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By Henry Handley

Born 100 years ago this month, librarian Brother William “Bill” Fackovec, S.M. ’49 shaped the library by almost every measure in his 50-year tenure. With more than 6,000 volumes in the rare book collection that bears his name and over 65,000 volumes added to the entire Marian Library during his tenure, it can be hard to sum up his work in a single example. However, one favorite he shared in a 1997 documentary sheds some light on his library legacy.

In All Generations Will Call Her Blessed, Fackovec chose a volume of Flores Seraphici, a compendium of Capuchin biographies published from 1640 to 1642 in Cologne, as one he was “rather fond of” in the collection. Holding the book open to the engraved title page, he points out the illustration of St. Francis planting a tree at the base of the page. The branches twine around columns, bearing miniature images of Capuchin friars, identified by name. Mary, holding two watering cans, sustains the tree from the heavens.

If Marianists had a tree like the Flores Seraphici title page, Fackovec’s branch would be a sturdy, flourishing one. Born April 18, 1925, in New York, he didn’t live a life quite as dramatic as those illustrated in the Flores Seraphici, but it nevertheless included “the inspiration, the humor, the intellectual enjoyment, and the drudgery which are the lot of all serious bibliographers,” as Brother Stanley Mathews, S.M., wrote. Fackovec graduated from UD and took his final vows as a Marianist in 1949, and his vocation led him to libraries. He became a librarian in the Marian Library in 1960 and worked with collections and patrons until his retirement in 2011. Books like these carry on his inspiration, humor and intellectual enjoyment. They help connect 17th-century representations of Mary through his career as a librarian, cataloger and curator with present-day students, faculty, staff and members of the public.

Flores Seraphici is a perennial student favorite in class visits today, from the Wayfinders program for high school students to English major electives. Beyond the title page, the two-volume set features nearly 200 full-page engraved portraits in which Capuchin friars experience visions (often of Mary), confront demons, write books, levitate and otherwise demonstrate their zeal and religious virtue. Even though the text is in Latin, the illustrations contain miniature narratives and expressive figures. Thanks to Fackovec, the Flores Seraphici volumes are among thousands of materials that illuminate Mary from the 15th century to the present.

— Henry Handley is an assistant professor and rare books and print collections librarian in the Marian Library.