Rare book display at MSU links humans and animals

People love animals. People love books. 

Books about animals — even Gila monsters — should get twice the love. 

A new exhibit at Michigan State University’s Special Collections Main Library Gallery satisfies two of humanity’s most enduring passions, drawing on one of the richest collections of books about veterinary medicine in the world. 

It took nearly a year for Andrea Kepsel, with the help of a team of book conservators and in-house graphic artists, to curate and coordinate “The Human Animal Bond.”

As MSU Libraries’ health sciences librarian, Kepsel helps students and researchers find what they need for their courses and projects. 

She wanted to treat library visitors to a glimpse of the strange and exquisite books tucked into the Veterinary Medicine Historical Collection, the largest such collection in Michigan, with more than 1,400 items. 

Fine bindings, creamy paper and vividly detailed illustrations trace the history of human interactions with animals, from agriculture to horsemanship to the relatively recent practice of drafting animals into service as companions.  

A lavish treatise by French veterinary surgeon Claude Bourgelat, founder of the world’s first veterinary school in 1761, marks the beginnings of vet science as it’s known today. 

“Before that, anyone could call themselves a veterinary surgeon,” Kepsel said. “His work called for a systematic education.” 

The exhibit is unique partly because there just aren’t that many veterinary schools around. MSU is home to the only college of veterinary medicine in Michigan, and there are only 30 or so vet schools in the United States.  

Also included in the exhibit is an infamous book Kepsel described as “the single most damaging work in veterinary literature,” a half-baked compendium of remedies for horse diseases by early 17th-century English poet and dilettante Gervase Markham. 

“His crude and disgusting remedies kept on coming up for two centuries in veterinary literature,” Kepsel said. “By the 1800s, it petered out.”  

Beside it is a book on the care of horses by Carlo Ruini, the father of equine anatomy. The etchings in the book, also by the author, are so exquisite that they have been mistakenly attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. 

An 1811 collection of essays contains one of the earliest known essays on fishing, “A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle,” written in 1496 by English prioress Juliana Berners. 

Judging by the fearsome assortment of hooks, blades, hammers and other fish-killing implements in the displayed illustration, Berners was not your easygoing, catch-and-release sort of angler. 

“Another reason it stood out was that it’s credited to a woman, and you don’t see that a lot,” Kepsel said of the essay. 

Most of the graphics on display are in black and white because color plates fade when they’re exposed to light. The books are set at a relaxed angle and fortified with nearly invisible straps to minimize stress on the bindings.  

Each book in the exhibit rewards scrutiny as a work of art, but Kepsel has also taken care to put them in context. 

She traces a direct line from Nicholas Cox’s “The Gentleman’s Recreation,” a 1674 treatise on “hunting, hawking, fowling, fishing” while preserving “the King’s Forest,” to modern-day conservation movements. 

“Hunters and fishermen have been some of the biggest drivers behind some of our conservation laws,” she said. 

Kepsel tells the story of the human-animal bond in harmony with the One Health approach to medicine — that the health of animals, humans and the environment are inextricably linked. 

But the message never detracts from the visual feast. Kessel chose to display “The Bee-Keeper’s Guide: Or, Manual of the Apiary” (1883), by Michigan Agricultural College Professor Albert John Cook, not just because it’s one of the first textbooks on beekeeping.  

“I pulled that one out because the binding is so beautiful,” she said.  

The elegant little book is embossed with an exquisite golden bee. 

The bee books belong here. MSU’s vet school is a leading center in the growing field of bee health research. 

“There’s even a bee club,” Kepsel said. “There are beehives on the green roof of Bailey Hall.” 

“The Flying Nation: The Story of the Bees,” a gorgeously illustrated 1952 children’s book by Dorothy Crowder, with illustrations by Helen Haywood, tells the story of a bee colony over the course of a year. A lush color illustration depicts bees busily pollinating a stand of purple and white crocuses — a tableau Lansing-area gardeners are already starting to enjoy in real life with the coming of spring. 

The bee books come from the Ray Stannard Baker Bee Collection, another magic closet tucked into MSU Libraries’ collections. Baker, its founding donor, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and alumnus of Michigan Agricultural College. Besides being a beekeeper, he was an adviser to President Woodrow Wilson and a widely respected progressive commentator on race relations in America.  

The exhibit is not without a touch of whimsy. Library visitors who pause to inspect the books on farming will be gently serenaded by moos, squawks and other barnyard sounds from a discreet dome speaker overhead. 

The second half of the exhibit shows how publishers have lavished attention on a wide variety of companion animals, from dogs and cats to birds and lizards. One tome is opened to reveal a lovingly rendered Gila monster. 

“For a long time, a lot of the written information on animal care and health focused on livestock — animals you needed to make a living,” Kepsel said. “It wasn’t until the late 1800s or early 1900s that you saw somebody who wanted a rabbit, for example, as part of the family, just for the sake of having a rabbit.” 

Kepsel doesn’t just talk the talk. She loves all kinds of animals and has a chinchilla named Walter at home. 

“It is the softest fur you will ever feel,” she said. “He’s not so cuddly, though. He’s a rodent. But he’s very intelligent and curious.”