Reconstructing Giovanni Vacca’s Collection in the Vatican Library

Abstract

This article reconstructs an important but specific portion of Giovanni Vacca’s personal library: his books related to mathematics in Chinese language. Collected during his stay in China from 1907 to 1908, they were donated to the Vatican Library after his death. The article combines detailed archival and bibliographic research with an analysis of handwritten annotations in mathematical books in the Library’s collection R. G. Oriente in order to identify which books were previously owned by Vacca. This not only allows us to contextualize his sojourn in China and understand better his intellectual interests in Chinese science and the way he read and translated Chinese mathematical texts, but it also contributes to a more detailed picture of the Chinese book market in the early twentieth century.