George Cruikshank (1792–1878) was one of the most inventive and talented graphic satirists of his time. As a boy in London, he learned printmaking from his father, Isaac Cruikshank; after Isaac died in 1811, the family was supported entirely by George’s drawings. His political and social caricatures entertained and piqued the British public, and when he died, he was one of England’s best known and most prolific artists, having designed as many as twelve thousand prints.

The Princeton University Library’s George Cruikshank Collection consists of 35 boxes of Cruikshank’s personal papers, correspondence, and original drawings, including some two dozen bound sketch books. The most recent addition to the collection is a manuscript in Cruikshank’s hand, heavily corrected and signed by him in six places. The manuscript is a draft of a pamphlet Cruikshank would publish in 1860 titled A Pop-gun Fired Off by George Cruikshank: In Defence of the British Volunteers of 1803, expressing support for civilian volunteers in the face of a French invasion of Great Britain. The manuscript includes nineteen colored and pen-and-ink sketches, which differ from those published in A Pop-gun.

In A Pop-gun, Cruikshank recalls his first participation in a volunteer militia at age 11. When Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) declared war on Britain in 1803, George Cruikshank’s father Isaac joined a volunteer troop while George and his brother drilled with toy weapons. The manuscript draft offers further details: “In our Bloomsbury corp,” he writes, “we had to find our own uniforms with the help of the mamas—and our own arms and accoutrements—my Brother made himself a pasteboard cocked hat and a youth who was apprenticed to a coach builder made him a saber of wood…and I had a pasteboard cap and the Regiment having punched some small gun stocks, we had moss sticks—or Broom handles—fixed in these, and Black leaded to imitate the polished steel.” His training as a boy, he argued in A Pop-gun, prepared him well to bear arms as an adult in defense of his country. At the bottom of this manuscript page, Cruikshank has included a colored sketch of soldiers in uniform.

The manuscript is accompanied by a scrap of paper in Cruikshank’s hand containing military maneuvers and diagrams, tipped into a booklet titled Our Rifle Volunteers, Sketched by “Quiz.” The booklet is an illustrated verse satire on the volunteer militia that also focuses on the volunteers’ attire, but to very different effect. On one page, the verse “Now don’t make a fool of yourself, strutting there,/With the limbs of an ape, and the head of a bear” is illustrated with a drawing of an artillery volunteer wearing a large, furry hat and a comical expression. If the author of this work was not Cruikshank, it may have been Edward Caswall (1814–1878), a Roman Catholic priest who also wrote humorous and satirical poetry under the pseudonym Scriblerus Redivivus. Cruikshank may have owned this booklet and used it for reference.

In 1859, British volunteer troops were formed again under the threat of another French invasion. Cruikshank joined the 48^th Middlesex corps, eventually becoming its commanding officer; the George Cruikshank Collection contains other materials related to his career in the Middlesex corps. The collection complements the Graphic Arts Division’s holdings of over six hundred Cruikshank prints.

Additionally, scattered throughout the Manuscripts Department’s holdings is a wealth of works of art on paper by many British artists and illustrators, most of whom have a literary association: for example, George Du Maurier, Thomas Rowlandson, and J.M. Barrie. Worthy of special mention is the renowned Gallatin-Beardsley Collection, which includes 130 drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, collected by the American artist A.E. Gallatin, along with a rich archive of manuscripts, correspondence, posters, illustrated books, and other materials by or related to the 1890s English artist. The Department also holds artwork by other members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, John Everett Millais, Simeon Solomon, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Max Beerbohm, and Gwen John, whose watercolors were recently discovered in the Arthur Symons Papers.

George Cruikshank, undated manuscript draft of A Pop-gun. Man­u­scripts Divi­sion, Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions, Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library. Not to be repro­duced with­out the per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library.

Our Rifle Volunteers, sketched by "Quiz." Man­u­scripts Divi­sion, Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions, Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library. Not to be repro­duced with­out the per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library.

The Princeton University Library is pleased to announce that the Douglas Kent Hall Papers, a generous gift from Dawn Hall in 2010, have been arranged and described in a detailed finding aid and are now open and available to researchers. The papers comprise more than 100 boxes of correspondence, manuscripts, notes, research files, and audio and visual materials, documenting approximately fifty years of Douglas Kent Hall’s work as a writer and photographer.

Douglas Kent Hall (1938–2008) was born in Vernal, Utah, a rural community approximately two hundred miles from Salt Lake City. He attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, coupling his interests in creative writing and photography for a lifetime of documentary and artistic photography across the world. Hall traveled through Europe in 1968 and settled in New York City in 1971, where he had his first photography exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974. In 1977, he moved to New Mexico. The American southwest and border region would influence the next thirty years of his work, resulting in at least ten major publications and projects from the 1980s through the 2000s.

The creative bulk of the papers consists of at least 96,000 unique photographic images in the form of black-and-white negatives, contact sheets, color transparencies, and prints spanning Hall’s forty years of work as a photographer. Major subjects include rock and roll stars from the 1960s and early 1970s (including Jimi Hendrix and The Who), the American southwest (including rodeos, mission churches, border residents, and Native dances), poets and artists (including Mark Strand, Allen Ginsberg, and W. S. Merwin), and photographic studies of subcultures including bodybuilding (with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno), prison life, drag racing, dance, and cowboy lifestyles. Locations photographed include the U.S.-Mexico border, the American West, New Mexico, New York City, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, and Russia. The photographs are accompanied by manuscripts, notes, research files, and correspondence related to their production.

Hall also wrote an Academy Award-winning documentary about rodeo (his longtime interest), and published four novels and over fifteen photography books on subjects ranging from body building (with Arnold Schwarzenegger) to the Native American weaving traditions of New Mexico. His novels were often autobiographical, centering around his rural Mormon-influenced childhood, while his photography books explored subcultures he discovered as an adult, such as rock and roll, bodybuilding, and prison life. The papers include drafts of major publications, including his first novel On the Way to the Sky (1972) and Let ‘Er Buck (1973), as well as the interviews and research behind the documentary The Great American Cowboy and extensive unpublished drafts and related materials. Other writings include books, plays, autobiographical short stories, essays, freelance articles and reviews, unpublished poetry, teleplays, and unproduced screenplays from his time as a student up until his death.

The Douglas Kent Hall Papers are a valued addition to Princeton’s extensive holdings of Western Americana, including manuscripts, archives, historical photographs, printed books, maps, and other materials. These include Daniel Gano’s Gold Rush Scrapbook and other overland travel narratives, the Western Americana Photograph Collection, photographs of Native American Indians from the Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories by William Henry Jackson (1843-1942) and others, and the Sheldon Jackson Collection of Indian Photographs.

The Seeley G. Mudd Library, part of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, has 11 boxes of photographs in the Association on American Indian Affairs Records and a series of private papers concerning the crusade to return Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo. For printed books, including those in the Philip Ashton Rollins Collection and J. Monroe Thorington Collection, please contact the Rare Books Division. For maps, please contact John Delaney, Curator of Historic Maps, at delaney@princeton.edu.

Douglas Kent Hall, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Wyeth, undated. Man­u­scripts Divi­sion, Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions, Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library. Not to be repro­duced with­out the per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library.

Douglas Kent Hall, Black Mesa, undated. Man­u­scripts Divi­sion, Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions, Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library. Not to be repro­duced with­out the per­mis­sion of the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library.