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SELECTED RECENT ACQUISITIONS
One of the earliest surviving records of Cistercian liturgical practices, this collectar, or collection of prayers, was made for and used at the Cistercian abbey of Ladek in Poland. It begins with a calendar that records the important dates in the history of the abbey, including feast days devoted to its founders, to various dukes, and to kings of Poland. The manuscript was used at Ladek through the seventeenth century, and additions and alterations are made on practically every page to keep the book up-to-date. The script, decoration, and binding are typical for Cistercian manuscripts in their simple elegance.
This first surviving treatise on chess is a moralizing sermon that compares the duties and obligations of various members of feudal society to the pieces in a chess game. The work was written around 1300, this late fourteenth-century manuscript being one of the earliest surviving copies. Bound with the treatise by Jacobus are an allegorical commentary on Ovid, the medieval History of the Seven Wisemen , and Walter Burley's biographical work on Greek philosophers-all of them composed in the first decades of the fourteenth century.
This manuscript contains a cycle of eight plays in Old French about the life and miracles of St. Nicholas. The plays are unique to this manuscript, have never been edited or studied, and are entirely unknown to the modern world. Plays in honor of St. Nick, among the most popular of medieval religious dramas, were frequently performed on his feast day (December 6th) by school children and by the members of the various guilds of which St. Nicholas was patron. Our manuscript was written in a peculiar format with long, narrow pages. It is bound in a vellum wrapper that envelopes the manuscript like a wallet. The size and shape of the book suggest that it was intended to be carried in the long side-pocket of a robe. The unusual format, combined with the frequent stage directions found in the manuscript, suggest that this copy was a director's. If so, the manuscript was not made for reading, but performing, and is one of the few such books that survive from the Middle Ages.
A unique concordance to the vernacular poetry of Petrarch, arranged alphabetically by last syllable. For each entry, all the words in Petrarch's poetry that end in the relevant syllable are listed, with page references to a printed edition of the poems, providing the reader an opportunity to find words used by Petrarch with the desired rhyme. In the early sixteenth century, Pietro Bembo promoted Petrarch as the ideal model for Italian poetry and initiated a Petrarchan movement that dominated sixteenth-century Italian verse. This lexicon must have been compiled to aid a would-be poet of the period in composing Petrarchan sonnets. The manuscript is divided into two volumes; the original Venetian bindings were made for a member of the Fugger family, whose arms are stamped on the covers.
Among the most collected of sixteenth-century illustrated books are the Italian religious dramas called Sacre Rappresentazioni , vernacular religious plays published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On the feast days of various local saints and on high holy days, acting companies, many of them connected to confraternities, performed sacred dramas before the churches of Florence and Siena, as well as in monasteries, piazze , gardens, and courtyards. The texts of the plays were printed for distribution at the performances and were regularly illustrated with woodcuts or engravings, most of them commissioned for the purpose. They constitute an important chapter in the popular art of the Italian Renaissance. The plays were written by some of the leading dramatists of the period, including Feo Belcari, Castellano Castellani, Bernardo Pulci, and Tommaso Benci, though many are anonymous. The range of editions included in this collection documents the development and transformation of religious drama in the Renaissance, reflecting the influences on the genre of popular piety, Savonarolism, classicizing humanism, romance, politics, and the Reformation. Songs and dances interspersed in the texts provide important evidence for Renaissance music. Both because of the ephemeral character of the pamphlets and because collectors of book arts have so avidly sought out their illustrations, original editions of Sacre Rappresentazioni are rarely seen on the market. This collection of 61 plays more than quadruples Yale's holdings of this type of material. Many of the books are not held in any other North American library, several are known in only one or two other copies, and a few are unique. Illustrious collectors of illustrated books, including Fairfax Murray, Ginori Conti, Horace Landau, and the Prince d'Essling, figure among the earlier owners of individual volumes in the collection.
The last of the Elizabethan mathematicians, William Oughtred (1575-1660) wrote his Easie method of geometrical dialling while a student at Cambridge. Around 1600 he devised an instrument capable on delineating sundials on any surface and later invented the earliest form of the slide rule. He became rector of Albury in Surrey, country seat of Thomas Howard, second Earl of Arundel, where he taught sons of the gentry in addition to the two Arundel sons. The younger, Sir William Howard, later Viscount Stafford, was the dedicatee of this "Key of mathematics," Oughtred's first separately published and most famous work, known as Clavis mathematicae. The book is a compendium of all that was then known of mathematics and algebra and was the first to introduce the sign x for multiplication. Oughtred's was highly influential, which is not surprising if one considers that his students included the future Sir Jonas Moore, Dr. John Wallis, and Sir Christopher Wren. Newton referred to him as "a man whose judgment (if any man's) may be safely relyed upon." The first edition of Clavis mathematicae is a legendary rarity. This copy came from Giles Strangways of Melbury Sampford in Dorset and passed by descent to the seventh Earl of Ilchester and was then in the collection of Haskell F. Norman.
William Laud (1573-1645), the Wolsey of his age, was the most powerful man in England during the "eleven years of tyranny," 1629-41. In this long, good-humored letter he thanks John Bramhall, bishop of Derry and Lord Stafford's chaplain, in a teasing vein, for his "Lenten-Present" of salmon and eels and anticipates the arrival of some promised herrings. He also refers to funds being raised for his great project, the restoration of St. Paul's, which remained half-built and neglected and became a stable for Cromwell's horses before it was destroyed in the Great Fire. Seventeenth-century English Poetry Broadsides This collection of nearly 320 poetry broadsides printed between 1660 and 1700 is evidently the one formed by Robert Michell of Horsham, Sussex, and Petersfield, Hants., M.P. for Petersfield under William and Mary and Queen Anne, whose daughter married Joan Jolliffe. The Jolliffe family later received the title Baron Hylton and had a country seat at Ammerdon Park, Radstock, near Bath, where the collection was preserved, the broadsides (some of which are double-sided) having been mounted on sheets of paper and numbered. The first such collection to appear on the market in recent memory, it offers a rich panorama of the popular poetry of the time. The broadsides are all illustrated with generally crude woodcuts. Subject matter ranges from traditional popular themes (a number are based on the Robin Hood folklore) to love, satire, and contemporary subjects ("The famous fight at Malago," "Oxford in mourning for the Lord of Parliament," "The late Duke of Monmouth's lamentation"). At least one ("A voyage to Virginia") has an American theme and one is Faustian ("The judgement of Faustus"). Most are anonymous but a number are by the prolific Thomas D'Urfey. Other authors include Thomas Jordan, John Dean, Abraham Miles, John Wade, and Tobias Bowne. The broadsides are usually recorded in very few copies, with fewer still in American libraries.
Isaac Watts (1674-1748) was a nonconformist minister and the composer of 600 hymns. In this letter to his younger brother, he discusses ignorance, empiricism, and moral certainty, then offers help with mathematics homework. "You Complain of the Laborious study of Divinity and its perplexing difficultys which fright you from the study of it and that your knowledge in the Mathematicks has made you desirous of demonstration in everything." He then proceeds to help his brother with his "difficulty in Algebra."
John Dean (of Nottingham, ca. 1679-1761) was a navy captain under Peter the Great. This unpublished manuscript contains "Observations," chiefly at first hand, on the czar, on the Russian people, and on Deane's service in the Russian navy, 1712-22. He writes of the czarina, society, religion, honesty, justice, punishment, and torture, and gives details about Peter's interest in surgery and medicine. There are excellent accounts of engagements with Sweden and of crossing the Caspian Sea, when Peter insisted the whole court, including the ladies, should be ducked from the yardarm if this were their first visit. Eighteenth-century Italian Theater A bound volume of manuscript memoranda, letters, notarial documents, account ledgers, and printed broadsheets, concerning the Accademia degli Immobili. Florence, 1717-89. The Accademia degli Immobili was founded in 1649 in Florence under the patronage of Cardinal Giovanni Carlo de' Medici, brother of Grand-Duke Ferdinando II, for the promotion of drama, music, dance, and chivalrous sports such as fencing and horsemanship. It leased its own theater in the via della Pergola. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Academy was virtually defunct. It was reorganized in 1714 and took formal possession of the Teatro della Pergola, which reopened in June 1718 with a performance of Vivaldi's Lo Scanderberg . This collection, probably originating from the archives of the Frescobaldi family, documents the reorganization of the Academy in the subsequent years. It contains contracts of employment and related memoranda between the impresario and the Immobili and two ledgers recording income and expenses incurred on specific productions: these include Pergolesi's Adriano in Siria in December 1745, an anonymous Didone abandonata in 1752-53 on a libretto by Metastasio, who also provided the text for Traetta's Olimpiade , performed in 1767 on a royal occasion. Documents relate to the renovation of the theater undertaken in 1755 and to further architectural restructuring in 1787. The renovated theater was inaugurated on 26 December with a grand ball followed by a performance of Caruso's L'Amletto . Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Yale collectors and librarians have pursued Goethe so assiduously over the years that the Speck Collection has all the first editions of his works and lacks few early printings. There follows a sampling of older Goethe-related books added during his 250th birthday year. Heinrich Leopold Wagner. Confiskable Erzählungen . [Giessen] 1774. Wagner, the author of Sturm und Drang satires and plays, attended law school with Goethe in Strassburg in the early 1770s. His "confiscatable stories" (in verse) are sarcastically dedicated to the censorship office in Vienna. Gottfried von Bretschneider. Eine entsetzliche Mord-geschichte von dem jungen Werther . Frankfurt a. M., 1776. The first printing of the doggerel poem, probably sung at fairs and markets, warning young people against the fate of Werther: I sing about the killer With a page of engraved music. One of the great rarities of Werther reception. Schlosser, who practiced law, was the husband of Goethe's beloved sister Cornelia; Goethe admired his foreign language skills. The book on Pope contains a prose translation of Essay on Man ; the second item purports to be an outline history of the world for women (but hardly gets beyond Cyrus the Great), while the third belongs to Schlosser's attack on Kant's philosophy.
Vulpius was another brother-in-law, the brother of Goethe's wife Christiane. He achieved literary fame on his own as the author of robber novels, the best-known of which was the wildly successful Rinaldo Rinaldini, der Räuberhauptmann , a three-decker first published in 1798. This set of biographies (judged "decent" by Hayn-Gotendorf, the German bibliography of erotic literature) is devoted to women--for instance Anne Boleyn and Marozia, mother of Pope John XI-whose played interesting political roles in world history.
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Gore ot uma , "Woe from wit," also rendered as "The misfortune [or mischief] of being clever," is not only Griboedov's masterpiece, it is also the greatest Russian comedy before Gogol's Government Inspector . The first two acts were written in Tiflis, where Griboedov was diplomatic secretary to the commander of the Russian army of the Caucasus from the end of 1821 to the beginning of 1823. The play was completed in May 1824. Printed extracts were published the following year in the almanach Russkaia Thalia , but publication of the whole play in book form was denied by the imperial censors owing to its highly irreverent portrayal of conservative Moscovite society. Griboedov gave manuscripts to friends, and copies (of which this is one) were widely circulated. The play was finally staged in 1831 and published, albeit in a bowdlerized version, in 1833. Griboedov saw neither book nor performance: in January 1829, he was massacred by fanatic Persians together with the entire personnel of the Russian legation in Teheran.
Son of the Reverend Charles Welsey, Samuel Wesley (1776-1837) was a composer and the greatest organist of his day. In this letter, written at the age of sixty-four, he discusses his dealings with music publishers and reflects on the successes and failing of his long life and on his regrets, the greatest being his failure to "usher into the musical World" the fifteen Latin anthems of Byrd transcribed from the manuscript in the Fitzwilliam Museum. A Yale library that wasn't to be
Two of the three ink and watercolor wash drawings contained in this portfolio are plans for the earliest proposed separate library at Yale University by the most important American architect of the antebellum period. Born in 1803, A.J. Davis had just become a partner of the New Haven architect Ithiel Town, with whom he remained associated until 1849. Did Yale, perhaps in the person of its then president, Jeremiah Day, approach Town or Davis about a design for a free-standing library building? Or did Davis produce an unsolicited design to attract Yale's attention? Whatever the circumstances may have been, these striking drawings (floor plan and cross section) reveal plans for a neoclassical building, both handsome and functional, featuring two stories of stacks, a basement for students' collections, and sub-basement vaults, the whole crowned by a dome lavishly decorated by frescoes, which in Davis's rendition irresistibly evoke the style of Thomas Cole. An interior skylight in the center of the dome was to bring light into the first floor and the basement. It can be regretted that the Davis library was never built. In its place, a library building in rather heavy Gothic style was commissioned from Henry Austin and completed in 1846. The third A.J. Davis drawing in this portfolio, for a public library, applies on a smaller scale the same principle of a rotunda, with wings added on both sides.
The first edition of Luigi Pirandello's translation of Goethe's Römische Elegien , with twenty illustrations by Ugo Fleres. Goethe wrote the poems in the late 1780s during his two-year sojourn in Italy; Pirandello translated them a hundred years later, while he was a student in Rome.
The first edition of Stefan George's German version (it is called an Umdichtung , not an Übersetzung ) of Les fleurs du mal includes poems suppressed in the original French edition and banned in France until 1949. Typographically, the book is a characteristic example of the Bondi editions of George's works.
Born in 1869, Albert Roussel was 45 when the war was declared, but he volunteered to serve and was first asked to work for the Red Cross in Eastern France in September 1914. From August 1915 on until August 1917, he served in the automobile division of the army as an artillery lieutenant. This vast collection of the more than 220 long letters to his wife Blanche documents his movements back and forth on the front through Champagne and Somme and Lorraine, especially at the time of the battle of Verdun. Musical preoccupations are not absent: during that period Roussel completed his opera Padmavati , inspired by his trip to India in 1909; in February 1917 his ballet Le festin de l'araignée was given a concert performance. The letters also discuss the music of his colleagues, friends, and contemporaries: Debussy, Fauré, Hahn, D'Indy, Ravel, Schmitt, and others.
Americana from the Frank T. Siebert collection The Frank T. Siebert collection, which came up for auction at Sotheby's in May, with the second part to follow in late October, is without question the most important Americana collection to be dispersed since the Streeter sales of 1966-69. The Beinecke Library was able to add a number of important titles to both its Eastern and Western Americana holdings. Canadian Eastern Languages:
The Northeast :
Trans-Appalachia:
Eastern Indian captivity narratives:
Indian treaties before 1800:
Iroquoian language materials
Algonquian language material
Documents & accounts of Indian-white relations in the early national era:
When soldiers retired from the Roman Imperial army, they were issued diplomas guaranteeing their status as veterans. These engraved bronze tablets were presented to them at their dismissal. This tablet, issued to a veteran from Skopje (Yugoslavia) in March 204, is inscribed on both sides, the text appearing once in capital script and once in cursive.
The Provincial Prior of the Dominicans in England writes to the Abbot of Malmesbury, excusing the abbot, on account of his infirmities, the masses, prayers, sermons, fasting, and vigils of the order. Written during the War of the Roses, the letter employs a gothic hand which became popular in the latter half of the thirteenth century and is a rare example of a dated illuminated manuscript.
This Latin and Italian manuscript, which combines a number of classical and humanistic works, must have been assembled by a Florentine humanist in the 1460s. The volume includes poems by Persius and Ovid, accompanied by humanist commentaries, as well as works by Petrarch, Niccolo Perotti, Poggio, and Bruni. The most remarkable work in the volume is Brunellescho's Geta e Birria , an Italian translation of a twelfth-century Latin comedy by Vitalis de Blois. The medieval Latin play, a remaking of Plautus's Amphytrio , ridiculed the scholastic philosophy of the schools of Paris. Brunellescho's Italian translation of the work was an important step in the dissemination of Plautus in the Renaissance and had a considerable impact on the development of Italian drama of the period. This is the only known complete copy of this collection of 117 dance songs written by Lorenzo de' Medici and members of his inner circle of literary friends for performance at the Medicean court festivals and Carneval celebrations. The popular fame of Lorenzo "il Magnifico" was based to a large extent on the cultural splendor of his reign, including the public performances he supported of poetry, music, and dance. The pieces included in the present volume, widely disseminated in the sixteenth century, influenced popular dance and song throughout Italy. Since all subsequent printings of these songs are reprints of this edition, the volume has extraordinary textual importance. The significance of this copy is even further amplified by the manuscript annotations added in the margins in a mid-sixteenth-century hand. The author of these annotations records that they are based on a manuscript that belonged to Baccio Ugolini, a friend of Lorenzo and of Poliziano, and a participant in some of the contemporary theatrical performances of Poliziano's works. The annotations record variant readings and supply, as well, a verse missing in all printed versions of the work. Renaissance Women More than a decade ago Axel Erdmann, proprietor of Gilhofer & Ranschburg in Lucerne, began collecting sixteenth-century books written by, for, or about women. His principal aim was to document the presence of women in sixteenth-century printing--as writers, readers, printers, illustrators, and publishers of books. He included within his scope as broad a range of European printing as possible, geographically, religiously, and intellectually. The collection eventually numbered 138 items and encompassed such subjects as law, medicine, pedagogy, literary criticism, poetry, epistolography, oratory, religion, design and fashion, prostitution, witchcraft, and cosmetics. The writings of more than forty women of the sixteenth century are represented, including some of the best known of the period: Laura Terracina, Tullia d'Aragona, Vittoria Colonna, Isabella Cortese, and the Madames des Roches. Among the highlights of the collection are François Rousset's New Treatise on Cesarian Births (Paris, 1581); Jean Baptiste de Glen's Duties of Young Ladies (Liége, 1597), which includes a suite of plates illustrating lace patterns; Jost Amman's The Women's Closet (Frankfurt, 1586), the first book devoted to women's fashion; The Pharmacy of Women and Children (Strassburg, ca. 1535), a practical guide for future mothers, midwives, and wet-nurses; three of the misogynist satires of Hans Sachs (Nuremberg, 1553 and 1554); Jean Bodin's On the Devilry of Sorcerers (Paris, 1580) as well as treatises by Gödelmann, Spina, and Weyer on witches; Johannes Stradanus' Silk Worm (Antwerp, ca. 1590), a collection of engravings illustrating the manufacture of silk; Isabella Cortese's Secrets (Venice, 1595), the first printed work on cosmetics by a woman; and the complete printed works of Madeleine and Cathérine des Roches (Paris, 1579, 1583, 1586). Another major focus of the collection is women in the printing business. Books printed by women in Antwerp, Lyons, Paris, Nuremberg, Rome, and Venice are included. The Erdmann collection is described in an extensive catalog that includes commentary on each of the books and numerous bibliographies, including lists of women writers and printers of the sixteenth century. The collection was acquired in its entirety by the Beinecke Library in 1998.
Ariosto's two earliest dramas, the Chassaria and I Suppositi , were composed in 1507 and 1508 for performance at the court in Ferrara. The staging of these plays is considered by some scholars to constitute the beginning of Italian Renaissance drama. For the early productions, elaborate stage designs were prepared by Pellegrino and Raffael. Actors in the plays stole copies of the text and had them published in Florence in 1509, against the wishes of the author. Ariosto did not authorize editions of the plays until the 1520s, and unlike the later authorized editions, these early versions are in prose. They are of the greatest rarity; there are no other copies in North America. Italian Comedy, 1524-25 Minizio Calvo, among the most cultured and learned printers of the early sixteenth century, had personal contacts with the leading literati of the day, including Erasmus, Amerbach, Froben, Grolier, Amaseo, Alciati, and Giovio. He printed more than 160 editions during his career in Rome between 1521 and 1535. Among the few vernacular works he published were a series of seven separately printed Italian comedies, produced in identical format, in 1524 and 1525. The plays, most of them first editions, are among the most important Italian plays of the Renaissance: the anonymous Aristippia , the Cassaria and Suppositi of Ariosto, the Mandragola of Machiavelli, the Calandra of Bibbiena, the Eutychia of Niccolò Grasso, and the Formicone of Publio Filippo. All seven are present in the two newly acquired volumes, one of the volumes preserving its original Roman binding of the 1520s with the name of the original purchaser, Antonio Camillo, stamped on the cover.
Giambologna's Rape of the Sabine Women , unveiled in the Loggia dei Lanzi in 1583, is a landmark of Mannerist sculpture. The composition, which resolves the problem of relating three figures in violent activity, requires viewing in the round for complete comprehension. This collection of verses praising the statue was published shortly after the unveiling and includes woodcuts showing the sculpture from both sides as well as in its placement in the Loggia, along with Michaelangelo's David , Donatello's Judith , Bandinello's Hercules and Cacus , and Ammannati's Neptune .
Bertelli's costume book, present here in its first edition, is one of the rarest of the sixteenth-century collections of fashion designs. Unlike other contemporary costume books, Bertelli's provides plates in paired sets, showing either male and female costumes from the same social strata, or town and country costumes from the same regions. Another innovation is the use of moveable flaps on some of the engravings, a sixteenth-century forerunner of pop-up books. One of the engravings so treated shows the Venetian courtesan, whose dress one may lift in order to view her hidden secrets. This manuscript inventory of a great country house describes the contents of 94 rooms, ranging from the Great Chamber and the Long Gallery to various offices and servants' quarters. Fourteen vellum skins were joined together to form a roll, approximately 25 feet in length. Compiled at the death of Robert, 3rd Lord Peter, on behalf of his widow, the inventory documents a great house at a time of rapid social and cultural change. School Theatre in 17th-Century Italy One of the interesting consequences of the Counter-Reformation in 17th-century Italy was the development of theatrical activities in schools and seminaries under the impulse of the Jesuits, gradually followed by other religious orders. This development is documented by a collection of 18 scenarios dating from 1619 to 1730. Religious themes dominate the earlier plays, some of which are celebrations of the local martyr or protector, such as S. Virgilio (Trento, 1629) and Santo Alessandro (Bergamo, 1619), whereas many of the later ones are purely profane comedies, such as L'inganno della fantasia (Rome 1696) and I litiganti (Rome, 1697), adaptations of Moliére's Le malade imaginaire and Racine's Les plaideurs respectively. Other themes include mythology-- Minerva sotto la persona di Mentore , a cantata for which date and location are unknown--, ancient history-- Agrippa (Rome, 1697, after Josephus), Piero Corsetto's Constantino (Palermo, 1653)--, or medieval history--Luigi Altoviti's La Svevia , performed in Rome in 1629 during the carnival, or Eraclio (Bologna, 1672, probably after Corneille's 1664 tragedy). These printed scenarios are of the greatest rarity--most of them totally unrecorded and unknown to most bibliographers. Some contain indications revealing an elaborate scenography, such as La Teodelinda (Parma, 1690). Others include information on the music and danced intermezzi interspersed in some plays: the choreographer's name is occasionally given, as in I litiganti (Gabriele Dalmazzo) and in L'Evilmero , a distant forerunner of Verdi's Nabucco , performed at the Jesuit Collegio imperiale of Palermo in 1730, to music by Giovanni Statella and choreography by Gianandrea Mongiardino.
Birken was the third member of the Shepherds of the Pegnitz, a poetry society founded in 1644 by Georg Philipp Harsdörffer in Nürnberg and named for the river that flows through that city. This volume brings together many of Birken's previously published works, including pastoral poems, occasional poetry, a few prose pieces, and three pattern poems (a book, a wreath, and a scale). In later life, Birken turned more to scholarship, producing several genealogies of prominent families. New York History Manuscript accounts of Sir Edmund Andros as governor of New York, 1682. Notarial accounts of the town of Jamaica, Queens, N.Y., 1660-1840. Appointed governor of the province of New York by James, Duke of York, in 1674, Andros remained in this position until 1681, when he was recalled to England. Upon the accession of James II, he became governor of the dominion of New England, where his unpopularity led to his removal and a near-trial. He was more successful as governor of Virginia between 1692 and 1698 and governor of Jersey between 1704 and 1706. The present accounts, covering his New York tenure, were written in October 1682. The first volume of the notarial accounts of Jamaica begins shortly after the first English settlers moved in from Massachusetts and Eastern Long Island and secured a pattern from the Dutch authorities. By the time the English took control in 1683, the small town was the seat of Queen's county and housed the court and the office of the county clerk. The second volume covers the years 1706-1749. The third volume opens in 1752, stops in 1758, resumes in 1772 (apart for a few entries for 1763) and stops again in 1778 to resume in 1785--an interruption that corresponds roughly to the occupation by British troops. The rest of the volume records the town's incorporation in 1814 and the building of the Long Island Rail Road in 1836, and stops in 1844. Mme De Graffigny Collection This gift of 13 titles hitherto not at Yale was made in connection with the international conference on Françoise d'Happencourt de Graffigny which took place here in early April, sponsored by the Department of French, the Beinecke Library, and the Lewis Walpole Library. The collection comprises Graffigny's first appearance in print, the anonymous Recueil de ces messieurs (Amsterdam [i.e. Paris] 1745), to which she contributed an "histoire espagnole" entitled "Le mauvais example produit autant de vertus que de vices"; two of the nine 1747 printings (one of them possibly the first) of her immensely successful epistolary novel, Lettres d'une Péruvienne , both bound with the earliest of three apocryphal continuations; two English editions of the Peruvian Letters (1768 and 1782, the latter with illustrations by Thomas Stothard); and several bilingual French-Italian editions published between 1777 and 1833: this use of a best-seller as an instructional linguistic tool has been compared to that of Albert Camus's L'étranger in American schools and universities in the second half of this century.
Sonette . Berlin, 1853. The philologist, diplomat, and educational reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt was a lifelong friend of Goethe and Schiller. In his essay about Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea , Humboldt endeavors to define the general character of epic poetry while describing Goethe's particular genius. The autograph initials A.v.H. on the front flyleaf may be those of the author's younger brother, the scientist and traveler Alexander von Humboldt. Wilhelm von Humboldt's sonnets were gathered and published after his death by his brother Alexander, who, in his introduction, notes that the 352 poems were the product of the last few years of Wilhelm's life. The volume includes an engraved portrait.
A collection of song texts compiled by Goethe's composer friend Zelter for the use of the Berlin choral society he founded in 1809. Zelter issued three editions of the collection during his lifetime, each an expanded version of its predecessor. This is the middle edition and contains the first printing of three texts by Goethe as well as poems by Brentano, Novalis, Tieck, and Uhland, among many more.
This anonymously published pamphlet is a typical Beckfordian jeu d'esprit. It consists of 24 verse epitaphs purportedly collected, as stated in the short preface signed "Viator," from church-yard tombstones during rambles in the neighborhood of Bath. It is, however, highly likely that some, if not most of them, are of Beckford's own invention. The rarest item in the Beckford bibliography, this pamphlet was hitherto recorded in two copies, one in the Dyce Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and one in the Beckford papers. This copy belonged to Lady Lincoln, Beckford's granddaughter, and bears the contemporary bookplate of Mannington Hall, seat of Lord Walpole. It came with a copy of Vathek (London, 1837), also presented by Beckford to Lady Lincoln.
Typical of its time and genre, this literary almanach for women readers contains a mixture of fiction, historical narrative, and poetry, illustrated at the front with a suite of engravings. The unusual paper slipcase is printed with an Escher-like geometric design. A Unique California Album An album of 183 albumen photographic prints; 9.5 x 11 cm. and smaller. Manuscript captions on mounts, with manuscript numbers on the prints. Thomas Houseworth (1829-1915) established his San Francisco photographic studio in the mid-1860s. Photographers who worked for him include George Fiske, Charles L. Weed, and Martin M. Hazeltine. John Prince-Smith was a German political economist, the founder and leader of the German Free Trade Party. Edward Vischer, who appears to have been responsible for creating this unique presentation album, was a pioneer California merchant, artist, and author who published several works depicting the redwood forests, the Yosemite Valley, and the Spanish missions. The 183 photographs in the present album depict early San Francisco, Sacramento, and Stockton, the dry dock at Hunter's Point, the iron-clad monitor Comanche , and the sinking of the Aquila carrying the Comanche , the Mendocino lumber region, geysers in Sonoma County, the Calaveras mammoth tree groves, the Yosemite Valley, scenes in the Sierra Nevada, including Lake Tahoe, and views of the Central Pacific Railroad. The Bibliographer's Eliot Donald Gallup has given the Beinecke Library the first three T. S. Eliot titles, the third in two states:
Marie Scheikevitch Papers Born in Russia in 1882, Marie Scheikevitch was the daughter of a prosperous lawyer (the King of Saxony stayed with them when attending the coronation of Nicholas II) who settled in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. She was unhappily married for a short while to the son of the fashionable painter Carolus-Duran, who took her under his wing and introduced her to the artistic and literary circles of the day. From 1912 onwards, she was close to Marcel Proust, and when Du côté de chez Swann appeared in 1913, she was able to arrange, through her friend Adrien Hébrard, director of the daily Le Temps , an exclusive interview with Proust, whose subsequent letters to her contain some of the most revealing comments he made on his own work. In 1935, she published an autobiography, Souvenirs d'un temps disparu , which contains an important memoir of Proust. She died in the mid-1960s. The papers consist in about 1,000 letters from a large number of correspondents. Those from Proust, which have long been known, are no longer in the collection, but the list of distinguished names includes, from the world of literature, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Maurice Barrès, Jean Cocteau, Georges Feydeau, Anatole France, Fran ois Mauriac, André Maurois, Henry de Montherlant, Paul Morand, Anna de Noailles, and Henri de Régnier; from the world of the arts, Sarah Bernhardt, Jacques-Émile Blanche, Gustave Charpentier, Gabriel Fauré, Reynaldo Hahn, and Jules Massenet; and from the world of politics, Louis Barthou, Léon Blum, Paul Boncour, Aristide Briand, and Paul Painlevé. The archive also includes Marie Scheikevitch's writings, especially a long diary which covers most of her life, with interruptions that seem to correspond to periods of depression, as well as texts of unpublished public or radio talks she gave on personalities she knew: Proust, Cocteau, Sarah Bernhardt, Lord Balfour, and Boni de Castellane, among others. A Wyndham Lewis Unicum
In October-December 1912, Wyndham Lewis exhibited at the Grafton Galleries in London a series of drawings depicting various scenes from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens , intended for an illustrated edition of the play to be published by Max Goschen to coincide with the show. Difficulties and delays intervened and the book never came out. The drawings were eventually published separately as a portfolio, which Goschen issued in a limited edition in December 1913 under the imprint "The Cube Press" (of which this is the sole occurrence): the portfolio was, in fact, Lewis's first separate publication. What was hitherto unknown is that a maquette of the book, with the printed text of the play and all the illustrations in place, had actually been printed. This unrecorded item, containing captions and notes in Lewis's hand concerning the printing and placement of the illustrations, passed into the possession of Ezra Pound, who sold it to John Quinn in 1917. The front wrapper bears a presentation inscription from Pound to Quinn which states: "So far as I know this is the unique copy of the Timon text printed with the designs." Early And Late Iliazd
The first book is one of the earliest publications bearing the "Degree 41" imprint which made Iliazd famous as one of the century's greatest modernist artists of the book. "Rekord niezhnosti" can be rendered as "affectionate reminiscences": it is portrait of Iliazd by his friend Terent'ev, illustrated with tiny vignettes by Iliazd's brother Kirill Zdanevich. The second book combines two distinct texts: the African portion of a travel narrative by a 14th-century Franciscan, preceded by a fragment from Bontier's and Le Verrier's account of Jean de Bethencourt's voyage to the Canary Islands in 1402. It is a fine example of Iliazd's typographic virtuosity and is illustrated with sixteen drypoint etchings by Picasso, including eight double pages, one of which is also printed on the cover.
Paul Zech (1881-1946) worked in the theater before emigrating to South America in 1933. The author of poems, fiction, and plays, Zech wrote two other, biographical books about Rilke, whom he greatly admired. This lyrical eulogy, published in the year after Rilke's death, was hand printed at the Officina Serpentis.
Hans Carossa (1878-1956) was a writer and medical doctor who belonged what the Germans call the "inner emigration," people who opposed National Socialism but chose silence instead of emigration or open dissent during the Nazi period. Most of his novels and shorter fiction are autobiographical in character. The three limited edition pamphlets displayed today are all signed by the author. The best known of the three is the long poem Verse an das Abendland , which circulated secretly in manuscript copies during the war. Iris Murdoch Colletion The collection consists of first editions of all her novels, from Under the Net (London, 1954) to Jackson's Dilemma (London, 1959, signed copy), including a presentation copy of A Severed Head (London, 1961) and limited, signed printings of The Good Apprentice (London, 1985) and The Message to the Planet (London, 1989). Illustrating Anthony Hecht
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