Category Archives: New acquisitions

Recently acquired: Comunismo Argentino Collection

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Recently the Library acquired an extensive collection (approximately 1,300 items) of pamphlets, serials, books, and other documents from the Partido Comunista de la Argentina and other communist political organizations from that country. These are now stored and serviced by the Rare Book Division. Publication dates range from 1918, year when the PCA was founded, to the present. The collection includes official party resolutions, declarations, congress proceedings, conferences, bulletins, educational, and electoral materials, as well as the works of numerous communist intellectuals and publishers. Also present in the collection are more than forty periodical titles published throughout most of the 20th century. Some of those periodicals are Documentos del Progreso (1919-1921), Soviet (1933-1935), Problemas de la Paz y el Socialismo (1958-61), and Comentarios (1978-83). The collection consists of duplicates from the Centro de Documentación e Investigación de la Cultura de Izquierdas en la Argentina and obtained through an intermediary. Overall, the collection is one of the most important collections of its type outside of Argentina.

The collection joins the Library’s growing collections of pamphlets, periodicals and ephemera relating to political, social, economic, and religious movements in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Peru, and a number of other countries in Latin America, as well as Argentina.
For further details, contact Fernando Acosta-Rodriguez [facosta@princeton.edu].

Beers’ Almanack for the Year of Our Lord 1811 • Only copy recorded

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Garland C. Boothe, Jr., class of 1954, presented to the Library the only known copy printed as single sheet of Beers’ Almanack for the Year of Our Lord 1811 (New Haven, 1811).

Almanacs were a staple of printer’s trade for centuries, with some editions being printed in hundreds of thousands of copies. Purchasers ranged from the hard-scrabble farmer to the prosperous proprietor and everyone in between. “All our domestic operations are carried on by the aid of this daily manual; and we do not stir from our firesides without running over the long thin columns of days, sun’s declination, time of rising and setting, or without a wishful glance at the hazardous assurance of the bright moon-light nights, and pleasant days.” (Atlantic Magazine, August 1, 1824, page 298)

The usual publishing format was a book styled for a gentleman’s pocket or a lady’s desk. For public places, such as a coffee house wall or above a merchant’s desk, printers provided the text imposed on a single sheet. Useful while current and hanging, but, once out of date, requiring disposal, sheet almanacs rarely survive today. Pocket almanacs stood a better chance of survival. They could remain on the shelf with other books, especially if they were handsomely bound so as to complement a fancy mahogany desk.

According to the titlepage of the pocket edition, Andrew Beers, “Philomath,” provided the “Lunations, Conjunctions, Eclipses, Judgment of the Weather, Rising and Setting of the Planets, Length of Days and Nights, Tide-Table, Time of Sitting of the Courts in Connecticut, with other Matter, Useful, Instructive and Entertaining.” He assured the reader that his calculations “may serve for either of the towns in Connecticut, or the adjacent States, without any essential difference.”

The Boothe gift is now catalogued and shelved as (Ex) Broadside 392.

[Illustration above adapted from page 28 of Many Things Upon Money Matters for the Use of Young People in the United States (West Bradford and Boston, 1835)]

Penny Dreadfuls • Newly acquired

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Proof covers for the first 51 numbers of the Aldine Publishing Company’s “O’er Land and Sea” Library. 51 single octavo leaves, rough trimmed, some mounted on thin card, others showing signs of mounting. [London, 1890-1891]. Call number (Ex) Item 4697736.

The Aldine Publishing Company, 9 Red Lion Court, Fleet Street, London, “was the foremost of the reprint presses that, from the late 1880s, published American ‘dime novels’ in Britain, notably those featuring such favourites as Frank Reade Junior, Buffalo Bill, and Deadwood Dick.” * In 1890, A. P. C. issued number one in “The Aldine ‘O’er Land and Sea’ Library.” The series ran for 408 numbers, the last issued in 1905. A typical number cost 2 pence, and consisted of 64 closely-printed pages, with color-printed wrappers. The company thrived until the late 1920s to early 1930s, when changes in reading taste caused decline. A book salesman noted this change in a purchaser’s preference: “Highwaymen, pirates, and red Indians don’t excite his imagination; he wants fights with submarines, daring stunts in aeroplanes, and wonderful electric machines, … tales of Dick Turpin, Claude Duval, and Jack Sheppard interest him not.”

This gathering of the covers of the first 51 in the series came from the collection of Barry Ono, the Penny Dreadful King, whose collection was bequeathed to the British Library in 1941. Link here for details about the Barry Ono collection, including a portrait photograph of him surrounded by examples from his collection.

Among his many major purchases was the entire set of editorial file copies of the Aldine Publishing Company. Together with this gathering of covers is a photocopy of a typed note, dated May 31, 1940, signed by Ono announcing his purchase and stating that “these fine old wrappers are undoubtedly the only set in existence.”

*John Springhall, “‘Disseminating Impure Literature’: ‘: The ‘Penny Dreadful’ Publishing Business Since 1860,” The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 47, No. 3. (Aug., 1994), pp. 578.

Four Drawings by Renoir

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The Library has just acquired the first illustrated edition of Emile Zola’s famous novel of working class life, L’Assommoir. The novel first appeared in serialized form between 13 April 1876 and 7 January 1877, and sold well. Building on this popularity, the Paris publishers Marpon and Flammarion issued an illustrated edition in 59 parts in 1878. Each part had one illustration, keyed to a particular page. More than ten artists contributed artwork, which was published as a wood engraving. (More than five wood engravers were involved.)

The artists were notable in their day, and, for some, their reputation endured. Among those, the best known today is Auguste Renoir (1841-1919). He contributed four drawings to the project. Illustrated above is that adjacent to page 283, in which the heroine of the novel, Gervaise, and her lover Lantier listen at a café to Mademoiselle Amanda, declared by Lantier to be a “high class singer.” (Click on image for larger view.) Other pages contributed by Renoir are also scenes, indoors or out: page 136, La loge des Boche; page 192, Le père Bru piétinait dans la neige pour se réchauffer.; and page 368, Les filles d’ouvriers se promenant sur le boulevard extérieur. “Elles s’en allaient, se tenant par les bras, occupant la largeur des chausses.” Each work exhibits his painterly, impressionistic line, contrasting sharply with the acute lines of other illustrations by such artists as André Gill (1840-1885) or Maurice Leloir (1853-1940).

The result of this collaboration of artists, wood engravers, printers and publishers was a large, deluxe book with each illustration printed twice: once on a thick stock used also for the text (“papier de Hollande”) and once on China paper, whose soft surface caught shadings of ink more vividly than thick paper. The parts were bound in a red morocco half leather binding by Paul-Romain Raparlier, evidently on the commission of the London bookseller Henry Sotheran. (The names are stamped on the upper left corner of each front endpaper.) The Princeton copy is number 41 of a limited edition of 130 and has the booklabel of Eduardo J. Bullfinch, a lawyer and businessman in Buenos Aires in the first half of the twentieth century.
Call number: (Ex) Oversize 2007-0689Q

Award to Prof. William Gleason supports purchase of A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery (London, 1837)

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Figures • Upper: Title and price stamped in gilt on front cover. Middle: Title page with verses from William Cowper’s “The Task,” book II, lines 40-45, first published in 1785.
Bottom: Illustrated pages (19 and 51). Click on thumbnail for full-size view.

Call number for the book: (Ex) 2007-1634N

The Library has recently purchased the rare first edition of an important American slave narrative with funds provided by the President’s Awards for Distinguished Teaching, At Commencement 2006, Prof. William Gleason of the Department of English received the award, which included a portion for Library purchases. He directed the book portion go toward acquiring Moses Roper’s Narrative, first published in London in 1837. Graphic and poignant, the text went through several editions before the Civil War, then was not reprinted again until 1969 when it appeared in the Rhistoric Publications (Philadelphia) Afro-American History series. The text remains in print today.

“A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery (1837) gave the antislavery movement in England and America exactly what it wanted—a hard-hitting tour of slavery as a visitation of hell on earth, conducted by someone who had seen and suffered it all but who had survived to tell his story in a manner likely to evoke both credence and sympathy. The British clergyman who wrote the preface to Roper’s narrative solicited curious and prurient readers by promising them a kind of pious pornography: “There is no vice too loathsome—no passion too cruel or remorseless, to be engendered by this horrid system [of slavery]. It brutalizes all who administer it, and seeks to efface the likeness of God, stamped on the brow of its victims. It makes the former class demons, and reduces the latter to the level of brutes.” The twenty-two-year-old author of the Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper delivered what his white antislavery sponsors desired. The first scene of Roper’s Narrative details in a shocking but deadpan manner how the author, born in Caswell County, North Carolina, the son of his master and one of his master’s slaves, barely escaped death at the hands of his master’s enraged wife. Light-skinned and cooperative as a boy, Moses was trained for the comparatively mild duties of a domestic slave. But when he was sold to a South Carolina cotton planter whom Roper identifies only as Mr. Gooch, teenaged Moses was put to work in the fields, where he was subjected to floggings almost daily. Roper’s portrait of Gooch as an unmitigated sadist gave American antislavery literature the first example of what would become in Stowe’s horrendous creation Simon Legree a distillation of all that black America despised in the arrogant Anglo-Saxon: brutality, violence, hypocrisy, and tyranny.” — William L. Andrews, “General Introduction” to North Carolina Slave Narratives (Chapel Hill, 2003), p.5-7.

Newly catalogued • Hodder and Stoughton dustjackets

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Wrappers of books published by Hodder and Stoughton Limited (London, 1900-1940)
Call number: (Ex) 2010-0025E

Freshest advices! A complete listing of this collection is now available (4 August 2008).
See http://libweb2.princeton.edu/rbsc2/misc/H-S-summa.pdf

A collection of approximately 1200 wrappers and dust jackets, in albums and loose [viz. 2 vols. and 3 boxes], originally part of the publisher’s archives. Items mounted on leaves, arranged as follows:

[H&S vol 1] Bound in brown cloth, Guildhall Library shelfmark on spine: Ms 16346A vol 1, ca. 1920-40: books at 9d, also (inverted at end) at 2s; [H&S vol 2] Bound in brown cloth, Guildhall Library shelfmark on spine: Ms 16346A vol 3, ca. 1920-40: books at 2s, also (inverted at end) at 2/6, 3/6 and 5s.; [H&S box 1 – unit 1] Leaves (brown) with wrappers for books at 2s “Yellow Jacket” series, leaves numerated in white 1 to 50, probably ca 1920-1940 [approx. 53]; [H&S box 1 – unit 2] Leaves (brown) with wrappers for books at 3/6 and 2s, leaves numerated in yellow 2 to 71, leaves 2 to 51, books at 3/6, leaves 52 to 71, books at 2s Probably ca 1920-1940 [approx 60] ; [H&S box 2] 38 leaves (white) with wrappers for books at 1s. 2s, 2/6, 6s, leaves numerated and not numerated [approx 75]
[H&S box 3 – unit 1] Leaves (brown) with wrappers for books at 3/6, some “Yellow Jacket Western” series, leaves numerated in yellow 52 to 58 [approx. 18]; [H&S box 3 – unit 2] Leaves (brown) with wrappers for books at 9d and unpriced, leaves numerated in white: 25, 10[1], 10[2], 113 [approx. 12] ; [H&S box 3 – unit 3] 18 leaves (brown) with wrappers for books at 9d and various prices, leaves not numerated — [approx 70] ; [H&S box 3 – unit 4] 45 torn fragments of leaves (brown) with wrappers for books at 9d and various other prices [approx. 45]; [H&S box 3 – unit 5] 26 cut fragments of leaves (brown) with wrappers for books at 9d and various other prices [approx. 26] ; [H&S box 3 – unit 6] 23 unmounted wrappers [23]
Provenance: Princeton collection formerly on deposit at the Guildhall Library, London. In March 2001, Hodder and Stoughton withdrew these and eventually sold them. Princeton purchased this lot from a Boston bookseller in April, 2007.



Email: ferguson@princeton.edu

Recently acquired • Angelo Decembrio, De politia litteraria (1540)

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Purchased in spring 2007 with funds provided by the Friends of the Princeton University Library. Professor Anthony Grafton’s comments on this book: “The Milanese humanist Angelo Decembrio provides in his De politia litteraria a uniquely vivid, if fictionalized, record of literary life at the court of Ferrara in the age of Leonello d’Este. His court was the favorite habitat of the great humanist teacher Guarino of Verona; the architect, humanist and theorist of the arts Leon Battista Alberti; the poet Tito Vespasiano Strozzi; and many other scholars, writers, and erudite soldiers of fortune. In Decembrio’s unique dialogues we listen to these men debating the value of ancient and modern poetry, discussing the quality of Flemish tapestries and other works of art, examining the Egyptian obelisk that still stands in Vatican City in the Piazza S. Pietro; and describing the ideal renaissance library and how it should be kept. The text has fascinated students of the Renaissance for the last century and more, and parts of it have been edited (the one on the obelisk, for example, by Brian Curran, now of Penn State, and myself; that on works of art by Michael Baxandall).

“In collaboration with Christopher Celenza of Johns Hopkins, I plan to edit and translate parts of this text, … But it won’t be an easy text to edit. Decembrio’s work survives in two distinct recensions: one preserved in a Latin manuscript in the Vatican, of which we have a full copy; the other in two printed editions based on a manuscript stolen from the Vatican in 1527 and now lost. The differences are multiple and subtle, and the supposedly critical edition that appeared four years ago in Germany is very problematic. We [can] collate the divergent texts far more easily [now that] Firestone ha[s] both printed texts.

“The edition itself is of considerable interest, moreover: its title page illustration is a spectacular rendering of learned conversation, one of the most brilliant ones of this period, and the text it offers is curious in many respects.”

Email: ferguson@princeton.edu

Call number for the book: (Ex) Oversize 2008-0435Q