Conrad Bult has been a librarian at Calvin College since 1965; next summer he'll retire after over three decades of employment. So he might be excused for taking it easy as he nears the end of his career. But a recent discovery at Calvin proves that Bult's diligence shows no signs of waning in his final months on the job.

The story begins in a storage room in the basement of Calvin's Hekman Library where Bult and fellow librarian Harry Boonstra are working on Calvin's uncatalogued collection -- books sitting in piles that are not part of the everyday stacks; books that need a glance to determine where they should go. Some of these books, in fact, end up as part of the annual Calvin College Used Book Sale, fetching anywhere from 50 cents to a few dollars.

Among the books in the basement this fall that passed through the hands of Bult and Boonstra was an Italian play from 1547. It was missing its front and back covers, and close inspection revealed that the spine might be from the 1700s or 1800s, meaning that the book was rebound at some point. It didn't seem like much.

But when the book ended up in Bult's hands, he gave it more than the cursory inspection one might expect. In fact, he paged through it from start to finish. And after 139 pages of Italian drama -- a well-known Italian play called The Tragedy of Free Will by a writer named Francesco Negri -- Bult made an interesting discovery. A new document, complete with title page and page numbers starting over again at one, followed The Tragedy of Free Will.

Bult admits that his Italian was not sufficient to read the document, but he could tell that the margins contained Scripture references, leading him to wonder whether the new material was a religious work of some sort.

Intrigued, he brought the book up two floors to the H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies -- a research center specializing in John Calvin, which has one of the world's finest collections of books written by and about John Calvin. There, director Karin Maag and curator Paul Fields did some research. What they found was startling: the new document was a catechism, but not just any catechism. It was printed in 1545, most probably in Geneva, and was one of the earliest Italian translations of John Calvin's Genevan catechism.

Maag and Fields dug deeper and discovered that only three such catechisms are known to exist! And all are in Europe. The version Bult discovered is the only known North American copy. And it sat in the basement of Calvin's Library for over 30 years, probably pre-dating even Bult's first years at Calvin.

"It's amazing to think about," says Maag. "It really is an incredible find."

Maag and Fields speculate that the book came from Calvin's old Franklin Street campus during Calvin's move in the early 1960s. And they believe that even then nobody knew what the book actually contained.

"Howard Rienstra (former director of the Meeter Center) was fluent in Italian," says Fields. "If he had known this existed it would not have sat in the basement for 30 years."

Why the book was at Calvin and how it got there is just one mystery.

Another is why the catechism was bound behind the Italian play in the first place.

Maag says it could have been done in the 18th century, when the book looks like it was rebound. Or, as is more likely, the two documents may have been bound together already in the 16th century for concealment purposes.

"In Italy in the mid 1500s," says Maag, "the Protestant Reformation was perceived as a threat by the Italian Catholic church. Italian church authorities were particularly concerned at the proliferation of books and tracts which they saw as heretical. So a catechism by John Calvin may have been controversial enough to need hiding behind something else."

Adds Fields: "In the time this catechism came out (1545), Luther was still the primary voice of the Reformation in Italy, but Calvin was beginning to take the lead. His work would have been one that Italians would have wanted. Perhaps this volume was one way to smuggle Calvin's teachings into Italy."

Maag and Fields note that the price for having such a book would have been steep, especially in 1545 but even more so by 1549 and again in 1559 when the church published lists of banned books, known as the Index of Prohibited Books.

Still a third mystery is who was Thomas Sidney, and when did he own the book.

For on the title page of the play is Sidney's elegant signature in what Maag says "looks to be a late 16th century or 17th century hand."

And, also in Sidney's had, is an Italian inscription -- perhaps his own motto, perhaps a clue to the extra material that lies at the book's conclusion.

It says simply: "To those who are adventurous only a little seed is necessary."