About the craft
Exclusive Books about Down Knitting.
As we have already said, last week our staff visited an exhibition of the down-knitting craft at the Nadezhda Krupskaya Library in Orenburg. Among the large number of diverse exhibits, our greatest interest was aroused by two rare publications, which we will tell you about in this article.
"The Orenburg Down Shawl. Edition for the Visually Impaired".
This one-of-a-kind creation of the Orenburg children's art school is one of the most striking exhibits at the exhibition. The book, containing historical information about the Orenburg down shawl, is written in light, accessible language and full of bright illustrations; on its pages you can find real goat down and small crafts made by the school's pupils. But the most interesting thing is that all the material is duplicated in Braille, the so-called "alphabet of the visually impaired". The book itself is quite small; its value lies precisely in its accessibility for people with disabilities. The library staff gave us the opportunity to look through the contents of the copy and take photographs of this edition, which you can see in this article.
(in the picture on the left, an example of text duplicated in Braille)
"Proceedings of the Free Economic Society. Part II".
And this is an even more interesting publication. The book is not displayed among the exhibition's exhibits; it is purely a library item. However, you cannot just come and take it, especially if you do not know exactly what to look for. You will not be allowed to take the "Proceedings..." out in any case. This unique book is kept in the Rare Collection of the Krupskaya Library, and the edition dates from 1766 (!). Having learned from the staff about such a rare item, we asked permission to look at the original book in the presence of staff and take a few photographs.
The book was brought to us; naturally, no one will show you where exactly the Rare Collection is. But we still managed to "touch history". You can also see photos of the copy here.
The pages of this part of the "Proceedings..." discuss Orenburg livestock farming, including our unique goats and the role of the down-knitting craft in the economy of the Orenburg region. The staff told us that at the moment the "Proceedings...", along with other books of the Rare Collection, are being digitised and posted on the Internet. If you want to come to the "Krupskaya" and manage to arrange to see the original (only within the library and only with the permission of the head of the Collection), you are still unlikely to be able to read the edition. However, if you know Old Church Slavonic, in which the original is written, you can try.
No one on our team can boast of that yet, so we will study the contents of the "Proceedings..." in detail in electronic form on the Internet. For you, we have prepared several photographs of pages of this unique book, which you can see below.
We were also unable to obtain any reliable information about the original print run of the "Proceedings...". The only copy known to us is in the Krupskaya Library, and we are grateful to the staff for meeting us halfway and allowing us to look at this book, because, along with the Orenburg shawl itself, it is part of our history and a treasure of our region.
At the end of the article, as promised, a few pages of the original.
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