SELECTED RECENT ACQUISITIONS

2004

• October 2004
• May 2004

• Bede. De Templo Salomonis, and other texts. Tournai, ca. 1100.
  
  This splendid Romanesque manuscript contains four of the Venerable Bede's commentaries on books of the Old Testament, one of which is known in only three other copies. The manuscript was written at the Benedictine monastery of Tournai, founded in 1093, and must have been one of the earliest manuscripts produced there. It is recorded in the 12th-century catalogue of Tournai, and its provenance can be traced from then until the present day without a break. Written by many different scribes, the manuscript is of great importance for paleographical studies of Tournai. It also has art-historical interest as well; there are two decorated initials, one of them including a pair of dogs.
  

• Hymns of the Confraternity of the Dead. Bologna, 15th century.
  
  The Compagnia della Morte was formed in the late Middle Ages in Bologna and other Italian cities as a religious confraternity that would provide spiritual guidance and solace to prisoners condemned to death. This manuscript includes a collection of 49 hymns composed by members of the confraternity to sing with the prisioners while they were preparing for, awaiting, and even while they were being led to, their execution. Of the 49 poems, almost all are unpublished, and most are not otherwise known. The manuscript is the subject of a Yale dissertation by a student in the Italian Department.
  

• Conte Facino. Dialogus. Padua, ca. 1470.
  
  An unpublished and otherwise unknown text, this is the dedication copy of a "Dialog on Friendship" written by the Paduan humanist Conte Facino. The work is dedicated to Francesco Molino, who became Vice-Doge of Venice in 1500, and bears his coat-of-arms. The treatise discusses freindship from a philosophical perspective, focusing on examples of male friendship and love in the ancient world. The dialogue form is employed throughout, with various interlocutors presenting their own stories. There is, for instance, a discussion between Castor and Pollux. The illumination, attributed to the "Douce Master," is also related to the work of the "Master of the Putti" and the "Master of the London Pliny." The binding was produced in the Aldine bindery around 1525.
  

• Luis de Camôes. Lusiadas. Lisbon, 1572.
  

  First edition of the fundamental work of Portuguese literature, the epic poem on the history of Portuguese exploration and discovery. Camoes presents a fanciful and fantastical account of the descent of the Portuguese people from an imaginary figure named Luso, supposedly a companion of the god Dionysus. The poem presents in Homeric fashion a retelling of Portuguese history of the 14th through 16th centuries, culminating in a heroic account of the journey of Vasco da Gama, the first European to sail to India.

• Simon Trippe. Christianus medicus. Autograph manuscript. Oxford, 15 May 1572.
  
  The unique dedicatory manuscript of a remarkable Elizabethan text, unpublished and hitherto unstudied. The author, Simon Trippe, was a fellow of Corpus Christi College, and this text, an original English rationale for the "Christian doctor" seventy years before Sir Thomas Browne, is dedicated to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The elaborate binding was probably executed for Leicester by the so-called MacDurnan Gospels binder, who bound six other volumes owned by the great Earl.
  

German baroque literature

• Johann Rist. Musa Teutonica (Hamburg, 1637), his first poetry collection in its second edition; the Yale collection already included the first edition of 1634 and the third of 1640.
  

• Daniel Caspar Lohenstein. Poetische Schriften (Breslau, 1680), a collected edition of his works, the only one to appear in his lifetime, including two collections of poetry and the tragedies Sophonisbe and Cleopatra.
  

• Heinrich Mühlpfort.Teutsche Gedichte, with Poetischer Gedichte ander Theil (Breslau and Frankfurt, 1686-87), the first collection of his poetry with the supplementary volume, missing in most copies.
  

• Joannes Baptista de Grossis. Catanense decachordvm sive novissima sacrae Catan. ecclesiae notitia. . . . Tomvs prior [-posterior]. In Aedibvs Illvstrissimi Senatvs. Typis Ioannis Rossi. An extremely rare edition on the antiquities of Catania in Sicily, published before the massive destruction caused by the eruptions of Mt. Etna in 1669.
  

• John Roscius Anglicanus, or an historical review of the stage: after it had been suppres'd by means of the late unhappy Civil War, begun in 1641, till the time of King Charles IIs restoration in May 1660. London, H. Playford, 1708. First edition of this influential account of the inner working of Restoration theater. Narcissus Luttrell's copy.
  

• Anne Wharton. Manuscript volume of poems. [Early 18th century]
  

  The manuscript comprises 24 poems by Wharton and one by Edmund Waller. Wharton was a niece of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and her elegy on Rochester (present in this manuscript) was the only one of her poems to be published in her lifetime. Wharton's modern editors, Germaine Greer and S. Hastings, have assembled a canon of altogether 24 poems and one play, gathered from various sources, including printed miscellanies, a small number of contemporary manuscript copies, and a single manuscript volume of collected poems by her at Holkham Hall.

  The present manuscript volume, only the second of its kind to come to light, was unknown to Greer and Hastings and contains eleven poems not known to them, augmenting the established canon of Anne Wharton's poems by about fifty percent.
  

• Proto-Tafereel. [Netherlands? ca. 1720]
  
  A folio sammelband that, while beginning with the title page of the famous Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid, is an entirely unique production. Like the printed book, which casts an amused eye over the "great mirror of folly" that fueled the South Sea Bubble, this volume, created by an unidentified collector, brings together the original prospectuses of many companies, which were reprinted in the standard edition.
  

• Oliver Goldsmith. Autograph receipt, signed in full, acknowledging payment of 10 guineas from the publisher Ralph Griffiths, "for the translation of a book entitled Memoirs of My Lady B." [London, late 1760]
  
  Any manuscript of Oliver Goldsmith is rare, and only about 50 autograph letters are known. While never published in full, this document has long been known and bears a provenance stretching back nearly to the author's lifetime-ten earlier collectors have owned this document before it came into our hands. Every biographer and scholar of Goldsmith has echoed Sir James Prior's assertion in his 1837 Life of Goldsmith that this translation was "lost." However, Arthur Freeman identified the text, and one of the two copies he located was already in the Beinecke Library.

• James Macpherson. Temora. Po‰me epique en viii. Chants. Amsterdam, 1774. This first French translation of Ossian's epic poem, from Macpherson's English reconstruction of the ancient Gaelic bard, is provided with an elegant plate depicting the landscape where the action takes place. The translator is Maximilien-Henri, marquis de Saint-Simon.

• Henry Fielding. History of Amelia, or A description of a young lady. London, [1775?] An adaptation for children of one of Fielding's last works. This unique copy features three plates, instead of one, as recorded in ESTC.

Eighteenth-century books on business, finance, and idustry

One of the strengths of the Beinecke collections is in the history of business, finance, and industry. From the banking practices of the Spinellis in renaissance Italy to mining ventures in the American West, this strength crosses the library's traditional collection divisions. Over the last few months, we have added several 18th-century German books in this area:

• Paul Jacob Marperger. Das neu-eröffnete Manufacturen-Hauss (Hamburg, 1704), a survey of manufacturing in Germany with special emphasis on the textile and paper industries.
• The cameralist Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi's Gesammelte Politische und Finanzschriften (Copenhagen & Leipzig, 3 vols., 1761-64), a compendium of writings on economics and public policy.
  

• Johann Friedrich Kobe. Der kluge Capitalist (Nürnberg, 1768), a guidebook for the "clever capitalist," with advice about lending, investing, debt collection, and using exchange rates to one's own advantage.

• Jürgen Elert Kruse. Allgemeiner und besonders Hamburgischer Contorist (Hamburg, 2 vols., 1782-83), a merchants' handbook giving information on then current commercial practices and on currencies, weights, and measures used around the world..

• Christian Christiani. Unterricht für die zu Kaufleuten bestimmten Jünglinge (Hanover, 1790) containing advice to the young businessperson about how to write letters to foreign clients and how to fill out business forms, with information about banking in various European cities.
  

• Catherine II, Empress of Russia. Vol'noe no slaboe perelozhenie iz Shakespira, komediia Vot kakovo imiet' korzinu i biel'e. St. Petersburg, Pri Imperatorskoii Akademii Nauk, 1786. This translation of The Merry Wives of Windsor by Catherine the Great may be the first complete rendering of Shakespeare into Russian.

Literary women in German: 1798-1849

An ongoing project of the German Literature Collection is to gather books by women writers. Over the past few moths we have added the second issue of Friederike Brun's poems with its scarce second volume (Zürich, 1798-1801); Emilie von Berlepsch's account of her trip to Scotland in 1800 (Caledonia., Hamburg, 4 vols., 1802-04); Christine Westphalen's Charlotte Corday (Hamburg, 1804), the first drama in German about the woman who murdered Marat; and a complete run of the journal Iduna (Chemnitz, 2 vols., 1820), edited by Helmina von Chézy and Fanny Tarnow.


Novels by Karoline Pichler, Christiane Benedikte Naubert, Caroline von Wolzogen, and Fanny Lewald were also acquired, as well as Maria Caroline von Herder's reminiscences of her husband Johann Gottfried von Herder.

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Letter to Wilhelm Reichel. Weimar, 15 February 1828, in a secretarial hand, signed by Goethe.
  

  Reichel ran the printing plant of Goethe's publisher Cotta. This letter to him accompanied proofs for the ongoing edition of Goethe's works begun in 1827. The letter appears to be previously unrecorded. It was acquired in Germany by the donor's great grandfather, Charles Frederick Johnson, who was married to Sarah Dwight Woolsey, sister of Yale president Theodore Dwight Woolsey.

• Theate Liegoi. Various editions, 1814-48. This small group of plays, written in the patois of Liege in the mid-18th century, survived through subsequent editions well into the 19th, though they are extremely difficult to locate outside of Belgium.


• Amalia Schoppe. Robinson in Australien. Heidelberg, 1843.
  
  The first edition of this tale about a Hamburg captain's widow and her son William, whose adventures led him to Australia, where he was shipwrecked. William survives to become a rich gentleman of high standing who returns to Hamburg to grace his mother's old age. Amalia Schoppe (1791-1858), who was born on the Baltic island Fehmarn and died on her son's farm in New York State, was the prolific author of novels, children's books, and journalism.

The ancestor of the Katzenjammer Kids

• Wilhelm Busch. Max und Moritz, eine Bubengeschichte in sieben Streichen. Munich [1865]
  
  This is the rare first edition of Busch's seven bad-boy tales in comic-book form. After perpetrating several pranks upon the good German citizens of their town-pranks that include rigging a footbridge so it collapses under a village worthy, arranging for a number of chickens to be killed and then stealing them while they're being roasted-Max and Moritz finally get ground up for poultry feed when one of their tricks goes awry.

  Max und Moritz, one of the most popular German children's books ever published, is the ancestor of Rudolph Dirks's "Katzenjammer Kids," first published in 1897 in the Sunday supplement of William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and often regarded as the first colored comic strip. The Katzenjammer Kids strip is still syndicated by King Features and can be found on the web.

  Mitchell, S. Weir (Silas Weir). Wonderful stories of Fuz-buz the fly and Mother Grabem the spider. Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1867. This printed edition of the fantasy written by Mitchell (1829-1914) to benefit a Philadelphia children's hospital contains six original pencil or pen and wash drawings by Henry Bispham, bound in.

• Herder-Blältter. Prag, 1911-12. 5 issues in 4 volumes; a complete set.
  
  This copy of the rare early-Expressionist journal is from the library of its founder and editor, Willy Haas, who went on to a distinguished career in literary journalism during the Weimar Republic and in West Germany. (The title has nothing to do with Goethe's friend Johann Gottfried von Herder, but is the name of the journal's publisher in Prag.)

Contributors to the Herder-Blätter included Franz Kafka and his editor Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Paul Claudel, and many less well- remembered authors.

• Oskar Kokoschka. Die träumenden Knaben. Leipzig, 1917.
  

  One of the most sought-after artist's books of the German Expressionist period, Die träumenden Knaben was both written and illustrated by Kokoschka, the colorful illustrations being much in the style of the Wiener Werkstätte, where the Austrian artist was employed at the time. "The dreaming boys" started out as a children's book, but hardly seems to fit that profile with its oneiric underwater scenes of violence and awakening sexuality.

  Die träumenden Knaben was first published in 1906/07 by the Wiener Werkstätte in an edition of 500 copies, but the work met with little success and in 1917 Kurt Wolff purchased the remaining sheets. These were published, with a new binding, in an edition of 275 copies. The present copy, from the 1917 edition, is unnumbered.

RAME Collection of Gay and Lesbian Periodicals

This monumental collection of serials, dating from 1904-90, covers the range from the earliest Aesthetic movement titles, through pre-World War II German and French titles, to runs of the most influential post-Stonewall titles. Included are complete runs of groundbreaking magazines such as One, The Ladder and Der Freundschaft.

• Orpheu. Revista trimestrial de literature. Lisboa, Tipografia do Comercio, 1915. The first (and only) two issues of this seminal,but elusive magazine of Portuguese surrealism.
  

• Margaret C. Anderson/Elizabeth Jenks Clark Collection [1920-78]
  

  The literary archive of Margaret Anderson, modernist writer and editor of the Little Review. The collection includes manuscripts of Anderson's major works and correspondence with literary figures including Janet Flanner, Jane Heap, Georgette Lablanc, Kathryn Hulme, and Solita Solano.

  In addition, the archive contains the original prints of photographs that appeared in the Little Review, including many portraits of central figures in American and European modernism taken by important photographers of the period. The collection includes Man Ray portraits of Picasso, Duchamp, Matisse, Picabia, and Anderson herself, and Berenice Abbott portraits of Jane Heap, Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, Cocteau, and George Antheil, among many others.

• Martha Gordon Crotch. A collection of material [1925-74] relating to the den mother of the artists' colony in Vence, including 34 diaries, with photographs, notes, correspondence, personal papers and other papers relating to "Auntie," as she was known.
  

• Robinson Jeffers. 13 poems in manuscript drafts with corrections, written before 1928, including "Apology for Bad Dreams" and "Ante Morte." Yale is the repository for a large group manuscripts by Jeffers, and this addition fills out our holdings of his early work.
  

• Robert Creeley. All that is Lovely in Men, carbon typescript with corrections [n.d. but prior to 1955]. A typescript of this early Creeley collection, published in 1955 as Jargon 10. Creeley apparently gave this copy to poet and painter Basil King, who attended Black Mountain College, where he was Creeley's student, between 1951-56.
  

• Robert Bly. A Private Fall. Minneapolis: Melia Press, 1995. The first appearance of this poem, designed and printed by Robert Johnson at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, one of 26 copies on handmade paper by Mary Hark with binding and box by Jill Jevine. The tree bark texture on the box was created by Margaret Ritter.
  

May

• Gregory the Great. Dialogi. Central Italy, 11th century.
  
  Gregory's Dialogues, the most popular of his works, were a central text for medieval Benedictine monasteries since they tell the story of the life and miracles of St. Benedict, as well as those of other early Latin saints. This manuscript, in the distinctive Carolingian script of the region of Rome, was copied early in the eleventh century by more than a score of scribes. It has the appearance of being a writing exercise for a monastic school, with each pupil copying short sections of the work.
  

• Rabanus Maurus. Commentary on the Book of Kings. Trois Fontaines, 12th century.
  
  This splendid Romanesque manuscript was copied in the second half of the twelfth century at the Cistercian monastery of Ste. Marie des Trois Fontaines, in Champagne, one of the earliest Cistercian houses. Rabanus, a student of Alcuin and abbot of Fulda in the early ninth century, is often called the "teacher of Germany" because of the large number of educational works he wrote, and because of the widespread popularity of these works in his native land, as well as throughout Europe. He was the author of many biblical commentaries, and his study of the Book of Kings, which had been thought by earlier church authorities too bellicose to be read by Germans, was one of the most influential medieval commentaries on that book. Bound with this copy of Rabanus's work is the apocryphal correspondence of Alexander the Great and Didymus, King of the Brahmins, one of the major texts in the medieval Alexander Romance tradition.
  

• Peter Lombard. Sententiarum libri IV. Basel, ca. 1482.
  
  An important English mediaeval provenance, extensively annotated and hitherto unrecorded. The only book so far identified from the library of John Newland, abbot of the Augustinian abbey of St. Augustine, Bristol, from 1481-1515, and one of the most remarkable figures in late medieval English monastic life. His notes, in his small neat gothic script, fill the margins of nearly every page. He has read the book with great care, amplifying and clarifying the text and occasionally correcting it. The contemporary Oxford binding is from the workshop which has traditionally been called the Rood and Hunt bindery.
  

• Missale Halberstadiense. Strassburg, ca. 1493-1500.
  
  This rare missal for the use of Halberstadt (Saxony), printed in co-operation by Johann Gruninger and Peter Schoffer, has a magnificent full-page crucifixion with contemporary coloring, decorated initials, and an added small woodcut of the crucifixion (ca. 1470).
  

• Harangues et Oraisons des Anciens. Paris, ca. 1530.
  
  This collection of speeches and orations culled from ancient Greek and Latin writers, in French translation, appears to be unique to this manuscript. The volume formed part of the library of Anne de Polignac, wife of François II, comte de la Rochefoucauld, and is preserved in its original green velvet binding with enameled clasps bearing her coat-of-arms. Anne was among the leading women bibliophiles of the sixteenth century, and kept her library at her château in Verteuil. When her collection was dispersed in the nineteenth century, many of the volumes went to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where it was discovered that the pasteboards of many of the bindings preserved printers' waste from incunable printing in Angoulême.
   
  The pasteboards of our manuscript were comprised of complete quires from two early printed school books from Angoulême, the Questiones super minorem donatum and the Auctores Octo, printed in 1492 and 1491 respectively by Pierre Alain and André‚ Cauvin. Incunable printing from Angoulême is extremely rare, and there were previously no examples of it in the Beinecke Library.
  

• Jacob Preuss. Ordnung, Namen, unnd Regiment alles Kreigs Volcks. Strassburg, 1530.
  
  The first edition of this rare tract on pyrotechnics and military organization, mentioning every post in an army from the commander-in-chief down to drummers and cooks. This is followed    by an enumeration of all kinds of artillery, including how to make rockets and other explosive devices.
  

• Pierre Coustau. Pegma. Lyons, 1555.
  
  First edition of the first emblem book to include a commentary on the emblems, in a fine seventeenth-century binding, with annotations.
  

• Wolfgang Waldner. Newe Zeitung. Einer wunderbarlichen Historien von zweyen Meidlein. Nurnberg, 1558.
  
  The rare first edition of this account of two sick fifteen-year-old girls from Braunau, Christina and Margarethe, and their prophecies and miracles, with a colored woodcut on the title page. The author was a theologian active in Regensburg.
  

• Andrea Alciati. Emblemata denuo ab ipso autore recognita, ac, quae desiderabantur; imaginibus locupletata. Lyon, 1564.
  
  Richard White, English Catholic exile, jurist, and historian, used this completely interfoliated copy of Alciati's popular emblem book as his personal album amicorum, and forty of his colleagues and friends signed the blank leaves, frequently adding verses or short texts dating from 1567 to 1600. This album amicorum has never been studied, published, or extracted and has been hitherto unknown.
  

• Richard Grafton. Abridgement of the Chronicles of Englande. London, 1570.
  
  This copy, heavily annotated by Grafton's rival John Stow, is a new primary source for the long-standing and acrimonious feud between the rival chroniclers. Stow's marginal comments, quickly jotted down as he studied his rival's latest edition, document his objections to the book page by page and show the historian at his most unguarded, attacking Grafton's morals along with his grasp of history, at one point even couching his abuse in rhyme.
  

• Le dodici fatiche di Hercole. Florence, 1576.
  
  A rare edition of this chapbook on the labors of Hercules, one of the most popular fables of pagan virtue during the Renaissance, apparently the sole surviving copy. The woodcuts are considerably earlier than this text; some derive from designs by Antonio Pollaiuolo, who died in 1498. The woodblocks show numerous wormholes, an indication that they were probably fairly old in 1576. The Yale Art Gallery owns the only painting by Pollaiuolo in the western hemisphere, and one of the best impressions of the engraving after Pollaiuolo's Battle of the Nudes, a major monument of Renaissance printmaking. This book could be the subject of an extremely rewarding and multi-faceted study.
  

• Johann Rist. Des edlen Dafnis aus Cimbrien besungene Florabella. Hamburg, 1656. Bound with his Des Daphnis aus Cimbrien Galathee [Hamburg, 1644?]
  
  Better known for his hymns and religious poetry, Johann Rist (1607-67) wrote these secular and erotic poems during the early years of his career. The present copies are second, expanded printings (the first editions were published in 1651 and 1642 respectively) and both have numerous musical settings for the poems, melodies written by the author and by the north German composers Peter Meyer (fl. 1640-78), Heinrich Pape (1609-63), and their older contemporary Johann Schop (1590-1664). "Daphnis aus Cimbrien" was Rist's sobriquet in the literary society Shepherds of the Pegnitz.
  

• A Treatise of Bees...ca. 1646-58.
  
  Manuscript by an as yet unidentified beekeeper in Northumberland. In the opening pages of the text, the author gives some account of himself. He first began to keep bees in about 1624, when he inherited a small fortune in Northumberland, where he had both a town house in Newcastle and one in the country. By 1641, despite periodic setbacks, his stock had increased to more than a hundred hives. As a royalist, he was imprisoned at Winchester House in Southward from 1646-49, and there he wrote this Treatise. Despite all these clues, we have not yet been able to identify the author.
  

• Johannes Scheffer. De militia navali veterum Libri quatuor. Upsala, 1654.
  
  This learned treatise on the ancient Greek and Roman navies, the construction of their boats, their battle tactics, weapons, and drills, belonged to Edmond Warre (1837-1920). Warre, the headmaster of Eton, won success as an oarsman at Eton and Oxford, and he went on to be river master at Eton. He has extensively annotated the margins of this volume, and underlined considerable passages in the text.
  

• Charles Patin. Familiae Romanae. Paris, 1663.
  
  This book illustrated the ancient coins that were part of the collection of Fulvio Orsini. This copy belonged to Thomas Herbert, 8th Earl of Pembroke (1664-1732) and shows signs of extensive use. He has annotated it with the values of each coin in Italy and France, along with references and remarks. Pembroke was a collector on the grandest scale, particularly of classical antiquities. A catalogue of his coin collection was published in 1746.  

Wing-era items from the James Stevens-Cox collection

We were able to add over 60 titles from this English collector. Upon examining them, it was discovered that several had ownership marks of women. One notable title is:


• Simon Patrick. Hearts ease, or a remedy against all troubles. With a consolatory discourse particularly directed to those who have lost their friends and dear relations. The third edition inlarged. London: Printed for Fr. Tyton, 1671, inscribed on the flyleaf,  "Frances Godbold her Booke Given mee by the Right Honerable the Lady Poulet 1672: Sept. 5th."
  
  The inscription may haven been written by the same Frances Godbold who, according to one online genealogy, was born in Ixworth, Suffolk County, in 1736. "Lady Poulet" is Lady Susan Herbert, the daughter of the 5th Earl of Pembroke & Montgomery, who was married to John the 3rd Baron Poulett, and died in 1693. The book consists of several essays intending to console those who have lost a loved one.
  

• Johann Christoph Beer. Ausführliche und grundrichtige Beschreibung dess Königreichs Franckreich. Frankfurt & Leipzig, 1689.
  

• This thick little volume, almost as broad as it is wide, is both travel guide and history book about France, illustrated with 112 full-page and 4 folded copper engravings. J. C. Beer wrote several books like this about various countries, including a history of the British Isles, published in 1690.  

Chauncey Family Papers

Papers of Nathaniel Chauncey, Yale 1702, comprising manuscript sermons, a sermon notebook, a manuscript account book (ca. 1706-11), and miscellaneous family papers; and of William Chauncey Fowler, Yale 1816, comprising his letter book, additional correspondence, and manuscript sermons. The correspondence section includes 171 letters from Webster to William Chauncey Fowler and his daughter Harriet Webster Fowler (ca. 1815-40). Josiah Willard Gibbs, Samuel Goodrich, Samuel F.B. Morse, Benjamin Silliman, Jared Sparks, James Wadsworth, and Theodore D. Woolsey are among the other correspondents represented.  

Eighteenth-century English newspapers

• A run of the Glocester Journal (1758-60, 1764-65, and 1776), covering the year of the American independence. Bound with 35 numbers of the Bath Chronicle from 1776, also including the American Declaration of Independence.  
  

• Charles Francois Philippe de Charnieres. Memoire sur l'observation des longitudes en mer, publie par ordre du roi. Paris, 1767.
  

• First edition of a text describing a "mégamètre," a navigational instrument for measuring the distance between the moon and a star, as well as other innovations for world travellers.  


• Franz Bernhardo, oder der Irrthum der Liebe. Leipzig, 1783.
  
  This anonymous novel falls clearly in the wake of Goethe's Werther. In letters to his brother, the unhappy Bernhardo describes his hopeless love for a young woman and finally, like Werther, shoots himself. What makes the novel particularly interesting is Bernhardo's mysterious friend Adamson, a handsome young man from America who is said to have received a special signet ring from George Washington. One is tempted to look for a historical figure behind the fictional character.

Livingston Family Papers

Papers of the prominent New York family, whose members have played an active role in American politics, commerce, and military since the colonial era. The collection spans the seventeenth through twenty-first century, with a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth, and represents nearly every generation of the Livingston family from the time Robert and Alida Livingston settled in upstate New York in the late 1600s. Diaries, scrapbooks, correspondence, photographs, and printed material chronicle the Livingstons' social lives and their participation in New York and national government, as well as their involvement in the U.S. Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Among the papers are deeds, ledgers, indentures, and other business records, which provide detailed accounts of the family's financial transactions and land holdings, with particular regard to the Paramount Oil Co., the Oak Hill Iron Mines, and the family's New York estate, Oak Hill.  

Women Writers in German

Karoline Pichler. Idyllen. Vienna, 1803. Bound with her Biblische  Idyllen. Vienna, 1812.

Benedikte Naubert. Frontanges, oder das Schicksal der Mutter und der Tochter. Leipzig, 1805.

Friederike Brun. Neue Gedichte. Darmstadt, 1812.

Therese Huber. Hannah, der Herrnhuterin Deborah Findling. Leipzig, 1821.

Five titles by four women writing in German during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Pichler (1796-1843) was a prominent Viennese hostess and prolific author of prose, drama, and poetry, her collected works running to some 60 volumes. Naubert (1756-1819), a native of Leipzig, made her name as a historical novelist. Brun (1765-1835) wrote poetry and travelogues. Therese Huber (1764-1829) at first published her works under the name of her second husband, Ludwig Ferdinand Huber, but after his sudden death, she became one of the first German women to support herself as a free-lance writer, editor, and translator. The Beinecke Library is steadily building a distinguished collection of nineteenth-century German literary texts by women.


• Crisalin [pseudonym for Isaak von Sinclair]. Gedichte. Frankfurt, 1811.
  
  One of the great literary rarities of the Romanitic period in German literature. Sinclair (1775-1815), whose family originated in Scotland, had a brilliant diplomatic career in Hessen-Homburg, but he is best remembered as the devoted friend and protector of the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, whom he met at the University of Jena. Sinclair's own poems, Romantic in style and imbued with idealism generated by the French Revolution, were published in this volume of 1811 and in a second collection that appeared in 1813. ("Crisalin" is an anagram for Sinclair.)
  

• A. Texier de la Pommeraye. Lecteur Francais, amusant et instructif, propre aux jeunes etudians qui ont deja acquis une certaine connaissance de la langue Francaise. Premier edition [Philadelphia] J.F. Hurtel, 1826.
  
  First edition of a French language reader, containing short essays on educational themes -and ending with a long eulogy for Napoleon.
  

• Child's cabinet library: a collection of 76 titles in 50 volumes in the original publisher's glass fronted walnut bookcase, Philadelphia, American Sunday-School Union [1827-53]
  
  A very rare survival, an original presentation case, likely made by a publisher for a bookshop display. The vast majority of the titles were not previously represented in Beinecke's holdings.
  

• Giacomo Leopardi. Canti. Palermo, 1834.
  
  The rarest edition published in Leopardi's lifetime, this copy with Canti XXIV-XXXIV (first published in Naples in 1835) in manuscript, copied in a contemporary hand, bound in.  
  

• William Hayden. Narrative of William Hayden, Containing a Faithful Account of his Travels for a Number of Years, Whilst a Slave in the South. Written By Himself. Cincinnati: Privately Printed, 1846.
  
  Rare slave narrative documenting the life of William Hayden, a slave born in 1785 in Bell-plains, Stafford County, Virginia. Hayden characterizes and describes the various people who owned him, recounts his experiences traveling throughout the South as an enslaved man, and gives an account of his education and of the development of the skills that eventually allowed him to earn enough money to buy his freedom and that of his mother and sister

Abraham Hayward Papers

Papers of the lawyer and man of letters, including 70 letters from him to his sisters, 10 letters to the publisher Richard Bentley, and a group of letters to Hayward from Lady Blessington, John Murray, and Horatio Smith; also, papers relating to the Inner Temple Affair of 1845, and a photographic album.


• Palmer Cox. 10 original pen-and-ink drawings for the first  "Brownies" book, [ca. 1887]
  
  The Betsy Beinecke Shirley Collection contains a number of Palmer Cox drawings for later books. This set of charmingly detailed illustrations brings us back to the first book in the series, which became a popular culture juggernaut at the end of the nineteenth century.
  

• El Mundo cientifico: inventos modernos. Enciclopedia de conocimientos utiles y aplicaciones practicas de la industria. Barcelona, Feliu y Sussana Editores, 1914, 1917, 1918.
  
  A set of bound magazines, each issue featuring a "pop-up" system of flaps showing the inner workings of a modern invention: a streetcar, many variants of steam engines, and even a motion picture camera. dChandler White & Philena Pennell Smith Fund
  
  
• Max Sulzbachner. Illustrated broadsheet of Georg Heym's poem "Spitzköpfig kommt er . . ." [Basel, 1920s]
  
  Heym's poem, which envisions a magician passing over the roofs of the houses, dragging his yellow hair after him, was first printed in the collection Umbra vitae of 1912. A second edition of the collection was issued in 1924 by Kurt Wolff, with illustrations by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The Basel artist Sulzbachner (1904-85) had fallen under Kirchner's spell at a 1923 exhibition of the older artist's works, and this broadsheet is very much in the style of Kirchner's woodcuts for Heym's book.  

Giorgio Carmelich Collection

Born in Trieste in 1907, Giorgio Carmelich died in Bad Nauheim, in 1929 in his 23rd year. Along with his mentor Emilio Dolfi, he was active in the Futurist movement which flourished in the region of Venezia Giulia. Both a painter and a poet, he designed a series of books and periodicals in manuscript or mimoegraphed form, often hand painted. The collection acquired by the Beinecke includes Da New-York a San Francisco in automobile [Trieste, 1920], Storiella di Lenin [Trieste, 1920], Le cronache [Trieste, 1921-22], Cantiere: poemetto sintetico [Trieste, 1923], and the journals Epeo [Trieste, 1922] and Le mardi des amis [Trieste, 1923].  


• Eugene O'Neill. ALS to [Bromwell Ault, Sr.] Editor, Yale Daily News, 1921 April 15, with envelope and photograph of Eugene O'Neill by Carl Van Vechten and typed note, signed by Bromwell Ault, Jr.  
  

• Kurt Tucholsky. Das Lächeln der Mona Lisa. Berlin, 1929.
  

• _____. Lerne lachen ohne zu weinen. Berlin, 1931.
  
  The journalist, satirist, and cabaret artist Tucholsky (1890-1935) was born in Berlin, the son of a Jewish banker. He studied law and then spent three years in military service. Afterwards he avoided Germany, living first in Paris, then in Sweden, where he committed suicide in 1935. These two volumes-"The Smile of the Mona Lisa" and "Learn to laugh without crying"-are anthologies of his works.
  

• Nicolas Nabokov. The manuscript, in short and full scores, of his ballet Ode, based on the text on a poem by Lomonosov, premiered by the Ballets russes in June 1928, on a choreography by Leonid Massine. The composer was 25.
  

• Johanne Gros. Marie or le Premier amour de Murger. Dijon, Imprimerie Darantiere, 1934. A novel that serves a secondary purpose-as a typographical sample book-from the printer best known for his work with Gertrude Stein.
  

• Marsden Hartley. Handwritten manuscript of the artist's work Varied Patterns-A Book of Human Values, including sections titled "Decline of French Art," "Picabia-Arch Aesthete," and "Impressions of Provence."
  

• Leonor Fini. Jeu de cartes, Acanthe. [ca.1949]. A deck of cards designed by the idiosyncratic female surrealist.
  

• Pierre Lecuire. Ballets minute. Paris, 1954.
  

Two abortive projects are at the origin of this book. The first, driven by Pierre Lecuire's and Nicolas de Staël's common interest in the ballet as an art form, was to create actual ballets. Various composers, Stravinsky and Dallapiccola among others, were approached in vain and the idea was abandoned in favor of a "ballet book."

The second project was inspired by a shared admiration for the seventeenth-century Dutch engraver Hercules Seghers, on whom Lecuire had written a "Tombeau" which Staël was to illustrate. Staël's work on Seghers was then "recycled" into the ballet book. The 20 etchings which resulted represent the largest part of his engraved oeuvre: Sicilian or Tuscan landscapes, abstract forms derived from Seghers, the figure of a ballerina, Provençal pines, human heads, bare theater stages or seascapes blend harmoniously and with subtle variations with the texts and the titles, the whole conveying an impression of inner rhythm and extraordinary legibility. Ballets-Minute is considered one of the masterpieces of the French illustrated book in the twentieth century.

Joseph Brodsky Papers

The extant archive of the St.-Petersburg-born poet (1940-96), who came to the West in 1972. The papers comprise manuscripts of his works in verse and prose, in English and Russian, notebooks, correspondence, personal paper, and photographs.


• William Ewert. A complete collection of the New Hampshire publisher's works, including limited editions of poetry and prose by Galway Kinnell, May Sarton, Donald Hall, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, and many others.
  
• Susan Orlean & Jane Kent. Orchid Thief Reimagined [New York]: Grenfell Press, 2003. Text by Orlean, printed letterpress on eight silkscreens by Kent; sheets are laid into a tray case made by Claudia Cohen.