The Loci Communes is Melanchthon's best known and most important work, the first systematic handbook of reformed theology, first published in 1521 and in numerous other editions since.
In 1949 Professor Carlos Moseley of the University of Oklahoma acquired a copy of the 1548 edition of this book from Germany, which is distinguished not only by the personage of its first owner but also by some autograph entries of prominent leaders of the Protestant Reformation. The copy is bound in a sixteen-century leather binding, brown, with the stamped portraits of Melanchthon on the front and Luther on the back side, each of them accompanied by a distich:
Ingenium referunt clari monumenta Philippi,
Corporis effigiem talis imago refert
Ista representat faciem pictura Lutheri,
Qui puro Christi dogmata corde doce(t).