RARE DANTE COLLECTION

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30143, 29 May 1963, Page 5

RARE DANTE COLLECTION

Bequest To University "The Press" Special Service AUCKLAND, May 27. A rare collection of more than 200 old books by or about the poet Dante has been given to the library of Auckland University. The books are a bequest by the Rev. W. Jellie, of Mount Roskill, who died recently at the age of 97. Mr Jellie amassed a collection of 7000 books, some of them printed as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century. Mr H. Roth, deputy-librar-ian at the university, said that Mr Jellie’s Dante collection was certainly unique in New Zealand, and he doubted whether it would be possible to find one anywhere which was quite as good. The bequest also included a framed picture of Dante and a bust in Italian marble. Mr Jellie’s family has also given the university at least 1000 more recent books from the collection. Mr Jellie, who was the first Unitarian Church minister in New Zealand, built up his collection of rare books by purchases in Britain and New Zealand. Up to the time of his death he still read Italian, Greek, French, Latin and Hebrew. His family are keeping some of his oldest books, which include sixteenth-cen-tury editions of works by St. Thomas Aquinas, Bede and Calvin, and seventeenthcentury volumes of Horace, Marcus Aurelius and Catullus.