‘A number of curious entomological works’

Recently, a number of colleagues from other university libraries visited us in Groningen. As usual, we did our very best to show them the beautiful objects we have in our Special Collections. Even UB staff are no strangers to vanity. Naturally, I wanted to make an extra impression by showing a number of works from the collection that allowed me to tell some wonderful stories. Given my personal interests and area of research, I ended up picking a pile of old natural history works with colonial connections.

I had given my colleague at Special Collections a list of the books I wanted to show. This included Jean Baptiste Audebert’s ‘monkey book’ dating from 1800. The official title of the book is Histoire naturelle des singes et des makis [The Natural History of Monkeys and Lemurs]. I knew we had it in our collection, but I had never seen it before. It turned out to be a fantastically large book, packed with hand-coloured illustrations of the most remarkable monkeys and lemurs from all over the world. However, no matter how beautiful the book turned out to be, an unexpectedly unattractive little stamp on the title page eventually proved more interesting than the splendid illustrations.

If you have ever borrowed a book from the UB, you have undoubtedly noticed that it has an ownership stamp. This is an old habit we still have not gotten rid of, although not everyone is happy with it. My colleagues’ lamentations over yet another one of those stamps on the first page of one of our fifteenth-century incunabula are endless. These days, we no longer put stamps in old editions, but I’m glad we weren’t so careful back when the ‘monkey book’ made its way to us.

There are even two stamps on the title page of the ‘monkey book’. One from the UB itself but also a second stamp. This concerns a horizontal rectangular stamp with flattened corners bearing the text ACADEMIAE GRONINGANAE MUSEUM ZOOLOGICUM: the Zoological Museum of the Groningen Academy.

When my colleague from Amsterdam pointed that stamp out to me, I had more questions than answers. As far as I knew—and this is actually true—the natural history museum was destroyed in the fire of 1906 that completely wiped out the old Academy Building—except for a squirrel that had just left home. So where did this book come from? And how did that stamp end up in it? Had some things been saved from the Natural History Museum after all? That was worth investigating!

I informed a colleague at Special Collections about this stamp. A few days later, he came back to tell me that he had come across another book with the same stamp. It was Over de voortteeling en wonderbaerlyke veranderingen der Surinaemsche insecten [On the Propagation and Wonderful Changes of the Surinamese Insects] by Maria Sibylla Merian dated 1719.

We decided to take a closer look at our natural history collection to see if we could find more examples of this stamp.

After several enjoyable hours in our depot in the company of books by Aldrovandi, Gesner, Catesby, Cuvier, and the lesser gods of natural history on our laps, we arrived at a list of fifty titles, some in multiple volumes, in which we found the same stamp.[1] Six of these books were about mammals, one about the hydrarchos—a hoax skeleton of a sea serpent—and the 43 remaining titles were all about insects. So many books on insects; that obviously couldn’t be a coincidence. There had to be a story behind that.

All these books had been published well before 1906, so the hypothesis that these books had been rescued from the inferno was still workable, although I must confess that my colleague and I were slightly disappointed that we had not been able to identify any fire or smoke damage to these books.

That would have been absolutely spectacular, of course. We could almost see the professors in their smouldering pawn coats risking their lives to save their precious books from the greedy fire. Oh well, sometimes historians are allowed to let their imagination run wild for a while before returning to the facts.

So it mainly involved a lot of books on insects. Was there anything special about insects at the natural history museum? Every natural history museum has insects, but apparently someone had an above-average interest in them. Was it a professor, perhaps? On our depot quest, we had already come across a monograph on wasps  by Prof. H. J. van Ankum, the man who was in charge of the museum at the time of the fire and who saw his life’s work go up in flames. But I had not been able to find anything about a collection of his books.

Then I browsed through the online Gedenkboek der Hoogeschool te Groningen, ter gelegenheid van haar vijfde halve eeuwfeest [Anniversary Commemorative Book of the University of Groningen] published in 1864 on the occasion of its fifth half-century anniversary. In there, I found a paragraph dedicated to the University's museums and cabinets, and much to my surprise, I read the following sentence there: `Finally, it should be mentioned that Mrs dowager van Ittersum, at Brummen, endowed the Museum with the rich and fine collection of Coleoptera, and many important books on this order of Insects, assembled by her late husband.’ That was quite a coincidence and almost too good to be true.

After some internet surfing on genealogical websites and after consulting the Little Red Book, I found out that ‘her late husband’ was called Rudolph Anne Julius baron van Ittersum (1806-1859) and had worked all his life as a notary in Brummen.

Apparently, in his spare time, this notable engaged in collecting beetles (Coleoptera). In those days, it was not an unusual hobby for the upper classes to engage in natural history in their spare time.

It seems that Van Ittersum had the financial means to build his own insect library. And the best part was that in some of the books bearing the museum’s stamp, we also found the signature of R A J or R van Ittersum, so we had come full circle.

We could now establish with certainty that most of the books with the museum’s stamp came from Van Ittersum’s private library and had been donated to the natural history museum between 1859 and 1861, after Rudolph's death and before the death of his widow.

But then why was precisely the museum in Groningen the destination of the beetles and books of Rudolph from Brummen? Van Ittersum had been a member of the Nederlandse Entomologische Vereeniging [Dutch Entomological Society] since 1845–1846, as evidenced by his obituary in the Tijdschrift voor Entomologie [Journal of Entomology], the Society’s periodical. The Society was well aware that Van Ittersum owned ‘a number of curious entomological works’. The same journal reveals that Van Ittersum's collection of beetles was also sometimes used by scientists, especially one called Claas Mulder. And it so happens that Claas Mulder was a professor and lecturer of Natural History in Groningen. We are now entering the realm of probability bordering certainty. I have no proof that Mulder was the intermediary, but he does represent a clear connection between Groningen and Van Ittersum.

For me, this leaves the question of how Van Ittersum’s insect library found its way from the lost Natural History Museum to the UB.

We know that books were also rescued from the ground floor of the Academy Building at the time of the fire—the Museum itself was on the first floor. Of course, I would love to claim that the saved books are Van Ittersum’s ’curious entomological works’. But alas, I am not sure. Anything could have happened between 1864 and 1906, and someone at the Museum could have just decided to transfer the Museum library to the UB. Due to lack of evidence, we’ll just dismiss this last bit then. I am already very happy with the fact that we have at least managed to find out how that curious stamp got into those books.

P.S. After writing this blog, one of the student assistants at Special Collections, Berend Pietersma, has decided to devote his Master's thesis to nineteenth-century donations of natural history objects and books to the natural history museum. I am very curious to see what else he will manage to uncover.

[1] This link takes you to more than fifty hits in our catalogue; this is because some of the works are catalogued by volume. Moreover, after writing this blog, we have already been able to add more titles to this list.