For thou­sands of years, ordi­nary peo­ple all over the world not only worked side-by-side with domes­tic ani­mals on a dai­ly basis, they also observed the wild fau­na around them to learn how to nav­i­gate and sur­vive nature. The close­ness pro­duced a keen appre­ci­a­tion for ani­mal behav­ior that informs the folk tales of every con­ti­nent and the pop­u­lar texts of every reli­gion. Our delight in ani­mal sto­ries sur­vives in children’s books, but in grown-up lan­guage, ani­mal com­par­isons tend to be nasty and dehu­man­iz­ing. The demean­ing adjec­tive “bes­tial” con­veys a typ­i­cal atti­tude not only toward peo­ple we don’t like, but toward the ani­mal world as well. Orwell’s Ani­mal Farm and Kafka’s Meta­mor­pho­sis have become the stan­dard ref­er­ences for mod­ern ani­mal alle­go­ry.

Ear­ly lit­er­a­ture shows us a range of dif­fer­ent atti­tudes, where ani­mals are treat­ed as equals, with char­ac­ter traits both good and bad, or as noble mes­sen­gers of a god or gods rather than live­stock, mov­ing scenery, or exploitable resources.

We might refer in an east­ern con­text to the Jata­ka Tales, fables of the Buddha’s many rebirths in the human and ani­mal worlds that pro­vide their read­ers with moral lessons. In the Chris­t­ian west, we have the medieval bestiary—compendiums of ani­mals, both real and mythological—that intro­duced read­ers to a moral typol­o­gy through “read­ing” what ear­ly Chris­tians thought of as the “book of nature.”

The most lav­ish of them all, the Aberdeen Bes­tiary, which dates from around 1200, was once owned by Hen­ry VIII. Now, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Aberdeen has dig­i­tized the text and made it freely avail­able to read­ers online. Begin­ning with the key cre­ation sto­ries from the book of Gen­e­sis, the book then dives into its descrip­tions of ani­mals, begin­ning with the lion, the pard (pan­ther), and the ele­phant.

You’ll notice that these are not ani­mals that your typ­i­cal medieval Euro­pean read­er would have encoun­tered. One impor­tant dif­fer­ence between the bes­tiary and the fable is that the for­mer draws many of its beasts from hearsay, con­jec­ture, or pure fic­tion. But the intent is part­ly the same. These “were teach­ing tools,” notes Claire Voon at Hyper­al­ler­gic, and the Aberdeen Bes­tiary con­tains illus­trat­ed “lengthy tales of moral behav­ior.”

Like the sto­ries of Aesop, the bes­tiary presents impor­tant lessons, mix­ing in the fab­u­lous with the nat­u­ral­ist. As Voon describes the Aberdeen Bes­tiary:

The illus­tra­tions are impres­sive­ly var­ied, depict­ing com­mon ani­mals from tiny ants to ele­phants, as well as fan­tas­tic beasts, from the leocro­ta to the phoenix. Even the moral qual­i­ties of the hum­ble sea urchin are hon­ored with para­graphs of dis­cus­sion. Beyond this array of crea­tures, the bes­tiary details the appear­ances and qual­i­ties of var­i­ous trees, gems, and humans. Some of these may seem com­i­cal to 21st-cen­tu­ry eyes: a swarm of bees, for instance, resem­bles an order­ly line of shut­tle­cocks stream­ing into their hives. Yet oth­er paint­ings are impres­sive for their near-accu­ra­cy, such as one image of a bat that shows how its mem­bra­nous wings con­nect its fin­gers, legs, and tail. All of these rich details would have helped read­ers bet­ter under­stand the nat­ur­al world as it was defined at the time of the book’s cre­ation. 

Incred­i­bly ornate and bear­ing the marks of dozens of scrib­al hands, the book, his­to­ri­ans believe, was orig­i­nal­ly pro­duced for a wide audi­ence, then tak­en by Henry’s librar­i­ans from a dis­solved monastery. Nev­er ful­ly com­plet­ed, it remained in the Roy­al Library for 100 years after Hen­ry. “I doubt if the Tudor mon­archs took it out for a reg­u­lar read,” says Aberdeen Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor Jane Ged­des. Now an open pub­lic doc­u­ment, it returns to its“original pur­pose of edu­ca­tion,” writes Voon, “although for us, of course, it illu­mi­nates more about the past than the present.” See the high res scans here.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Bizarre Car­i­ca­tures & Mon­ster Draw­ings

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

An odd phe­nom­e­non has been at work in the past few years. Print book sales slope upward while eBook sales creep down. The trend man­i­fests the oppo­site of what most people—or most peo­ple who write about these things—expected to hap­pen, quite rea­son­ably in many respects. Per­haps through sheer his­tor­i­cal momen­tum, print retains its aura of author­i­ty.

But every­one knows that buy­ing isn’t read­ing, which may indeed be in decline giv­en the pri­ma­cy of images, audio, and video, of YouTube explain­ers and doc­u­men­taries such as the one above, which tells the tale of the “Pack Horse Librar­i­ans.”

These for­got­ten heroes, like the famed Pony Express, braved wind, rain, and rough ter­rain to deliv­er books to iso­lat­ed set­tlers who oth­er­wise may have had noth­ing to read.

But this is not a tale of cow­boys and fron­tiers­men. The Pack Horse Librar­i­ans appeared in an Indus­tri­al Age, and what’s more they were most­ly women. Called “book ladies” and “pack­sad­dle librar­i­ans,” the librar­i­ans were dep­u­tized dur­ing the New Deal, when FDR sought to end the Great Depres­sion by cre­at­ing hun­dreds of jobs addressed to the country’s real social, mate­r­i­al, and cul­tur­al needs. In this case, the Pack Horse Librar­i­ans respond­ed to what many of us might con­sid­er a cri­sis, if not a crime.

“About 63% of the res­i­dents of Ken­tucky were with­out access to pub­lic libraries,” and some­where around 30% of rur­al Ken­tuck­ians were illit­er­ate. Those rur­al Ken­tuck­ians saw edu­ca­tion as a way out of pover­ty, and the Works Progress Admin­is­tra­tion agreed, over­see­ing the book deliv­ery project between 1935 and 1943. “Book women” made around $28 a month (a lit­tle over $500 in 2017) deliv­er­ing books to homes and school­hous­es. By 1936, writes the site Appalachi­an His­to­ry, “hand­made and donat­ed mate­ri­als could not sus­tain the cir­cu­la­tion needs of the pack horse patrons.”

Sur­veys of read­ers found that pack horse patrons could not get enough of books about trav­el, adven­ture and reli­gion, and detec­tive and romance mag­a­zines. Children’s pic­ture books were also immense­ly pop­u­lar, not only with young res­i­dents but also their illit­er­ate par­ents. Per head­quar­ters, approx­i­mate­ly 800 books had to be shared among five to ten thou­sand patrons.

To com­pen­sate for scarci­ty, a Uni­ver­si­ty of Ken­tucky pre­sen­ta­tion notes, librar­i­ans them­selves cre­at­ed books of “moun­tain recipes and scrap books of cur­rent events.” But the ser­vice quick­ly grew to deliv­er­ing more than 3,000 donat­ed books per month, after a dri­ve in which every PTA mem­ber in the state gave to the cause.

Eleanor Roo­sevelt (pho­tographed above vis­it­ing a Pack­horse Library in West Lib­er­ty, KY) was a cham­pi­on of the ser­vice, which founder Eliz­a­beth Fuller­ton mod­eled after a sim­i­lar ven­ture in 1913, itself a pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion of work done by the Ken­tucky Fed­er­a­tion of Women’s Clubs in the late 19th cen­tu­ry.

We can see that the his­to­ry of women librar­i­ans on horse­back goes back quite a ways. But it is a his­to­ry now for­got­ten, despite the efforts of recent books like Down Cut Shin Creek: The Pack Horse Librar­i­ans of Ken­tucky. A recent trend involves sug­gest­ing his­tor­i­cal Amer­i­can fig­ures who might replace all those mon­u­ments to the Con­fed­er­a­cy. We might well add Pack Horse Librar­i­ans to the dis­tin­guished list of can­di­dates.

The ser­vice lost its fund­ing in 1943, “leav­ing some com­mu­ni­ties with­out access to books for decades,” Appalachi­an His­to­ry writes, “until book­mo­biles were intro­duced to the area in the late 1950s.” These ser­vices seem quaint in an era when wide­spread deliv­ery by drone seems immi­nent. We seem­ing­ly live in the most infor­ma­tion-rich, instant access soci­ety in his­to­ry. Yet a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of peo­ple in the U.S. and around the world have lit­tle to no access to the inter­net. And a sim­i­lar degree of illiteracy—at least of basic infor­ma­tion and crit­i­cal reasoning—may war­rant a sim­i­lar­ly direct inter­ven­tion.

via The Smith­son­ian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Libraries Shaped Like Doc­tor Who’s Time-Trav­el­ing TARDIS Pop Up in Detroit, Saska­toon, Macon & Oth­er Cities

Strik­ing Poster Col­lec­tion from the Great Depres­sion Shows That the US Gov­ern­ment Once Sup­port­ed the Arts in Amer­i­ca

The Future of Con­tent Deliv­ery

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness