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 The University of Virginia Library and
the University of Virginia French Department
are pleased to announce an expansion of the Renaissance in Print (Gordon Project), made possible by funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and continued support from the Florence Gould Foundation. Digital facsimiles of 16th-century French books in the Douglas Gordon Collection continue to be made available on this site thanks to the support of the Florence Gould Foundation. New titles are listed on the Index page. A Preservation and Access grant award from the NEH will fund the development of a significantly expanded set of reference materials over the next two years. – June 2006
Read more about the expanded project.
 The
Gordon Collection comprises some
1200 volumes of French books dating from the sixteenth
through the nineteenth century. Over 600 were printed
before 1600, and many retain their original bindings.
The collection, which came to the University
of Virginia in 1986, was the bequest of the
late Douglas Huntly Gordon of Baltimore,
a prominent Maryland attorney, former president of
St. John’s College in Annapolis, and recipient
of the French Légion d'Honneur and Palmes
Académiques. A Francophile since his undergraduate
days at Harvard, Mr. Gordon was one of the most distinguished
American bibliophiles of the 20th century.
 The approximately 600 Gordon
books dating from the sixteenth century include literary
works and titles pertaining to religion, philosophy,
medicine, astronomy, travel and architecture. Together,
they provide a remarkable window on the French
Renaissance. The rarity of so many of the
books, combined with the size and range of the collection,
make it a treasure for Renaissance scholars from around
the world, as well as those studying the early history
of printing and the book arts. In fact, many of the
volumes are counted among only a few surviving copies,
and, in some cases, the Gordon book is the only known
copy in the world. Among the rarest sixteenth-century
titles in the collection, for example, are an illustrated
edition of Marot’s Blasons anatomiques du
corps feminin…, published by Charles Langelier
in Paris in 1543, and a little-known volume of Alciati’s
emblems, Les emblemes de M. Andre Alciat,/ traduits
en ryme Francoise par Iean le Feure, published
in Lyon by Jean de Tournes in 1549, with woodcuts
attributed to Bernard Salomon.
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