Rose McCandless isn’t on TikTok much.
The 26-year-old’s nose is more likely to be in a book about medieval handwriting. The Paleography of Gothic Manuscript Books: from the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century, to name one. The 13th century is McCandless’ thing. You know, checking out what the average person was thinking 800 years ago. So much so that she collects books about the history of books from the Middle Ages to the present.
McCandless recently won the University of Denver’s Taylor C. Kirkpatrick Prize. The $1,000 prize recognizes and encourages young Colorado book collectors under the age of 30. Collections are judged on their thoroughness, the approach to their subject, and the seriousness with which the collector has cataloged and presented their materials.
The young Denver collector is currently a reference and instruction assistant at the University of Denver Special Collections & Archives library. She’s “the person who watches to make sure you don’t get your salad dressing on the rare books.”
She also works for the Digital Scriptorium, a one-stop shop for information about any medieval manuscript owned in North America.
McCandless has many ways to describe herself and her interests.
“A book lover is probably number one,” she said.
“Every book has a soul”
McCandless has a tattoo on her arm in Spanish: “Cada libro tiene una alma,” every book has a soul. It’s associated with a quote from Spanish novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s novel, “The Shadow of the Wind.” The quote encapsulates McCandless’ passion and devotion to books.
“Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”
McCandless loves books not just as things to read, but as objects to hold and touch. She’s interested in how they became objects of value, both on one’s shelf and in the rare book trade. It’s medieval manuscripts that are her true love, books written by hand before the invention of the printing press.
“These materials preserve our physical history and our textual history,” she said, especially now, in a world where facts and what constitutes reality are ever-shifting. “History is being manipulated, and rare books are just one way to be able to access what really happened.”
Her small collection of books about books is both scholarly and personal. The books aren’t particularly valuable, but they carry meaning and help her with her studies of medieval manuscripts. McCandless took Latin in middle and high school and she is trained in certain medieval handwriting.
“But if you give me a legal document from Henry VIII’s time, I can't make heads or tails of it, so you know, it's a very, very niche skill set,” she laughs.
Here is a selection from her collection:
- “Form and Function in the Late Medieval Bible”
- “What Is a Book?: The Study of Early Printed Books” (“I find his discussion of binding practices very digestible.”)
- “A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books”
- “Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages”
- “Lexicon abbreviaturarum: dizionario di abbreviature latine ed italiane, usate nelle carte e codici, specialmente del medio-evo, riprodotte con oltre 14000 segni incise”
- And of course, “The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books” (“I will use this until its spine disintegrates.”)
There are also some books in her collection she buys just for personal and aesthetic reasons. McCandless gently opens a beautiful book called “The Kelmscott Press: A History of William Morris's Typographical Adventure.” It’s about the small press that produced 52 books between 1891 and 1898 that were designed by celebrated poet and designer William Morris, best known for his textile and wallpaper designs.
“Isn’t that gorgeous?” McCandless enthuses. “His design aesthetic is just incredible!”
Another favorite in her collection is the book “Otto Ege’s Manuscripts,” about 20th-century art historian and teacher Otto Ege, a self-proclaimed “biblioclast,” a person who destroys books. Ege bought medieval manuscripts, cut out individual pages and sold them. He said he did it because manuscripts are too expensive for most people to buy.
“This book is very special to me because my mentor at Ohio State knew that I was interested in pursuing the reconstruction of these fragmented manuscripts in my career, which is a project that I work on a lot, and so he got me one of the very few copies that were ever printed of this book.”
“Don’t touch that! (Just kidding)”
In the world of medieval manuscript scholars, McCandless is young. But academics and others have been happy to welcome her to the field. It’s one she stumbled into. She was a freshman at Ohio State when a scheduling kerfuffle landed her in a graduate-level history of the book class. On the first day, the class visited the rare book reading room.
“I picked up this beautiful 1611 copy of one of Shakespeare's lesser-known plays, ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor.’ ”
It had a gorgeous floral and gold binding. She touched it, entranced.
“The curator looked me directly in the eyes, and just said, ‘Don’t touch that!’”
McCandless was mortified.
“He started laughing and said, ‘No, just kidding, you can actually touch everything in here.’ And that really formed my philosophy about rare books, that everybody should be able to touch them and enjoy them and learn from them.”
That was the moment when she knew she wanted to be part of the book world — and that curator went on to become one of McCandless’ mentors.
Connecting to people 800 years ago
Manuscripts, by the very nature of being handwritten, reflect the individual personalities of people, she said.
“One of the other aspects of the power of rare books is their ability to spark joy and facilitate connection between human beings. We live in this crazy insane world that it feels so scary and sometimes it's nice to just put your hands on something that is old and cool.”
She urges readers of this story to visit their local library and ask to look at the rare books and manuscripts, “because you are the people that that stuff is being preserved for.” She also recommends the University of Denver’s special collections website.
This fall, McCandless will head to Cambridge University for a PhD in history, specializing in medieval manuscripts.
“I want to know about what the average everyday person was thinking about when they wrote in the margins in their Bible,” she said.
She’ll specifically investigate the period “when the Bible went from a very, very large object to a very, very small object.”
What’s next for McCandless’ collection of books on books?
John Steinbeck’s annotated copy of the “Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights.”
“That is a book I am really keeping my eye on.”
But it’s not just rare books or books about books she’ll continue to seek out. McCandless calls books “carriers of memories” — many she owns outside her collection are paperbacks a friend gave her, or books that remind her of a time in her life. Anyone can have a collection, McCandless said, she just wants people to keep reading.
“Pick up a romance novel or a dime thriller from the airport and just sit down and read it for an hour!”
And with that, McCandless hands me a spare copy of one of her favorite novels, “The Shadow of the Wind,” and sends me on my way.
