What's the oldest book you own ?

[Tender Branson]

A 1928 World Atlas.

Pretty funny. The races of the world in there are still classified as Whites/ns/Mongolian etc.

And Muslims are named Mohammedans.

Vienna is the 8th largest city in the world.

The US only has some 120 Mio. people (AK and HI are missing).

Africa consists of ca. 4 countries.

And so on ...

[angus]

I have a 1943 world atlas from Rand/McNally, given to me as a wedding present.  Germany is a huge country.  I don't know whether the US government recognized its expanded borders at that time, but RM certainly did.  I also noticed the Mohammedans and the big divisions of colonial Africa.  

Older books:  a Physical Chemistry text by Glasstone from 1939 and an electronics text from 1937.  Sober, monotone covers.  Not like today's science textbooks.  There's also a Qualitative Analysis manual (paperback) from 1927 given to me by a colleague whose grandfather gave it to her.

At home I have a replica first-edition (1769) Encyclopædia Britannica.  Three huge volumes:  A-B, C-L, and M-Z.  It was actually printed in 1969 on the 200th anniversary, but it was made to look and feel like the original edition published in Edinburg two hundred years prior.  My parents bought the set on my second birthday, and somehow I've managed to hang on to them all these years.  The articles on medical treatments and surgery are among the most fascinating.  The articles describing the Americas are interesting as well.

[Lumine]

A 1907 Geography textbook from Spain. It's quite interesting to see the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Qing Empire referred in the present tense along with all the western colonies in Africa and Asia, and even the spelling of some words is a bit different (Jeografia instead of Geografia). Other than that, a poetry book from 1916, and since I don't own books from the 20's I jump to several books I have from the 30's and 40's (including a book on the Sino-Japanese war written in 1938).

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

Something from the 17th century that belonged to my great-grandpa. I need to look this up.

[angus]

(including a book on the Sino-Japanese war written in 1938).

That's a fascinating time as well.  I have a large collection of National Geographic magazines.  One is a February 1938 issue, which features a long article on Nanjing.  The article was prepared in December of 1937, of course, so it does not address the horrors and atrocities that were visited upon Nanjing between the time the manuscript was prepared and the the time the edition hit the bookstore shelves.  It was nevertheless an edgy article, attempting to provoke intervention against Japan, and the color photos of the capitol city of China with its American capitalist investors and modern department stores are visually captivating.  

[DemPGH]

There are two that I know of from the late 19th century - sometime around 1890 or so (would have to look for an exact date, but it's around 1890). One is a math book and the other is an English literature survey book. They've been in the family. There are actually a number of old books like that in the family, but I know of those two that I have.

[dead0man]

I've got a social studies text book from 1917.  The subtle and not so subtle racism is all over the place.

[Grumpier Than Thou]

The Bible?

[TDAS04]

1916 geography textbook for schoolchildren.  

According to this book:

*Nebraska has more people than Florida.

*Hindus are a dark-skinned branch of the white race.

*The US is helping and educating the people of the Philippines and Porto Rico, the latter of which is to west of the Danish West Indies.

*California has fewer people than Missouri.

*The largest cities in the world are 1)London, 2)New York, and 3)Paris.

*The cruel Turkish government especially treats the Christians very brutally.

[angus]

*The cruel Turkish government especially treats the Christians very brutally.

Indeed they were.  My paternal grandfather immigrated to the United States from his Balkan village in 1916 after witnessing a number of atrocities.  My favorite story growing up was the one where the Ottoman soldier put his sword into the belly of a pregnant woman and pulled out the fetus.  He was not at all like me.  He was a very sober man, not given to exaggeration or cheering at sporting events. 

Did your book spell it Porto Rico?  I never thought to notice such a thing in any of my old books. 

[TDAS04]

Did your book spell it Porto Rico? 

Yes.

[angus]

Interesting.  I have noticed that my 1943 atlas uses "hindu" as an ethno-racial term as well.  They're a subclass of Aryans, which also includes Nordic, Italic, and some other stuff.

[politicus]

A 1928 World Atlas.

Pretty funny. The races of the world in there are still classified as Whites/ns/Mongolian etc.

And Muslims are named Mohammedans.

Vienna is the 8th largest city in the world.

The US only has some 120 Mio. people (AK and HI are missing).

Africa consists of ca. 4 countries.

And so on ...

ns sounds very unlikely. Is it Negroides or Negros and you are just exaggerating? (Negro and n are two very different terms..).

Mohammedans were in use up to the late 80s/early 90s in many coutries in Continental Europe.

[angus]

I had assumed it was a mistranslation.  Dutch and German use a word, neger, which does not even loosely translate to the English word n.  (Maybe Danes have a similar word?)  If it is neger, then that would translate into English roughly as negro.

I have a Diercke Weltatlas from 1974 that I collected (read:  stole from my elementary school) in Germany.  On a world map entitled Völker, it further subdivides neger into Bantuneger, Sudanneger, etc.  It also has Niloten, Buschmanner as subgroups of neger.  Interestingly, it has two separate terms for what the English atlases at the time considered one group:  Indoeuropäer and Kaukaser.

Also, American atlas used Caucasoids, Negroids, Mongoloids, and Australoids in the 50s.  In the 40s, the word Aryan was in use at least by Rand McNally, and included the Caucasoid as well as the some other groups, such as "Hindu."  To be fair, I should mention that RM also used the word Hindu as a religious group.

There's also a Cephalic Index in my 1943 atlas, with maps.  There are four general head shapes, dolichocephalic, mesocephalic, brachycephalic, and hyperbrachycephalic, and three general skin colors, lecoderm, xanthoderm, and melanoderm.  I guess folks were still arguing about "race" enough in those days that this particular map avoided the argument entirely and opted instead for physical descriptions. 

Racial categorization seems like a relatively fluid commodity.  I wonder if it is really necessary outside academic anthropological circles.
 

[Hash]

It is probably a very rare (one of 150 copies printed) French book from 1945 about French Indochina, which has a mix of informative stuff, colonialist rhetoric about France's civilizing mission in Indochina or flowery fluff about how everybody loved the French. It belonged to my grandfather, who stayed over 10 years in the region during World War II and the Indochina War.

[J-Mann]

Somewhere I've got an 1890-something copy of The Odyssey. Other than that, a few textbooks from the 1940s and '50s.

[bore]

*The cruel Turkish government especially treats the Christians very brutally.

Indeed they were.  My paternal grandfather immigrated to the United States from his Balkan village in 1916 after witnessing a number of atrocities.  My favorite story growing up was the one where the Ottoman soldier put his sword into the belly of a pregnant woman and pulled out the fetus.  He was not at all like me.  He was a very sober man, not given to exaggeration or cheering at sporting events. 

Did your book spell it Porto Rico?  I never thought to notice such a thing in any of my old books. 

That sounds very similar to a story Ivan uses in The Brothers Karamazov (published 1880):

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Although apparently all of the stories Ivan uses are true, which is one reason why the chapter is so powerful.

[angus]

My father's father name was Ivan.  I don't suppose that it was the same Ivan.  Well, it couldn't have been because he would have been born a few years after Brothers Karamazov was published.

You have inspired me.  I have not read it, but I think I will now.

[Cranberry]

I myself don't own any old books, neither do my parents; but my granpda has a medicine and biology book from the 17th or 18th century... I'll have to look up the exact date when I'm at his house, but if my memory serves me right, it was 16xx....
It's really an old book, and describes a few illnesses on the human body and how to combat them; using all the latin terms for the illnesses and so on - which is particulary funny, as they used the Gothic "alphabet" / font-style for the German text and the "normal" font for the bits and pieces in Latin... So you have a text full of the Gothic font, and then, every two or three lines, a normal word like "canceris" or whatever... It is really funny

[JerryArkansas]

I own a bible from the 17th century printed in German.  I can't read it well, but I still find it amazing and I flip through it and try at points to read a familiar verse or two.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

I have a book from 1914 that came from my grandfather's collection. It has pictures of the "Great European War."

[Chunk Yogurt for President!]

My parents have an old German Bible from the 19th century that has a genealogy of my ancestors in it.  There's also a book in English I found that was from about 100 years ago.  I think there is an old map somewhere that still shows Africa divided between various European powers.

(Most of my family members who were alive 50 years ago weren't the type who enjoyed reading and many of them were probably illiterate).

[Fmr President & Senator Polnut]

A copy of the complete works of Robbie Burns from 1919.

[MATTROSE94]

My oldest book is actually a homemade newspaper scrapbook that was originally a farm ledger in the early 1800s. Most of the newspaper articles clipped into it range from the 1880s up until about 1910 or so. I received that particular book from my aunt in 2008. In addition, prior to Hurricane Sandy I had a history book from the 1870s discussing the history of the civil war, but the storm destroyed it. Further old books that I own include two books from 1942 and 1944 discussing the then-cutting-edge technology behind TV and the progress behind TV programming at the time (kind of ironic considering that there were less than 10,000 TV's in use at the time). I also have a book about General Wainwright from 1946 that belonged to my mom's uncle when he was a kid.

I also have a number of old magazines ranging from the 1940s-1970s. Some of the more notable ones are a couple editions of Liberty Magazine and The American Legion Magazine from 1946 and '47 and an issue of Life Magazine from September 16, 1957 (the featured article discusses the Little Rock Integration Crisis and President Eisenhower's reaction to it).

[Bacon King]

Not 100% sure it's the oldest book I own but the oldest book I could find on my bookshelf is a 1956 academic treatise on Totalitarian Dictatorships from Harvard Press, which I bought at a yard sale for a quarter