Original evidence; a continuing history
The Mormon past survives in things that can still be opened, read, examined, and compared. This is a place for that encounter with the original record.
From early printing and handwritten documents to portraits and architectural fragments, each object has its own maker, use, ownership, and history of survival.
A title page identifies an edition. Binding, completeness, inscriptions, repairs, and provenance identify the surviving copy. Bibliography should preserve both kinds of information.
John’s work with early Mormon printing follows books through the circumstances of their production and use, including the volumes that have passed from private hands into research collections.
The literature of Voree and Beaver Island belongs within Mormon history alongside that of Palmyra, Kirtland, Missouri, and Nauvoo. Books, newspapers, photographs, and letters preserve the communities that remained in the Midwest.
The contemporary source should be identified on its own terms before being fitted into a later institutional narrative.
Historical buildings and burial places require the same attention as texts. Maps, surviving fragments, records of ownership, and physical observations can correct assumptions repeated in later accounts.
John’s Liberty research brings those forms of evidence together in his study of the Arthur plantation and the burial ground he identifies within the earlier settlement area.
John Hajicek began collecting rare books in 1980 and has worked in historical research and collecting full time since 1990. His library, archive, and museum in Independence, Missouri, assemble printed works, manuscripts, photographs, paintings, furniture, and artifacts that are too often studied separately.
His work has included rare-book bibliography, documentary examination, the study of early Mormon portraiture, and the preservation of historic buildings and surviving Nauvoo Temple stone. In 1991 he supplied the labor and investment to save an 1840s Mormon house on Mormon Road in Voree. His research combines the evidence found on a page with the workmanship of an object and the geography of a place.
Collectors, researchers, and owners of original material are welcome to make contact. Questions about an object are most useful when accompanied by photographs, a description, and whatever is known of its history.