Graphic Arts

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), El ultimo prologo de Jorge Luis Borges (Buenos Aires: Ediciones “Dos Amigos”, 1990). Graphic Arts Off-Site Storage. Oversize 2009- in process

“It has occurred to me that complete works are an error of commercial or academic origin,” wrote Borges in the prologue to this volume, “A man has a right to be judged by his brightest page, not by the distractions of his pen or his casual correspondence. I would like to be judged by the nine texts that follow or by the echo of those texts in memory.”

Eduardo Mayer published this trilingual edition in honor of the Argentine writer, essayist and poet. Borges chose the texts, which appear in Spanish, French, and English. Illustrations are by Josefina Robirosa (El Muerto), Rodolfo Ramos (Ulrico), Roberto Páez (La Espera), Norma Bessouet (La Muralla y Los Libros), Alica Scavino (La Intrusa), Gabriela Aberasturi (Fragmentos de un Evangelio Apócrifo), Vechy Logioio (La Luna), Julio Pagano (Utopía de un hombre que esta cansado), Libero Badii (Fue en Ginebra) and Luís A. Solari (Avelino Arredondo) The book concludes with an epilogue by Horacio Zorraquín Becú.

We are fortunately to have received the donation of another Bernhardt Wall (1872-1956) etched book, joining the eight already in rare books and special collections (see earlier post). It is a fine example of Wall’s publications, in which he not only drew the etchings for his books, but also printed and bound them.

Wall was an avid researcher of American history. He published biographies of several American presidents and various American writers, including Theodore Roosevelt, Warren Taft, Henry Coolidge, Sam Houston, Mark Twain, Thomas A. Edison, Abraham Lincoln, and Andrew Jackson. This is his biography of Washington Irving.

For more information on Wall, read Francis J. Weber, Following Bernhardt Wall: 1872-1956 (Austin, Tex: Book Club of Texas, 1994). Graphic Arts (GAX) Oversize 2005-0466Q

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George Cruikshank (1792-1878), Triumph of Dr. Jenner …, ca. 1807. Pencil drawing. Inscribed in ink: “Triumph of Dr. Jenner - the inventor of vaccination - & his friends. The [illegible] is on the top of the old College of Physicians on Warwick Lane - [illegible] suggested by old John Birch, surgeon of ‘St. Thomas’s’ and who was a strong anti-vaccinist.”

Early in the nineteenth century, the British public was divided as to the benefits of a small pox vaccine. This sketch by George Cruikshank refers to Edward Jenner (1749-1823) who was a strong advocate for vaccination and John Birch (1745?-1815) who was anti-vaccination. A group of figures with joined hands dance in a circle as a skeleton plays a stringed instrument. One of the figures on the left carries a coffin. On the back of the sheet, Cruikshank wrote some notes around a self-portrait. This drawing has not been matched to any published print.

The vaccination debate led to a number of satirical drawings. James Gillray (1757-1815) published an anti-vaccine print in 1802, depicting cows sprouting and leaping from vaccinated patients. In 1808, the year the government finally established a National Vaccine Institute, Isaac Cruikshank (1756-1811) published an engraving supporting Jenner entitled “Vaccination against Small Pox, or Mercenary & Merciless spreaders of Death and Devastation driven out of Society.”

George Cruikshank illustrated several articles on vaccine quackery in the humorous periodical The Scourge including “The Cow Pox Tragedy” and “The Examination of a Young Surgeon.” See, The Scourge, or, Monthly Expositor of Imposture and Folly (London: W. Jones, 1811-1814). Graphic Arts Collection (GA), Cruik 1811.2

According to the book The Double Elephant Folio, chapter G “The Copper Plates,” John James Audubon (1785-1851) had his engraver Robert Havell Jr. (1793-1878) prepare and ship the set of 365 copper plates for The Birds of America to the United States in 1839. Double elephant refers to the enormous plate size of 1016 x 678 mm. The plates survived a warehouse fire in 1842, about which Audubon wrote “They have indeed passed through the great fire of the 19th ulto but we are now engaged in trying to restore [them] to their wonted former existence; although a few of them will have to be reingraved for use, if ever the work is republished in its original size at all.”

After Audubon’s death, his wife took charge of the plates. An advertisement was published in 1870 offering 350 plates for sale, although no buyer was found. A 1908 article by Ruthven Deane indicates that the plates were eventually stored with William Dodge, Princeton class of 1879, who gave a number of them to the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution and Princeton University.

Happily, The Double Elephant also contains an inventory to the 78 plates that are currently known to be held in public or private collections (the rest were presumably sold for scrap). Princeton is fortunate to hold plate no.56 Red-Shouldered Hawk; no.101 Raven [above]; no.417 Maria’s, Three-toed, Phillips’s, Canadian, Harris’s, and Audubon’s Woodpeckers; no.422 Rough-legged Falcon (Rough-legged Hawk); and no.434 Little tyrant fly-catcher; Blue mountain warbler; Short-legged pewee; Small-headed fly-catcher; Bartram’s vireo; Rocky mountain fly-catcher [below].

Waldemar H. Fries, The Double Elephant Folio: the Story of Audubon’s Birds of America (Amherst, Massachusetts: Zenaida Publishing, c2006). Graphic Arts: Reference Collection (GARF), QL674.A953 F74 2006

The German artist-activist John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfelde, 1891-1968), created images in photomontage using labels, newspaper ads, photographs, and engravings. These were cut, assembled, and re-photographed (by Janos Reisman) for half-tone reproduction. Heartfield himself was not a photographer but a collage artist who prepared the work for commercial reproduction. George Grosz said he and Heartfield invented photomontage “in my South End studio at five o’clock on a May morning in 1916.” (George Grosz, “Randzeichnungen zum Thema,” Blätter der Piscatorbühne, Berlin 1928). Unlike other reproductive work, the published half-tones are usually bought and sold as Heartfield originals.

Heartfield joined the German Communist Party in 1918 and remained sympathetic to these ideals throughout his life. His younger brother, Wieland Herzfelde, founded the publishing house of Malik Verlag where leftist writers were championed, such as American Upton Sinclair who sought to expose social injustice and economic exploitation through his writing. Heartfield created many of the dust jackets for his brother’s publications.

Heartfield’s cover designs involved two images, one for the front cover and one the back, interrupted by a separate spine element. The two images for Sinclair’s Das Geld schreibt depict a group of writers as puppets of the state on the front and the family of German writer Emil Ludwig (1881-1948) on the back. Ludwig, who was himself persecuted by the National Socialist Party, threatened to sue Malik for defamation of character. As a result, the faces of the Ludwig family, including the dog, were punched out on all unsold copies. Princeton now owns both the censored and the original uncensored copies.

Heartfield was eventually forced to leave Germany in the 1930s but thanks in part to Berthold Brecht, was able to return in 1950 when he worked primarily in theater design.

Below, see two of the color variations Heartfield created for Oil! (Petroleum), Sinclair’s novel recently translated to film as There will be Blood, by Paul Thomas Anderson, starring Daniel Day Lewis. Heartfield tried the design both in green and in gold, representing both paper money and hard currency.

For more, try this volume on bindings and dust jackets of Berlin Publishing Houses: Anne Buschhoff, Blickfanger: franzosische Plakate um 1900 aus der Sammlung der Kunsthalle Bremen (2000) Marquand (SA) NC 1807.F7B872 2000. Blickfanger can be translated “eye catcher.”

Magdalena Dabrowski, “Photomonteur: John Heartfield,” MoMA magazine no.13 (Winter/Sprint 1993): 12-15.

Peter Selz, “John Heartfield’s ‘Photomontages’,” The Massachusetts Review 4, no. 2 (Winter 1963): 309-36.

This posting is to remind us all that the daylight savings time clock change is coming next weekend.

A sacrifice to Time, Fate dooms us all // And at his Feet poor Mortals daily fall // Time whose bold hand alike does bring to Dust // Mankind, and Earthly Pov’ns in which they Trust

Written by a British naval officer Robert Tailfer, these tables were designed to ease the conversion between dates on the Gregorian calendar and the Julian (Old Style) calendar. The book includes a brief history of the Gregorian calendar (part seen above) and three tables: the first giving the dominical letter for each year from 1300 to 2083, the second relating the days of the week to the dominical letter for each month of the year, and the third relating the epact (surplus days of the solar over the lunar year) and golden number for each year in both the Old Style and the Gregorian systems. See: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05480b.htm

According to Tailfer, these tables are useful “in examining ancient Records, Deeds, Conveyances, Notes of Hand, or any kind of Contracts whatsoever, but more especially in discovering fictitious & forged Deeds of Gift, it being well known that all Writings dated on Sunday (excepting what the Law allows) as null and Void.”

The English artist George Bickham I (also known as the Elder, ca. 1684-1758) engraved the entire work, including the allegorical frontispiece. Bickham was a writing master who is best known for his engraved copy books, such as Art of Writing, in its Theory and Practice (1712) Rare Books (Ex) 2007-0692Q; Second Part of Natural Writing: Containing the Breakes of Letters and Their Dependance on Each Other (1740) Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) 2007-0421Q; Natural Writing: In All the Hands, with Variety of Ornament (1740) Graphic Arts Collection (GA) 2007-0462Q; and most important of all, The Universal Penman; Or, the Art of Writing Made Useful to the Gentleman and Scholar, as well as the Man of Business … (1743) Cotsen (CTSN) Folios 11406

In most impressions of this engaging portrait of Maximilian I (1459-1519), the Holy Roman Emperor is looking to the left. Here at Princeton, he looks to the right. All the details in the scene are exactly the same except laterally reversed. That is, until you look at the top right, where a decorative figure with a horned headdress is holding a tablet with the artist’s signature and printing date: L 1520. While the scene is laterally reversed, the signature and date are correctly printed left to right. Our impression is not from the original plate.

The original portrait of Maximilian I was conceived, printed, and published by the Netherlandish artist Lucas van Leyden (ca.1494-1533) after seeing the 1518 woodcut Portrait of Maximilian I by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). In both, Maximilian wears the necklace of the Order of the Golden Fleece and a rimmed hat. However, Lucas’ print is one of the first to combine etching with engraving on a copper plate, using the quicker etched lines to lay down the preparatory drawing and the elegant engraved lines to finish the scene.

According to New Hollstein, this laterally reversed copy of Lucas’ print may have been done by the Dutch artist Jan Harmensz. Muller (1571-1628). Muller apprenticed under the master printer Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617) and eventually came to equal his teacher’s virtuosity with the burin. Nowhere is the reason behind this copy explained, although it may have simply been to prove that Muller’s talent was equal to that of Lucas.

Muller’s engraving came to Princeton University with a gift of approximately ninety-five prints and drawings of Alpine views. The Portrait of Maximilian I was included with a note explaining that the emperor was the first climber to be depicted using various articles of mountaineering equipment. Maximilian had three books commissioned to document his life, although he probably wrote some of it himself. The third, Theuerdank (1517) (facsimile: Graphic Arts GA PT1567.M6 A7 1979), includes these mountain climbing images.

The New Hollstein: Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts 1450-1700 (Amsterdam, 1996). Vol. 14 Lucas Van Leyden, p.112. Marquand Library SA ND653.L5 F502 1996

Ellen S. Jacobowitz and Stephanie Loeb Stepanek, The Prints of Lucas Van Leyden & His Contemporaries (Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1983. Marquand Library SA ND653.L5 J32

The first U.S. patent (no. 1,767) for “settable-unit stencils” was filed in 1840 by Edwin Allen, who designed stencils of individual letters that could be joined together to form words. This and other U.S. patents can be read at www.uspto.gov.

Samuel Widdows Reese (1843-1913) was a veteran, who served in the 1st Pennsylvania Reserve Cavalry. After the war, he moved to Chicago where he is listed in the city directory as a stencil cutter. Reese filed his first patent for a series of adjustable stencil letters in June 1873 (no. 148,087) and filed a second in 1876 for stencils with an S-fold on one edge to lock together with adjacent letters. The stencils were “machine-cut in spring brass with steel dies”. A broadside advertised Reese’s stencils

for shippers in marking merchandise and produce … manufacturers for labelling contents on boxes … merchants and real estate men in making signs and bulletin boards … cheese factors for dating cheese … in fact nearly all classes find them useful, profitable and desirable.

1876 was also the year his firm S.W. Reese and Company opened in Chicago, where one could buy stencils, badges, and other sign-making equipment. Although the company continued to operate under Reese’s name, he left it in the hands of his partner Christian Hanson (1843-1914) and moved to New York City. A second business called Reese and Company was established on Pearl Street in Manhattan, where it remained until late in the twentieth-century. So successful was the Reese interlocking stencil design that it is still used today.

See Eric Kindle, “Patents Progress: the Adjustable Stencil,” Journal of the Printing Historical Society no. 9 (Spring 2006): 65-93
and
Eric Kindle “Recollecting Stencil Letters,” Typography Papers 5 (Reading, 2003)

On Tuesday, October 20th, from 6-8pm, the New York City Bar Association will present

Lost and Found: A Practical Look at Orphan Works

You will hear from a diverse panel of speakers, including: Brendan M. Connell, Jr., Director and Counsel for Administration, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation; Frederic Haber, Vice President and General Counsel, Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.; Eugene H. Mopsik, Executive Director, American Society of Media Photographers; Maria Pallante, Associate Register for Policy & International Affairs, U.S. Copyright Office; Charles Wright, Vice President and Associate General Counsel, Legal and Business Affairs, A&E Television Networks; Moderator: June M. Besek, Executive Director, Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts, Columbia Law School.

This free public program will be held at 42 W. 44th Street, in the Meeting Hall of the Association. Please register at: http://www.nycbar.org/EventsCalendar/show_event.php?eventid=1222

Sir Hubert von Herkomer (1849-1914), Orphans, 1878. Drypoint. GA 2006-02669

In addition, The Society of American Archivists (SAA) has issued:
Orphan Works: Statement of Best Practices

a 16-page report that provides what professional archivists consider the best methods to use when attempting to identify and locate copyright holders. The statement, which primarily focuses on unpublished materials because they are usually found in archives, is available on the association website as a PDF at http://www.archivists.org/standards/.

Orphan works is a term used to describe the situation in which the owner of a copyrighted work cannot be identified and located by someone who wishes to make use of the work in a manner that requires permission of the copyright owner. Eight archivists and a recognized legal expert in intellectual property and copyright law developed the statement, based upon their experiences researching copyright status.

We created this statement to provide archivists with a framework to discover what materials they hold are truly orphaned works, and in the hopes of empowering them to provide wider access and use of those materials as a result

The primary authors of the statement include Briston (University of Oregon), Mark Allen Greene (University of Wyoming), Cathy Henderson (University of Texas, Austin), Peter Hirtle (Cornell University), Peter Jaszi (American University) , William Maher (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Aprille Cooke McKay (University of Michigan), Richard Pearce-Moses (Arizona State Library), and Merrilee Proffitt (OCLC). Financial and administrative support was provided for this project by OCLC Research and the RLG Partnership. More information on SAA’s Intellectual Property Working Group can be found at: http://www.archivists.org/saagroups/ipwg/.

Anton Kuchenreiter, Die Calligraphie in ihrem ganzen Umfange, geschrieben in Stein (Calligraphy in its entirety, written in stone) (Neuburg an der Donau, 1831). 35 x 51 cm.

This is the first and only edition of a German writing album containing thirty-three plates printed lithographically by Anton Kuchenreiter. It is a dedication copy for Princess Therese von Thurn und Taxis (1773-1839) and the bookplate bears the Thurn und Taxis arms. The dedication is signed “Anton Kuchenreiter lithograph.”

Kuchenreiter is not listed in any of the standard indexes to printmakers. However, there was a Swiss firm named Kuchenreiter known for their elaborately engraved firearms, led by Andreas Kuchenreiter I (1716-1795). It seems likely that Anton learned engraving from members of the family and incorporated the detail of the cut line with the ease of lithography.

The book was printed in Neuburg an der Donau (Neuburg on the Danube River), the capital of the Neuburg-Schrobenhausen district in the state of Bavaria, not far from the first quarries of Bavarian limestone, which was the favored stone of the earliest lithographers.

Princess Therese was born Duchess von Mecklenburg-Strelitz before marrying Prince Karl Alexander von Thurn und Taxis. Her younger sisters were Louise, Queen of Prussia; Duchess Charlotte von Saxe-Hilburghausen; and Princess Friedrike of Prussia. In the volume’s final plate, Kuchenreiter has drawn three names as though they were printed on top of each other: Louise, then Charlotte, and finally Therese. If you look closely, you will see additional words inside the letters of Therese’s name.

One more point of interest, the work is an example of lithographic engraving, or engraving on stone. A coating of grease-resistant gum arabic is painted on the stone and the artist scrapes away the text with a steel point. The exposed stone is inked and the rest is treated like lithography. This means that it would be written laterally reversed. For more, see Michael Twyman’s Early Lithographed Music (1996), p. 504. Mendel Music Library Ref SV ML112.T89 1996

Cruikshank’s print is described by the British Museum as: A bedizened hag walks to the left with an insinuating leer, with the stoop fashionable in 1816, and with splayed-out feet. Features and dress are inscribed with the names of food in which fish predominate: her skirt is covered with a Fishing Net, which forms a transparent hem; her high bonnet is a Scallop shell; her mouth Tulips; her teeth Pearl Oyster, or Sweet Meat; her hand, in which she affectedly holds an eyeglass: Fish hooks or Crabs Claws. There are many other disparaging inscriptions. Behind is a notice-board among trees: Beware of Men Traps.

The print is a companion plate to An Exquisite Dandy - Prodigious!!! A Nice Gentleman, (12 September 1818) also designed and printed by Cruikshank, in which a man is depicted walking in profile, bending at the waist. His features and dress are also inscribed with the names of food: his red carbuncled rose is Currant Jelly, his shallow broad-brimmed hat (an eccentricity) is Calves Head Jelly and Pancake; the cravat which covers neck, cheek, and chin is Puff Paste; his loose short trousers are White Sugar Bags; his handkerchief Blow Monge; his long spurs Gilt Gingerbread. Graphic Arts 2009- in process

It seem fitting in a week when announcements are issued concerning Playboy as mandatory reading for certain Architecture graduate students and masturbation being prohibited in Princeton bathrooms, that we post something from a temperance book devoted to showing the “lamentable conditions” to which the wicked are apt to fall.

This is a collection of stories first published individually in the New York Tribune, then released, according to an 1853 advertisement in the New-York Daily Times, in an edition of 15,000. The book sold in a cloth binding for $1.25 and in a gilt edition for $2.00. It was a best-seller. The sad stories focus on the beggars, the alcoholics and the prostitutes who lived in and around the Five Points area in the lower east side of Manhattan.

So popular were the stories that three separate theater productions were developed around the character of Little Katy (who sold hot corn in the winter and peanuts in the summer) at Barnum’s American Museum, the Bowery Theatre, and the National Theater. At the latter venue, Little Katy ran in repertory with Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

There are many such books on our collection. See also Ernest Gray or The Sins of Society by Maria Maxwell (1855) Graphic Arts Hamilton 1055

According to Sinclair Hamilton, the artist John McLenan was discovered by the publishers working in a pork-packing plant in Cincinnati and making drawings on the tops of barrels. He became one of the most prolific of our early illustrators. Besides the American temperance books, McLenan illustrated many English novels for Harper’s, such as The Woman in White, Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations, as well as being well-known as a comic draftsman.

Unfortunately McLenan died in 1865 at the age of thirty-eight. The memorial which appeared in the May number of Yankee Notions called him:

…one of the best draughtsman America has ever produced…. Equally at home in caricature and in sketches from the life, with a quick perception of the ridiculous and a fine appreciation of the picturesque, he soon took his place among the illustrators of our current literature, second to none.

See another biography at http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/mclenan/bio.html