University Park, PA -- Recently, following an absence of some fifty-seven years, an early edition of a text of Erasmus of Rotterdam was returned to the University Libraries. The text, De utraq[ue] Verborum ac rerum copia lib. II. :ad sermonem & stylum formandum utilissimi, was published in Amsterdam in 1645. It disappeared from the Libraries long before Penn State had a special collections department.

A letter accompanying the book explained what happened. It read, "From 1941Î1943, my father, Donald B. King, was an assistant professor of English at Penn State. He had this volume of Erasmus from your library for nearly sixty years. Shortly before his death in 1997, he asked if I might return it for him. As you can see, we�re not a family to be right on top of things. Signed Kathryn King, Vermont."

Donald King's translation of Erasmus, published in 1963 by the Marquette University Press, was titled On Copia of Words and Ideas, and it was edited and translated by King and H. David Rix. It would seem that while the Libraries did not have the original 1645 edition of the Erasmus text for a great many years, it did have a translation of the volume from the time of its publication only twenty or so years after it had "gone missing." The rare book is now safely deposited in the Special Collections Library, 104 Paterno Library.