This week’s blog post highlights one of the newly digitized Distinctive Collections materials published in 1927, which now makes it public domain. For more on Public Domain Day 2023 see last week’s post.

The Chronical of the Northern Baptist Caravan

This daily devotional was published by The Northern Baptist Convention Board of Missionary Cooperation in 1927. Each section represents a single day, meant to be read aloud as a family for the duration of one month.

The Land of Adventure: a virtual journey

This imagined caravan journey through the “Land of Adventure” includes a variety of virtual modes of transportation such as car, boat, camel, and even elephant. Baptist missionary destination highlights from the “Land of Adventure” include: The Castled Walls of Carcassonne, Shanghai China, Burma, El Salvador, and New York City.

A Book Sewn Shut

The introduction gives explicit instructions for its intended use, “Each day’s discoveries will be disclosed by cutting the corners of one page of the book.”

These books were sold with the pages sewn together. The cutting of the thread each day in order to discover the daily devotional was an important aspect of the spiritual reading practices of this particular text. The material evidence of the holes where the book was previously sewn shut appear in the top and bottom corners of each page.

Newly Digitized Public Domain Materials from 1927 in the Digital Library

In addition to the Northern Baptist Caravan, here is a list of some of the materials in the Distinctive Collections that are now available in our Digital Library:

150th anniversary of the battle of Germantown, October 1st to 4th, 1927 : programme

Neddie Burd’s Reading letter: an epic of the early Berks Bar / by J. Bennett Nolan

Anthony Comstock, Roundsman of the Lord

Irish medieval monasteries on the continent : a dissertation / by Joseph Paul Fuhrmann, O.S.B.

Mysteries of the missing / By Edward H. Smith