Sixteen faces: pen sketches, 19th century, on verso of rear free endpaper of The Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff Esq; Vol. I (London, Printed: And sold by John Morphew, near Stationers-Hall. MDCCX. [1710]) [Call number: RHT 18th-1087 oversize]
Newly published by the Library: The Cracked Lookingglass Highlights from the Milberg Collection of Irish Prose Writers
Now available for purchase, published in conjunction with the symposium and exhibition celebrating the most recent gift of Leonard L. Milberg to the Library.
Contents:
· 224 pages
· 169 full color illustrations
· 56 descriptive and / or interpretative essays about single items, groups of materials, or entire subgenres making up the collection, provided by 22 contributors including the two editors, as follows:
· Transatlantic Connections in the Early Nineteenth Century — Joseph Rezek
· Manuscript Letter from Maria Edgeworth
· The Irish Romantic Novel — Claire Connolly
· Representing Ireland: The National Tale — Renée Fox
· Manuscript Letter from Mrs. S. C. Hall
· Salute of the Earth: Carleton, Kiely, McLaverty — Paul Muldoon
· Charles Joseph Kickham — Howard Keeley
· The Irish Gothic — Renée Fox
· Manuscript Letter from Charles Robert Maturin
· Caroline Blackwood — Greg Londe
· Merrion Square — Renée Fox
· Telling Irish Fairy Tales — Renée Fox
· Manuscript Letter from Samuel Lover
· Irish Children’s Books — Renée Fox
· George A. Birmingham — Howard Keeley
· The Blasket Island Writers — Tom Shea
· Reinventions of the Gaelic: A Primer — Greg Londe
· A Fulcrum for Fun: Seosamh Mac Grianna — Paul Muldoon
· Walter Starkie — Mary Burke
· Comparing Colonies: Ireland and Africa — Greg Londe
· Manuscript Letter from James Stephens
· 1916: A Year in Prose — Greg Londe
· Liam O’Flaherty — Greg Londe
· On Somerville and Ross’s “The Whiteboys” Manuscript
· How to Say Yes: Quiet Men and Popular Fictions — Greg Londe
· Kate O’Brien — Paige Reynolds
· Manuscript Letter from Kate O’Brien
· Irish Writing during World War II — Clair Wills
· Manuscript Letter from Francis Stuart
· Irish Pulp Fiction — Greg Londe
· Elizabeth Bowen — Siân White
· Manuscript Letter from Elizabeth Bowen
· The Midcentury Short Story — Colm Tóibín
· Flann O’Brien Gets Away — Greg Londe
· O’Faolain and The Bell — Greg Londe
· Brian Moore — Terence Brown
· From across the Irish Sea — Colm Tóibín
· Iris Murdoch’s Working Notebooks — Greg Londe
· J. G. Farrell — Marina MacKay
· Northern Irish Fiction — Renée Fox
· Edna O’Brien, Carlo Gébler — Anne Fogarty
· Rethinking Endings: Irish Women Writers — Renée Fox
· The Lens of the Sentence — Colm Tóibín
· John McGahern — Kevin Whelan
· John Banville — Michael Wood
· Raven Arts Press: The New Dissident Dubliners — Greg Londe
· Dermot Healy and Sebastian Barry — Colm Tóibín
· The Art of the Irish Essay — Shirley Lau Wong and Greg Londe
· Colm Tóibín — Kathleen Costello-Sullivan
· The Art of the New Irish Memoir — Colm Tóibín
· Transatlantic Commuters in the Twentieth Century — Paige Reynolds
· Typescript Letter from Colum McCann
· The Bog Gothic — Ellen Scheible
· Emma Donoghue — Brian Cliff
· Queer Novelists — Renée Fox
· Anne Enright — Claire Connolly
Several of the essays are footnoted, in one instance with as many as 49 footnotes.
Other sections of the book: —
· 3 sections of front matter: notes on contributors; editor’s note; foreword by bibliographer and antiquarian bookseller J. Howard Woolmer
· 3 appendices: a listing of authors collected; a note about related Irish collections in the Library, particularly also those given by Leonard Milberg, and a checklist of primary works by authors in the collection. Available as a PDF.
· The whole carefully edited by Gretchen Oberfranc and artfully designed by Mark Argetsinger.
· Further bibliographical particulars: The catalogue is 224 pages (14:16s), paginated xv, 205, at a trim size of 8.5 x 11 inches. There are 177 images of which 169 are full color (39 at full-page, and 130 at half-page or smaller size), and 8 as B&W (although all images are technically printed as four color). The text stock is 80 lb. Mohawk Superfine Text, White, Smooth Finish.
Price: $30. Shipping is $4 within US, $9 outside the US. To obtain a copy, contact assistant for the Friends of the Princeton University Library, Linda A. Oliveira — email: loliveir@princeton.edu
Translations of The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria
The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria is Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel, first published in 1798, just one year after her death. It appeared as the initial two volumes of her Posthumous Works, and in the same year was reprinted in Dublin. In Philadelphia, it was published separately in 1799. It is still in print today. It is studied and widely regarded on a variety of levels: as among the earliest form of the feminist novel, for example.
Within seventeen years after publication, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria was published in French, German, and Italian. These have been little studied. Recently purchased for the collections were the first French translation (1798) and the first dated Italian translation (1815). Only a very few American libraries hold the French. Our purchase of the Italian is the only recorded copy in an American library
Call number for the French: Ex Item 5943134; for the Italian: Ex Item 5950717.
Note the frontispieces. The French is directly taken from the English original. Whereas, the Italian is completely different; rather than the author, it portrays the character Maria. The caption “Sol per te mia figlia me rincresce il morire” renders Maria’s words in the final scene “The conflict is over – I will live for my child!”
Note the frontispieces. The French is directly taken from the English original. Whereas, the Italian is completely different; rather than the author, it portrays the character Maria. The caption “Sol per te mia figlia me rincresce il morire” renders Maria’s words in the final scene “The conflict is over – I will live for my child!”
See it now: “one object that few can have ever seen: … a Renaissance iPad.”
New York Times writer, Edward Rothstein concludes his review of the current exhibition at the Morgan Library:
“… it has one object that few can have ever seen: a rare pocket-size calendar from 1609 with blank pages treated with coatings of gesso and glue. Using a stylus (no ink required), the owner could keep a diary without worrying about either honesty or secrecy. Instructions are given for treatment after writing: “Take a little peece of Spunge, or a Linnencloath, being cleane without any soyle: wet it in water” and “wipe that you have written very lightly, and it will out, and within one quarter of a hower you may write in the same place againe.” It is the first erasable diary, a Renaissance iPad.”
Here’s the Princeton exemplar, an edition from ca. 1605: [Writing tables with a kalendar for xxiiii. yeeres, with sundry necessarie rules. The tables made by Robert Triplet] [London, c. 1605?] 16mo in eights, 29 leaves (of 32) only (wanting A1, C4 and D8). Call number: Ex Item 5627567. Acquired in July 2009.
George du Maurier, illustrator of the first detective novel
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Who wrote the first detective novel? That question was answered recently in the New York Times Book Review. He was Charles Warren Adams (1833-1903), according to Paul Collins in his article “Before Hercule or Sherlock, There Was Ralph” (Sunday, 7 January 2011). Adams’s novel was “The Notting Hill Mystery”, first published in eight parts in the journal Once a Week: An Illustrated Miscellany of Literature, Art, Science & Popular Information between November 29, 1862 and January 17, 1863. It was subsequently published in one volume by the journal’s publisher, Bradbury & Evans.
Author aside, then what about the seven illustrations accompanying the text? Several are signed “DM” at lower left and “Swain” at lower right? Who are they? “Swain” is Joseph Swain (1820-1909), one of the most active wood-engravers of 19th century Britain. “DM” is George Louis Palmella Busson du Maurier (1834-1896), one of the great book illustrators of Victorian England. Du Maurier was a certain interest of Morris L. Parrish, whose collection of Victorian novelists is one of the great strengths of the Library. For more on Parrish’s holdings of du Maurier, see the following note and list prepared by Alexander Wainwright: |
[Transcription of caption] |
The dispersal of Sylvia Beach’s books
Above: Howard Rice surrounded by Sylvia Beach’s personal papers, office files, and the sign for Shakespeare & Co., 31 March 1964. At left: Her desk and some books, 12, rue de l’Oléon, 31 March 1964.
When Sylvia Beach died in 1962, relict in her apartment were books, business papers, correspondence, photographs, paintings, and literary memorabilia. By agreement with her sister, Holly Beach Dennis, Princeton purchased these effects in early 1964. Associate librarian for special collections, Howard C. Rice arrived in Paris in late March and spent three weeks in the rooms over her famous bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, 12, rue de l’Oléon.
Even though Sylvia Beach had given away 5,000 books to the American Library in Paris in 1951 (New York Herald Tribune, April 25, 1951) and even though she had sold her ‘Joyce Collection’ (as she called it) to the University of Buffalo in 1959, the apartment held, counting just the books, according to her sister’s lawyer, Richard Ader, 8,000 to 10,000 volumes. Untold numbers of papers and other objects filled closets, shelves, and walls. Howard Rice described as a ‘struggle’ his efforts to sort, collocate, organize, pack, and arrange shipping or further disposition of the apartment’s contents. When Rice returned to Princeton in April, he had completed dividing the contents as follows:
• 31 shipping cases sent to the library filled with more than 2000 books, hundreds of photographs, thousands of pages of personal and business papers, as well as some paintings and artifacts. For customs purposes Rice said these should be described as two paintings plus ‘books and papers for an educational institution.” He also described it as “‘the Sylvia Beach Collection’ proper — that is, her papers, inscribed copies of books, first editions of American, French and English authors, inscribed photographs, drawings, etc., …” Today these are arranged in two groups: the Sylvia Beach Papers (C0108) and the book collection given the location designator ‘Beach.’
• Another group of books – on the order of 3,000 to 4,000 – “constituting the basic library of English literature which once formed the core of the ‘Shakespeare and Company’ lending library was presented “to the University of Paris, for use in the library of its English Department, the Institut d’Etudes Anglaises et Nord-Américaines.” Rice wrote that these books were “…. far more than a mere circulating library for current reading. French teachers, students, and English scholars, as well as translators and writers, were in the habit of finding [at Shakespeare and Company], alongside the avant-garde writers of the twentieth century, not only Shakespeare, but also, in his company, the Elizabethan poets, the eighteenth-century novelists, the Romantics and the Victorians. Such books, which Miss Beach brought into France, with persistence and discrimination, from across the Channel or the Atlantic, may now continue their ambassadorial and fertilizing role among new generations at the Institut’s library, located in the Rue de l’École de Médecine, in the ‘heart of Paris,’ where Sylvia Beach lived for more than four decades.” (Princeton University Library Chronicle, 26:1, p. 12) Current successor to the library of the Institut is the Bibliothèque du Monde Anglophone < http://www.dbu.univ-paris3.fr/fr/bibliotheques/nos-autres-bibliotheques/bibliotheque-du-monde-anglophone>
•An unnumbered group of books was consigned by Howard Rice to antiquarian bookseller André Jammes. One document in the librarian’s records (AC123, box 51) shows these amounting to a 1500 Francs credit (or about $300).
•Maurice Saillet, a friend of Sylvia Beach since the 1930s, acquired her apartment after her death, and, according to Howard Rice’s notes, was “the key person during HCR’s sojourn.” Saillet’s collection of Sylvia Beach and Shakespeare and Company is now in the Carlton Lake Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas. It evidently includes some of Beach’s books.
Coda: In the late 1950s, Sylvia Beach prepared a 53 page list headed “The Library of Shakespeare and Company / Sylvia Beach / Paris – VI” together with a one page list of “Memorabilia from the Shakespeare and Company Bookshop, 12, Rue de l’Odéon – Paris -VI” Plans for making this list are mentioned in Sylvia Beach’s letter to Jackson Mathews, dated 2 July 1959. (Letters of Sylvia Beach, ed. K. Walsh [2010], p. 284). A copy of the list is in the Noël Riley Fitch Papers (C0841, box 3, folder 10).
Coda II: Photographs from Howard Rice’s memoranda in C0108, box 276.
Why Cruikshank was collected
In April 1871, New York antiquarian bookseller, Joseph Sabin (1821-1881) told why works by artist George Cruikshank (1792-1878) were valued and deemed collectible.
“CRUIKSHANK. This veteran inimitable and popular artist, whose works have afforded boundless amusement to all classes on both sides of the Atlantic, …. … There is no living artist who has used his pencil so often or so well for the benefit of mankind. Society owes him a debt not only for much enjoyment but for many valuable lessons. He is a great teacher of morality, whom the people should ‘delight to honor.’ It need only be added that George is popular among his associates. His face is an index to his mind. There is nothing anomalous about him or his doings. His appearance, his illustrations, his speeches are all alike – all picturesque, full of fun, feeling, geniality and quaintness. His seriousness is grotesque, and his drollery is profound. He is the prince of living caricaturists, and one of the best of men.”
The American Bibliopolist Vol 3 1871 page 134-135.
Note on pictures above: At right, detail from a photograph taken ca. 1920 of Case 50 in the Exhibition Room of the Princeton University Library. The case shows several books from the Library’s collection of George Cruikshank, presented by Richard Waln Meirs, Class of 1888, in 1913. Two items are identifiable: cover of My Sketch Book (1834, issued in 9 parts) and plate 3 of part 6 “Porters.” [Call number: (GA) Cruik 1834.2q]
Further details about the Library’s extensive holdings of Cruikshank books, prints, drawings, and manuscripts are the following links:
http://www.princeton.edu/~ferguson/h-bu-dr.html#cruik
http://libweb10.princeton.edu/Visual_Materials/cruikshank/index.html
Seventy years ago …. news from the Daily Princetonian
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)
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
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.