Selected Acquisitions

Compiled by the curatorial staff of the
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Spring 2002

• Josephus. Jewish Antiquities. Murbach Abbey, ca. 800.
  
  A single leaf on vellum, recovered from a book binding, of a pre-Caroline manuscript of the Latin translation of Josephus’ work. Originally composed in Greek, Josephus was translated into Latin in the sixth century under the direction of Cassiodorus, and provided the medieval West with most of its historiographical knowledge of Jewish history. This leaf is written in the distinctive script of the Alsatian abbey of Murbach and is the earliest surviving witness to the portions of the text that it preserves. The manuscript from which the leaf derives is listed in the ninth-century catalog of the Murbach library, and like many manuscripts from Murbach, was dismembered by bookbinders in nearby Strassburg in the sixteenth century.
  
  
  
• Marco Fabio Calvi. Antiquae urbis romae cum regionibus simulachrum. Rome, 1532.
  
  A suite of woodcuts constituting the earliest attempt to represent pictorially the various stages in the development of classical Rome. The plates show the early walls of Rome, important monuments, and outstanding topographical features of the city. The engraved calligraphy is the work of Arrighi.
  
  
  
• Theodorus Bibliander. A Godly Consultation unto the Brethren and Companyons of the Christen Religion, Antwerp: Matthias Crom, 1542.
  
  The first and only edition of the first extensive account in English of Islam. Principally inspired by concern about the Turkish advances in Eastern Europe, Bibliander was among the leading Protestant scholars and opponents of Islam. So great was the European fear of the Turks that any works about the Muslims, even treatises like this one that are critical of Mohammed and of Islam, fell under suspicion, and the printer and place of printing of this book are disguised on the title page (which claims the book was printed in Basel by “Radulphe Bonifante”). The English translator is likewise not named and has never been identified. This copy is from the Bute library.
  
  
  
• Georgette de Montenay. Emblemes ou devises Chrestiennes. Lyon, 1571.
  
  First edition of the first emblem book written by a woman as well as the first emblem book by a Protestant. The volume includes one hundred engravings by Pierre Woeiriot, with Georgette’s verses printed beneath each engraving. This copy includes the author’s portrait and shows the engravings in an exceptionally crisp state.
  
  
  
• Livio Sanuto. Geografia. Venice, 1588.
  
  An important geographical compilation on the continent of Africa, Sanuto’s work also constitutes the first printed atlas of Africa. Its twelve full-sheet maps depict sections of the coastline, the final map showing the entire continent. Cities, mountains, rivers, and lakes are delineated, and the text supplies considerable ethnographic information on the inhabitants of the different regions and their various customs.
  
  
  
• António Enriquez Gomez. Sanson Nazareno. Poema heroico. Rouen, 1656.
  
  The author of this epic poem based on the Biblical story of Samson was born in Segovia in 1600 in a Portuguese Jewish family. Having enlisted in the army and risen to the grade of captain, he was forced to leave Spain in 1636 for religious reasons and sought refuge in Bordeaux, then Rouen and Paris, where he was appointed secretary to King Louis XIII. His career as a poet, a novelist, and a playwright took place in France. His work includes twelve comedies in the style of Calderon, the satirical poem El siglo pitagórico, and the picaresque novel La visa de don Gregorio Guadaña. Sanson Naza-reno, influenced by Gongora, was one of his last works. The book is illustrated with copperplates by Dacquet.
  
  
  

German Baroque Literature

Paul Fleming. Ode der durchlauchtigsten . . . Fürstin . . . Marien Eleonoren. Leipzig, 1631.

Johann Albrecht von Mandelslo. Morgenländische Reyse-Beschreibung. Schlesswig, 1658.

Philipp von Zesen. Andächtige Lehr-Gesänge. Magdeburg, 1675.

Simon Dach. Chur-Brandenburgische Rose, Adler, Löw und Scepter. Königsberg, ca 1690.

We were able to add an unusually high number of titles to the Faber du Faur Collection this year, these four being the best known of the authors represented. Fleming’s ode contains good wishes for the Swedish queen. Fleming and Mandelslo both participated in a commercial expedition to Russia in 1633, which was to yield the latter’s “Oriental Travelogue,” edited by their mutual friend Adam Olearius, who also published Persian poetry in translation. Zesen’s devotional poems, an adaptation of the Imitatio Christi, are provided with melodies by Malachias Siebenhaar. The Simon Dach volume, though not so titled, is the second edition of his collected works, the first to contain the plays “Cleomedes” and “Sorbuisa.”

Funeral in Ferrara

Francesco Berni. L’esequie trionfali del marchese Guido Villa... celebrate nel tempio di San Francesco in Ferrara il dì 22 febraro 1649. Ferrara, 1656. Bound with Il colosso guerriero inalzato fra le Pompe de’ funerali all immortalita fama dell’illustrissimo et eccellentissimo Sig. Marchese Guido Villa... spiegato in Aste nella chiesa di S. Francesco. Turin, 1657.

This impressive volume depicts in considerable detail the grandiose funeral pomp honoring Guido Villa, a military commander who served against the Spaniards, eventually becoming the ambassador of the Court of Savoy to England, then France, and superintendent of the French armies in Italy. He died of a cannon shot at the siege of Cremona in 1648. Francesco Berni devised a spectacular baroque celebration in the church of San Francesco, which became famous as one of the richest and most complex ever organized, combining architecture, sculpture, music, and scenography.

The present volume is illustrated with a gigantic folding plate as well as a frontispiece and five additional folding plates. The companion title commemorates Villa’s funeral oration delivered in Asti (where the son of Guido Villa was governor) by a Barnabite friar. This printing is unknown to all bibliographies.

• Missal. Ethiopia, 1729.
  
  A complete illustrated manuscript in Ge‘ez of the Ethiopic missal. The present manuscript is dated in an original colophon, and thus is among the very few dated examples of Ethiopic manuscript decoration. It also contains musical notation, the only example of Ethiopic music in the Beinecke collection. The manuscript is preserved in its original binding and with a leather carrying bag.
  
  
  
• Thomas Gray. His copy of The Secret History of Persia . . . translated from the French Original, with a Key, and some explanatory notes. London, 1745.
  
  In the index, the poet Thomas Gray has meticulously identified the characters and places in his neat and minute autograph—a considerable labor, suggesting that he read and re-read the text carefully. Perhaps he prepared it to lend to friends—Horace Walpole, for instance, immensely enjoyed just this sort of curiosa and seems not to have possessed a copy of his own.
  
  
  
• Richard Tickell. A sprightly letter from this dramatist and wit to a close friend, Edward Tighe of Dublin. Tickell (1751-93) refers to “the inestimably sublime Samuel Johnson” and discusses the succession of Forster as Headmaster of Eton, lauding the event in a short Latin address, relating that Forster “flogs well, walks well, may think well, but cannot act well yet .”
  
  

Guy Johnson Papers

Colonel Guy Johnson succeeded his father-in-law, Sir William Johnson, in 1774 as Superintendent of Indian Affairs in New York, inheriting his large estate near Fort Johnson on the Mohawk. He sided with the Crown during the War of Independence and refused an offer of immunity by Congress, thereby forfeiting his properties, for which he received only a mediocre settlement. The collection of his papers recently acquired by the Beinecke, and complementing the Johnson Papers received as part of the bequest of Paul Mellon, comprises 150 documents, including a copy of the will of Sir William Johnson, documents relating to the Johnson estate, correspondence both from and to Johnson (relating, in particular, to Indian movements), contemporary accounts of Indian affairs, and additional documents, ca. 1774-1837.

• Edmund Burke. Autograph letter, signed, to an unnamed correspondent, April 1787.
  
  The letter is about the proceedings against his arch bête noire, Warren Hastings: Burke expresses his vehement feelings about Hastings . . . “that nefarious Villain has made a war of corruption & oppression on the Landed interest of Bengal for twelve years . . . .” Hastings was indicted in May 1787 shortly after this letter was written, and the case for impeachment opened in February 1788. In 1794 Burke delivered a nine-days’ speech for the impeachment in reply to the defense; Hastings was acquitted the following year.
  
  
  
• Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, et. al. Die Versuche und Hindernisse Karls. Eine deutsche Geschichte aus neuerer Zeit. Berlin & Leipzig, 1808.
  
  The first edition of one of the curiosities of German literature, a novel written by a committee of Romantic writers living near Berlin, one author continuing where the last left off. The publisher (Realschulbuchhandlung), not caring much for the result, did not put the firm’s name of the title page and issued only a very small edition, with the result that this is one of the rarest German literary books of the period.
  
  
  
• Hugh Peter Browne, 2nd Marquis of Sligo. Letters from the Levant, August-December 1810.
  The young Marquis of Sligo, a Cambridge contemporary of Lord Byron, describes in nineteen letters to his mother plus seven to friends his travels in Greece and Asia Minor, including his elaborate entertainment by Veli Pasha, his experiences travelling with Lord Byron and meeting Lady Hester Stanhope, and his shipment of “vases and other treasures” home to Ireland from digs in Greece.
  
  
  
• Sophie von Knorring. Julie Saint Albain (Dresden, 1801); Dramatische Fantasieen (Berlin, 1804); Evremont (Breslau, 1836).
  Sophie von Knorring, who is often cited as Sophie Bernhardi after her first husband, was the sister of Ludwig Tieck and one of the most gifted women writers of the early Romantic period in Germany. Julie Saint Albain, an epistolary novel, is her first publication. The second book is a collection of three dramas on fairy-tale themes, while the third, an ambitious historical novel, was published posthumously by her brother.
  
  
  

History of the book in Germany

Friedrich Perthes. Der deutsche Buchhandel als Bedingung des Daseyns einer deutschen Literatur. Gotha, 1816.

Friedrich Wilhelm Carové. Die Buchdruckerkunst in ihrer weltgeschichtlichen Bedeutung. Siegen & Wiesbaden, 1842.

Perthes, who established his own book business in 1796, was one of the founders of the Börsenverein des deutschen Buchhandels, which still serves as the professional organization for the retail book trade in Germany. His 1816 brochure was influential in introducing legal copyright in Germany. Carové studied with Hegel at Heidelberg and was active in the radical German student movement after the Napoleonic Wars. This sole edition of his history of printing ends with the exclamation “Freedom of the press.”

Travel Diary

The diary of two Continental tours, ca. 1821-36, by Mrs. E. A. Kenah, wife of a military officer. Mrs. Kenah has taken great care to record their travels and to capture images of them. The drawings are almost always captioned and often relate to pertinent examples in the text. At the end are additional attractive watercolors, presumably done after her return to England.

 

Italian Costume Book

Costumi e descrizione delle processioni conosciute in Genova sotto il nome di Casacce ricavati da quella di San Giacomo il Maggiore delle Focine. Genova, 1828.

This handsome oblong plate book, gorgeously illustrated with twelve full-page color plates, documents one of the most ancient, original, and solemn religious processions held in the city of Genova, known as the “Casaccia,” originally on Maundy Thursday, then on 3 May for the feast of the Invention of the Cross. The plates are the work of the very young artist Giovanni Fontana, on designs by the even younger Francesco Baratta. The book is unrecorded in any bibliography.

• Jacques Offenbach. Le désert. Autograph manuscript, ca. 1846.
  
  This early cantata for four-part chorus and orchestra is a parody of Félicien David’s hugely popular “ode-symphonie” of the same title, a work inspired by David’s committed involvement in the Saint- Simonian utopian movement. Offenbach’s version dates from the composer twenty-eighth year, the year of his visit to London, marriage, and conversion to Roman Catholicism. It takes a characteristically light-hearted approach to the topic, in which Allah rhymes with “Oh là là,” the dearth of fromage is equated with lack of civilization, and the desert weather deemed decidedly “embêtant.” The work was performed at the salon of the Comtesse de Vaux in 1846 but remains unpublished.
  
  
  

Masonic pamphlets

Nearly 500 pamphlets concerning the Masonic movement throughout the United States. Acquired jointly by the General Collection and the Western Americana Collection, the pamphlets include obscure, early imprints from all parts of the country and greatly extend Beinecke’s coverage of American printing and social history.

• J. Willis Menard. Lays in Summer Lands. Washington: Enterprise Publishing Company, 1879.
  
  The first and only edition of poetry written by J. Willis Menard, the first African American elected to the U.S. Congress, in 1868. Menard’s white opponent appealed the vote and was awarded the congressional seat in spite of Menard’s clear victory in the polls. When he spoke before Congress in defense of his election, Menard became the first African American to address the U.S. Congress.
  
  
  

• W. J. Van Patten. A typescript account of his Western overland trip, 28 April-18 June 1887.
  
  Van Patten, Attorney General of Vermont, provides an articulate and interesting account of his trip west to San Francisco and return through Yellowstone, offering detailed comments on Mormon communities in Utah, with observations on polygamy, on San Francisco and its Chinese inhabitants, and on Yellowstone National Park. He travels by steamer, train, six-horse coach, and horseback—and occasionally on foot. He says much about roads and the lack thereof and devotes numerous pages to describing Yellowstone Park and the surrounding region. Although typed, the account appears to be unique; no other copies are located in any of the major bibliographic databases nor in the Vermont Historical Society’s on-line catalog.
  
  

• Thomas Hardy. The Spectre of the Real. Typescript with autograph corrections, 1893.
  
  The short story The Spectre of the Real was Hardy’s only genuinely collaborative work. It was written in October 1893 and first appeared in November 1894 in the winter number of To-Day. Hardy’s collaborator was Florence Henniker, daughter of Richard Monckton Milnes, first Lord Houghton, and one of the models for Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure. Florence Henniker included The Spectre of the Real in her volume In Scarlet and Grey in 1896, the year following the publication of Jude the Obscure, which met with much hostility. The story was found “gruesome” and “repulsive” and Mrs. Henniker chastised for her tasteless choice of a collaborator.
  
  The manuscript of the story having been destroyed by common understanding between the authors, the present material is all that survives to document the extent of Hardy’s role in the composition: a typescript with copious autograph corrections by him; a carbon typescript, also considerably annotated; and a set of corrected galleys from To-Day. These items came from the Hardy collection of Frederick B. Adams, Jr., one of the two great gatherings of Hardy material, which came up for auction at Sotheby’s, London, in November 2001. The other great Hardy collection, now preserved in the Beinecke, is, of course, that of Richard Little Purdy, Yale 1925.
  
  
  

Decorated & Pictorial Bindings
The collection of Leonard & Lisa Baskin

The 868 largely American and English books that make up this collection document the era of publishers' decorated bindings. Bookcloth was introduced in the late 1820s and quickly became the dominant covering material for books in England and the United States. Ornamented at first to blend quietly into parlor decoration, after the mid-century their possibilities as point-of-purchase marketing tools were seen. Cloth covers became the focal point of the books. It was worthwhile for publishers to employ highly skilled bookbinders, engravers, and artists to create appealing designs. In the 1890s a number of gifted women artists entered the field, including Margaret Armstrong, whose work is richly represented in the collection. This artistic opportunity came to an end with the emergence of the printed book jacket in 1910, leaving behind an extraordinary burst of imaginative, beautiful, and provocative work.

Some 200 volumes from the collection will be shown at the Beinecke this summer in the exhibition "Gleaming Gold, Shining Silver," (26 July-12 October) curated by Sue Allen.

• John Francis Lee. The Prince in Ebony (No place: Privately printed, 1907), the author’s second book.
  
  
  
• Umberto Giordano. Mese Mariano. Autograph manuscript, ca. 1910.
  
  Giordano’s career as a composer began with a one-act opera, the still unpublished Marina, submitted to the 1889 Sonzogno contest, which was won by Cavalleria Rusticana. Two decades later, long after the triumphs of Andrea Chénier (1896) and Fedora (1898), he returned to the one-act form with this Verismo tragedy based on the play by Salvatore di Giacomo. The action is set in Naples, at the Albergo dei Poveri, and revolves around the death of a child born out of wedlock and the plight of his mother—a story more than slightly reminiscent of the one Puccini treated in Suor Angelica a few years later. The premiere took place in Palermo on 17 March 1910. It was not a success but the opera was admired by connoisseurs (Mascagni for one). It has recently been recorded.
  
  This preliminary draft in pencil, abundantly corrected, was until her death in 1985 in the possession of Giordano’s widow, Olga Spatz.
  
  
  

Gottfried Benn

The German Literature Collection recently acquired a collection of almost all the published works of the poet Gottfried Benn (1886-1956), comprising over forty first editions. Benn was trained in medicine, and his earliest poems, published during the First World War, reflect his experiences as a doctor. He served as a medical officer in both wars and afterwards returned to private practice in East Berlin. After 1948, linguistic experimentation began to play a prominent role in his work, and on this basis he achieved international recognition.

• Virginia Woolf. Mrs Dalloway. London, 1925.
  
  This first edition of Virginia Woolf’s most celebrated novel, published by the Hogarth Press, with a pictorial dust-jacket by Vanessa Bell, comes from the collection of Frederick B. Adams, which was dispersed at Sotheby’s, London, in November 2001.
  
  
  
  

The Robert Graves Collection of William S. Reese

“I settled on Graves as an author to collect almost by chance,” writes William S. Reese in the introduction to the centennial Robert Graves exhibition he presented in 1995 at the Grolier Club, New York. He began the collection in 1982 after reading Good-bye To All That, Graves’s memoir of the First World War and its aftermath.

The collection includes several hundred Graves letters, all “A” items in his extensive bibliography, many of which are presentation copies (notably to Siegfried Sassoon), as well as important poetic manuscripts.

 

Miguel Torga Collection

One of the most important Portuguese writers of the twentieth century was Adolfo Rocha, in real life a doctor, who published under the pseudonym of Miguel Torga. Born in 1907 in Tras-o- Montes, he was sentfont>The collection now in the Beinecke Library contains Rampa (Coimbra, 1930), the first and only edition of his second (and rarest) book, and copies of Pao azimo (1931), Terceira voz (1934), Outro livro de Job (1936), Criaçao do mundo (1937), and Diario (1941-64), all inscribed by Torga to his friend Alvaro Tavira.

 

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Comments: EllenR. Cordes, ellen.cordes@yale.edu
Copyright 1996. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,Yale University
All rights reserved.
Revised: July 17, 2002
URL:http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/blrecaq.htm