiana where young Nicholas grew up, eventually graduating from the College of Orleans in 1817. That same year, Thomas Jefferson invited Nicholas to Monticello. While there, Trist met and fell in love with Virginia Jefferson Randolph. Following a stint at West Point and a return to his family in Louisiana, Trist returned to Monticello to study law under Jefferson. Nicholas Trist and Virginia Randolph were married in 1824, and Trist served as private secretary to Jefferson, eventually becoming an executor of Jefferson's estate. Trist would later serve as private secretary to Andrew Jackson, U.S. Consul at Havana, Cuba, and as the diplomat who negotiated the treaty ending the Mexican-American War.
All of which raises an interesting question. Did Nicholas Trist, with all of his personal connections to Thomas Jefferson, acquire these books from Jefferson or Jefferson's estate? Did the books that now bear Trist's bookplate once belong to Thomas Jefferson, the Sage of Monticello? In age, the volumes date to Jefferson's generation not Trist's, and their author and subject matter would have appealed to a free-thinking Francophile like Jefferson. In fact, Jefferson is known to have owned works by Bayle. Surviving catalogs of Jefferson's library, however, do not include Marsy's Analyse Raisonnee de Bayle.
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Bookplate of Nicholas P. Trist. |
The only obvious marks of ownership in the books are Trist's bookplate. Might they still have been Jefferson's? Jefferson did not use a bookplate, but instead, marked his books in an unusual way. Printers of Jefferson's time identified the various signatures or gatherings of pages with a letter printed on the lower margin of the first page of each signature: A, B, C, D, and so on. The signatures arranged in alphabetical order would thus be in the correct order for binding. It is important to remember that the printers used the Latin alphabet for this purpose which did not contain the letters J, U, or W. To identify his books, Jefferson would turn to the "I" signature and write the letter T in front of the printed "I". On other occasions, he would turn to the "T" signature and write a J after the T. In both cases he was identifying the books as belonging to TJ - Thomas Jefferson.
A close examination of the signatures of Trist's books reveals no added T's or J's. The books are probably not Jefferson's. They are Nicholas Philip Trist's, an interesting character in his own right. We just don't know why they are in the Kellenberger storage room!
