Books Like to Travel Across the Oceans, do They not?

About the Travel of Carniolan Books to Indians, not Even to Mention Baron Zois’ Examination

Abstract

For the first time in historiography this research presents the final examination thesis of Baron Karel Zois (* 1756; † 1799), a younger brother of the more famous Sigismund. The title of the document was its only known detail up to now. The description considers the age of the documents and its path to the former Ljubljana Lyceum Library. Its absence from Sigismund Zois’ catalogues and even from Joseph Kalasanc Erberg’s Carniola Literary History is striking and duly highlighted. Despite the poor references on Karel Zois’ title page, the research provided a list of his Graz professors. The mathematical-technical provenience in the contents of Karel’s final examination is striking, but in some way, it formed a useful path to his later botanical interests. K. Zois’ examination theses bound with Bion’s mathematics was one of a large group of reprints and translations, which Graz students produced under the supervision of their mathematics teacher Taupe and most of all by Biwald. Many of these texts were widely read among the Carniolans, especially in the well-equipped libraries of the Barons Zois and Erberg. For the first time, the focus falls on the most interesting among them, the anthology of doctoral dissertations defended under the famous Linnaeus, which Biwald reprinted in Graz in 1764 for the first time. Erberg bought the item for his botanical enterprises in his gardens for the Dol manor near Ljubljana, but the book eventually made its way to Berlin, and later came to rest in the University town of Norman, Oklahoma, which in Zois and Erberg’ time was just a part of the huge, mostly uninhabited prairie of western Native Americans.