Yet to satisfy the University of Ottawa, Notre Dame needed more than illicit poultry and triumphs on ice; it needed a library. Among his other attributes, Murray was a bibliophile. No one is sure how he equipped Notre Dame’s library with vintage texts that would be the envy of most universities. But equip it he did. Books from Lübeck (1483) and Venice (1481). Leatherbound volumes signed by a French count and a Spanish marquis. A Latin text published in Lyon in 1547: Treatise on Evidence for Murder. . . .
Soon after Murray’s death, Notre Dame reverted to being just a high school. History and foreign languages are not prominent on today’s curriculum; the classics are absent. Murray’s collection survives inside a locked vault in the school’s museum. Students rarely glimpse the ancient books; their working library is a nondescript room tucked behind the hockey rink.
To reach the rare-book vault, you have to walk past a maquette of the ramshackle college of 1939, Murray’s moth-eaten buffalo coat, a plaster copy of friezes from the Parthenon—and several cans of Spam. (They commemorate a hungry moment when Murray advised the students to pray for a miracle. The next day a boxcar full of Spam arrived, courtesy of John Diefenbaker.) The vault forms an inner sanctum. Except on organized tours, few people venture in. The Nuremberg Chronicle and other rarities survive behind glass; humidity, light, and temperature are regulated with care. It’s a far cry from past decades when, in the midst of a lecture about Martin Luther, Murray would run out of the classroom and reappear waving a 1569 edition of Luther’s Bible.
“When Père was here, it was all hands-on,” says Jean Nelson, the archivist and museum curator. She has hauled into the prairie light a jewel of his collection: a thirteenth-century manuscript glorifying France’s patron saint, Martin of Tours. The manuscript is made of vellum—supple parchment from a calf’s belly. Look closely and you can still detect the lines that some anonymous scribe ruled across each page. The scribe then copied the saint’s miraculous deeds in double columns, leaving a space atop each section for a splendid ornamental initial.
These initials twine across the page like vines. One of them encloses a tiny portrait of a chunky, open-mouthed man brandishing a stick. It bears a striking resemblance to Murray.
In all likelihood, this manuscript arrived in Wilcox from Gull Lake, Saskatchewan, a small town about 250 kilometres to the west. Gull Lake was the parish of an expatriate French priest named Al Bacciochi—a distant relative of Napoleon who had previously worked in Louisiana. He didn’t slap his name on any manuscript. But he signed an illustrated 1637 edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. And on the title page of a magnificently illustrated Bible from 1874, Bacciochi wrote: “I am so glad to deliver into your hands, Father Athol Murray, the Bible [by] Gustave Doré the greatest illustrator of our times. I know you will enjoy it, admire it.”
The only study of the school’s collection—a recent thesis by Michael Santer of the University of Saskatchewan—mentions more than 450 items. About many of them, little is known: a parchment decree, for example, written in Latin and signed in the name of James I of England in 1606. Santer noted tersely, more work is needed.
“There’s a bit of a mystery here,” Nelson says, “but there’s no money to solve it. You’re living on what the kids bring in.” She gazes at a Latin letter, bound or trapped inside a first edition of Erasmus’s Institutio principis Christiani (“Education of a Christian Prince”), published in Basel in 1516. Its calfskin cover is peeling away, half exposing the letter. Who wrote it? Who received it? What news did it convey?
In truth, there are numerous mysteries about Murray’s ancient treasures in the middle of nowhere. “We’ve got things here,” Nelson admits, “that we don’t know we have.”
