Monthly Archives: November 2010

Seventy years ago …. news from the Daily Princetonian

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The Daily Princetonian announced on November 30, 1940 …

There is a rich deposit about purchases and gifts acquired by the Library in the Daily Princetonian, which has recently been fully digitized and is keyword searchable. See the following URL for details:
http://theprince.princeton.edu/





Raphael Holinshed, d. 1580?.
The firste [ – laste] volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande. Conteyning, the description and chronicles of England, from the first inhabiting vnto the conquest. The description and chronicles of Scotland, from the first originall of the Scottes nation, till the yeare of our Lorde. 1571. The description and chronicles of Yrelande, likewise from the firste originall of that nation, vntill the yeare. 1547. Faithfully gathered and set forth, by Raphaell Holinshed.
At London : imprinted [by Henry Bynneman] for Lucas Harrison, [1577].
2 volumes. Bound in brown morocco by Roger de Coverly for Pickering & Co. Contains bookplate of Charles Lilburn. Also penciled ownership inscription on front pastedown in volume 2: ‘Hargreaves, Alveston, Stratford on Avon.’ Call number: (Ex) 1426.472.11.

The Renaissance Emblem, an explanatory chart by William S. Heckscher (1904-1999)

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An illustrative chart by William S Heckscher, probably drawn in the 1950s.
[Click on thumbnail above to see much larger image.]
This is a chart meant to be read two ways.

First, reading from left to right gives a sense of chronological change, from ancient times on the left to the seventeenth century on the right. Secondly, the chart can be read in zones, as follows:

• Focal point of the chart is the first emblem book, the Emblematum liber by Andrea Alciati, first published in Augsburg in 1531.

•To the left of the focal point are arrayed 19 sources and seven antecedents.

•To the right are a series of branching diagrams covering seven diverse types of emblem books developing after Alciati. These are heroic, moral, and didactic, together with their subdivisions.

Note the foot of the chart: here are glosses for the labels above. For example, at lower left, the label ‘Egyptian: Hieroglyphs’ is explained as ‘Obelisk in Rome’.

Much of the text of this chart was reworked in 1954, when it was incorporated into the Library’s exhibition The Graver and the Pen: Renaissance Emblems and Their Ramifications. (ExB) 0639.739 no. 12 [link to full text]

Prof. Heckscher was a keen collaborator in the Library’s efforts to collect and interpret emblem books. He collaborated in publication of the 1984 short- title catalogue of emblem books in the Library. He complied The Princeton Alciati Companion: A Glossary of Neo-Latin Words and Phrases used by Andrea Alciati and the Emblem Book Writers of his time, including a Bibliography of Secondary Sources relevant to the Study of Alciati’s Emblems (New York, 1989). At present, Princeton’s holdings of emblem books and their cognates number more than 700. The collection continues to grow yearly.

From ‘Where sentimentalists, whether ladies or gentlemen, may become readers’ down to the present • A remarkable survival is found

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Recently discovered in the general stacks of Firestone Library:

This volume belongs to Bell’s Circulating Library, containing above two thousand volumes, next door to St. Paul’s Church in Third-Street. Where
sentimentalists, whether ladies or gentlemen, may become readers, by subscribing for one month, three months, or by agreement for a single book. Said Bell hath also very great variety of new and old books for sale; he, likewise, gives ready money for new and old books.

This bookplate appears on the front pastedown of the first volume of Andrew Baxter, 1686?-1750.

An enquiry into the nature of the human soul; wherein the immateriality of the soul is evinced from the principles of reason and philosophy. … . The third edition. To which is added, a complete index.
London : printed [by James Bettenham] for A. Millar in the Strand, MDCCXLV. [1745] [call number:
Ex 5744.155.1745], 2 volumes, together with a 3rd volume being Baxter’s Appendix to the First Part of the Enquiry…. (London, 1750), [call number: Ex 5744.155.1745a]

Chain of provenance from the colonial era down to today:
Bell’s Circulating Library (Philadelphia, fl. 1774-1778) -> Convers Francis, 1819 -> Theological School in Cambridge -> ‘Discarded by Authority of the Andover-Harvard Theological Library’ -> Acquired by Princeton in 1973, classed for the open stacks, then, during reclassification in 2010, it was discovered to have the bookplate of Bell’s Circulating Library, whereupon it was transferred to the rare book division.

Notes:
Very few books remain from Robert Bell’s Circulating Library. (Robert Bell is best known as the printer of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.) Several books from Bell’s Circulating Library are now held by the Library Company of Philadelphia and there is one at Stanford University. These Princeton volumes add a few more examples to the scant number already known.

Sentimentalists were persons of taste and sentiment. In the eighteenth century, the later term was not derisive, rather it pointed to refined emotional thought.

At LCP, the following at from Bell’s Circulating Library: Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, Aristippe, ou De la cour, Leiden, Elsevier, 1658, 2 vol. and two volumes of Pluche’s multi-volume Spectacle de la Nature; or Nature Displayed (Dublin and London, 1740-49) and

At Stanford, James Burgh’s Political Disquisitions (Philadelphia, 1775), formerly owned by Jay Fliegelman. (Call number JFL-276)

Furthermore, the two 1745 volumes at Princeton have annotations in the hand of Convers Francis, dated 1819, the year of his ordination into the Unitarian clergy. He was a senior member of the Trancendental Club.