Category: Audience

Ai Lettori: To the Readers

Who were these readers?

I am studying a 1615 English Edition of The Secrets of Alexis. The book was originally published in Italian under the name De’ Secreti del Reverendo Donno Alessio Piemontese in 1555 (WorldCat). This book was printed by William Stansby in London. It is a book of recipes for medicines, dyes, cosmetics, alchemy, etc. For more information on the physical book or the people who helped make it, please see my previous posts The Secrets of Alexis  and The Secrets of … Who?.

In my last post, I looked at the “To the Reader” and the way the author describes himself in it. This time, I want to look at how he views the reader, or rather, readers. In the Italian, this section is titled “Ai Lettori,” meaning “To the Readers,” the “i” at the end of both words indicating plural readers. With the vast popularity of the book, I feel the Italian offers a more fitting heading.

Alessio spent his life collecting these “secrets,” reaching a point where he was “assured that few other men [had] so many as” him. He had originally kept these recipes secret because out of “ambition and vain glory, to know that which another should be ignorant of.” He changed his mind, however, after a man had died of something he might have cured because he was too proud to share the remedy, and the physician was too vain to let another man help his patient. He wanted these “secrets” made public so that no one else would die in vain. In this way, his target audience is everyone and anyone possible—as many people as possible.

With so many print runs in so many languages, The Secrets of Alexis was certainly successful in reaching a wide audience. In 1894, an article from The Hospital notes how people would carry copies cheaply bound in blue paper with them to country fairs and such from the mid-16^th into the early 17^th century. This indicates, firstly, that the book was a staple for home remedies and amateur alchemy for almost half a century, and secondly, that historians have used The Secrets study the medical understanding of people at the time of its publication and the peak of its popularity. In a way, the historians are another, though unanticipated, audience of the book.

Charles C. Sellers, c.1970

As for this specific copy, I know for certain of only two owners: Dickinson College and Charles Coleman Sellers. Sellers was born in Overbrook, Pennsylvania March 16^th, 1903. He attended Haverford College, graduating in 1925, and then earned his Master of Arts at Harvard the following year. In 1957, he received his doctorate from Temple University. He worked as a historian and a librarian for various libraries and institutions. These include Wesleyan University (1937-1949), American Philosophic Society of Philadelphia (1947-1951), Dickinson College (1949-1969), and Waldron Pheonix Belknap Jr. Research Library of American Painting (1956-1958). He was also the editor for the American Colonial Painting (1959), as well as an esteemed author. Much of his work focused on early United States art history. He published three books on Charles Willson Peale in 1947, 1952, and 1969, as well as Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture (1962) Dickinson College: A History (1973), and Patience Wright (1976). Sellers was married twice. His first wife was actress Helen Earle Gilbert (m. 1932-1951), whom this volume was donated in memory of.  In 1952, after Gilbert’s passing, Sellers married Barbra S. Roberts.

This book was donated at some point between his first wife’s passing in 1951 and his own passing in 1980. There does not appear to be any further information on Sellers and how he got The Secrets, what he thought about it, when or why he donated it to the college, etc. It seems that because he worked in the archives, he felt such fanfare for his own donations were unnecessary, much to my dismay.

I imagine Sellers was not the first nor only owner of this book because it was printed nearly three centuries before he was born. Moreover, I noticed pencil markings on several pages, drawing attention to specific recipes. These markings may have been made by Sellers, but because of a trend I noticed in these recipes—that more than a third of them relate to sexual issues (menstruation, pregnancy, boils on the groin, etc.)—I think the book may have been read by someone researching or interested in the history of people’s understanding of sexual health. This would most certainly not be the audience that Alessio intended The Secrets for because these recipes were supposedly added in later additions, likely by a publisher or William Ward while he was translating the work to English (Martins). Also, I think this “other reader” was a woman because they underlined “in the nature of” referring to a woman, highlighting the difference in the way men and women were described in this remedy.

Interestingly, the pencil markings are mostly in the second part of the book, meaning more recipes relating to sexual health in the third part were not marked. The other recipes marked look at various topics: serpents, lizards, dogs, sunblock, warts, wild beasts, “marvelous dreams” etc. It is possible that these recipes were marked because they seemed a little impractical or impossible and the reader was amused by them. Branches put in a person’s ears, for example, do not prevent sunburn on the top of a person’s head. The trend I noticed above might actually be coincidence, and so many of these recipes were marked because there was so much faulty understanding about this topic, especially about women. A toad tied to a woman’s neck will not end her menstruation quicker, nor will any herb make a woman more likely to bear sons than daughters.

Works Cited

“Charles Coleman Sellers (1903-1980).” Dickinson College Archives & Special Collections, 2005. https://archives.dickinson.edu/people/charles-coleman-sellers-1903-1980. Accessed 2 December 2024

“De’ secreti del reverendo Donno Alessio Piemontese. Prima [-terza] parte.” Internet Archive, 2 March 2018. https://archive.org/details/BIUSante_pharma_res018694/m ode/2up. Accessed 2 December 2024

Martins, Julia. “The Secrets.” Cems KCL Blog, 14 July 2023. https://kingsearlymodern.co.uk/ key-texts/the-secrets. Accessed 21 November 2024

Ruscelli, Girolamo. The Secrets of Alexis [Pseud.]: Containing Many Excellent Remedies against Divers Diseases, Wounds, and Other Accidents. With the Manner to Make Distillations, Parfumes … and Meltings … Newly corrected and Amended, and also Somewhat more enlarged in certaine places, Which wanted in the former editions., Printed by W. Stansby for R. Meighen, 1615. ¹

“The Secrets of Alexis.” The Hospital vol. 16,407 (1894): 313.

1. This is the citation for the edition of The Secrets I worked with based on the Dickinson College Library Catalogue, which, like many catalogues, accredits the book to Ruscelli.

In my previous two blog posts I discussed both how the written text of An Almanack feels, looks, and functions, as well as exploring its previously known owners Hatty and Alice Bird French. An Almanack is not a real almanac at all but is rather The New England Primer; a children’s literacy pamphlet. The pamphlet too must have been a successful form of teaching language to children as its reader, Alice B. French, would become a doctor with her degree from Boston University in 1877. Even with its misleading title, An Almanack intended to teach children how to read and used religion to do so.  

The book contains a section meant to teach the alphabet and uses biblical references and images to help children connect to the letters. For example, in figure 1, to teach the letter A the book includes an image of Adam and Eve and reads, 

Figure 1 Illustrations and text that accompany the first letters of the alphabet

In ADAM’S Fall We finned all.  

And for the letter B, 

Heaven to find, The Bible Mind. 

This continues for every letter of the alphabet. 

The imagery in this alphabet section is very skillful as well, especially for working in a tiny, confined space of an inch and half an inch. This imagery could have been helpful for children learning how to read because images are more appealing and easier to understand than words are, at least when learning a language. I will include images of each of the letters with their drawings and biblical references as they are highly skilled and intriguing to study. (fig. 2) What makes these images particularly interesting is the ability to communicate a story in such a small space and with minimal detail. I also find the difference in font and spacing to emphasize the key portions of the text to be a valuable tool to learning the alphabet in this way. The phrases are also noticeably in a rhyme scheme which could have been to help with the memorization of them, both teaching the alphabet and key biblical stories.  

Figure 2 Illustrations and text that accompany the letters of the alphabet

The book also includes common names of men and women, so that children can learn to spell their names, and actually does specify this use case where the names are located in the text (fig. 3). One of these names is Alice; her sister Hatty does not appear especially due to the odd spelling. This is a fascinating find, as the first pages of An Almanack include the repeated spelling of the girls’ names- perhaps as they practiced their spelling. This to say that the book, at least in the case of the French sisters, reached its intended audience, and may have even been the cause of their learning how to read and write. And with Alice becoming a medical missionary later in her life, teaching through church stories may have been successful in encouraging youth to be church–minded.

Figure 3
List of common names of women, with the intention of teaching children to spell their names

In doing research for this section, I was finally able to find the gift plate that accompanies books given to the Dickinson archives documenting who donated the book. In the case of An Almanack, the Thompson family and Thompson’s Bookstore donated the book to the archives (fig. 4). Thompson’s Bookstore was a shop in Carlisle listed in the Carlisle directory from 1980. The store was located at 56 West High St. and was one of four bookstores in town (fig. 5 & 6). Thompson’s Bookstore however is not in the Carlisle directory from 1985, so the shop closed at some point in the years between 1980 and1985. The building that formerly housed Thompson’s Bookstore in town is now Georgie Lou’s Retro Candy.  

Figure 6
The former location of Thompson’s Bookstore on a modern map

Figure 5
Thompson’s Bookstore information in the Carlisle Directory of 1980

Figure 4
The gift plate for An Almanack

What is interesting about the gift plate itself is the design; the archives only used it between 1973 and 1987. In 1987, Dickinson had an international competition asking for a gift plate redesign. So, no books that entered the archives after the year 1987 would have the retired design that is on An Almanacks gift plate. An Almanack was likely to enter the Dickinson archival collection between 1973 and 1985 based on the timeline of the bookstore and the gift plate. The Dickinson archivist James Gerencser too shared that when Thompson’s Bookstore closed, they had an auction of the books that remained. Whether the archives bought this book at auction for the archives, or the Thompson family truly gifted it is unknown. Regardless the book entered the collection after previously being a part of Thompson’s Bookstore in Carlisle. 

An Almanack is a unique little book. Its title does not encompass the text that is within it, and within its pages the book can be contradictory. There are multiple publication dates, multiple title pages, multiple authors, and multiple publishers; which makes the book an interesting collaboration between authors across time. The handwriting left behind helped in gain insight into how the previous owners read this book, and their accomplishments in life showed just how effective this text may have been. The Dickinson archives are incredibly lucky to have An Almanack in its collection.  

Works Referenced  

AncestryLibrary. Ancestry.com, ancestrylibrary.com. Accessed 2 Nov. 2024. 

Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections. Dickinson College, archives.dickinson.edu/. 

Newman, H. (1843). An almanack containing an account of the Coelestial Motions, Aspects, &c. For the year of the Christian Empire, 1691. Ira Webster.