In 1960, the antiquarian bookseller Bernard Rosenthal began forming a collection of early printed books containing manuscript annotations by contemporary readers, in most cases anonymous Renaissance students, teachers, and scholars. At the time he began collecting, such annotations were widely regarded by bibliophiles and by members of the trade as blemishes to the printed book; their presence in a volume was typically noted along with the defects. Rosenthal's reaction, however, was quite the opposite; he saw the annotations as vital evidence of the interests and reactions of the original audience of the books and came in time, he says, to feel like a book was somehow defective if it lacked such evidence of its use. As Rosenthal added to his collection over the decades, he formulated the plan of making the first ever bookseller's catalogue devoted entirely to annotated books. He also determined that it would be his retirement catalogue.

Scholars and academic libraries have long recognized the importance of these records of early readership, and in the 1990s the study of annotated books has taken on new life under the rubric of "reader response criticism." This year the Beinecke Library successfully completed negotiations to acquire the Rosenthal collection en bloc and maintain it intact. We are preparing an exhibition and a catalogue of the collection, and it will be the subject of a conference in January co-sponsored by the Beinecke Library and the Bibliographical Society of America.

The collection numbers 242 separate editions in 160 volumes. In terms of subject matter, the entire range of Renaissance reading is represented, from classical authors to patristic and biblical studies, from vernacular poetry to Reformation theology. The books are predominantly from the 15th and 16th centuries--the range of dates is 1474 to 1752, all but 10 of them dating from before 1600. Although the books were printed in 32 cities, the greatest numbers come from Paris and Leipzig, where the local printers produced books for students at the universities. These volumes provide extraordinary insight into the educational practices and curricula at these universities in the 16th-century, and a first-hand record of how specific texts were read and interpreted. The Parisian volumes are largely Aristotelian and philosophical in nature, the Leipzig imprints mostly belles lettres, especially classical poetry. Most of the books are in Latin, but Greek and Hebrew are also well represented, as are Italian, French, and German.

If the primary interest of the collection as a whole lies in the evidence it provides about the reading habits of and reception of literature among the general reading public, the collection is not lacking in books annotated by well-known scholars, including Joseph Scaliger, Daniel Heinsius, and Hieronymus Wolf. These volumes preserve records of Renaissance literary and editorial activities at the highest level. There are also medical texts annotated by practicing physicians (who add case studies from their private practices, new recipes for medicines, and empirical criticism of the medical writers based on their own experiences); copies of dramatic texts with stage directions added by 16th century actors; illustrative drawings and explanatory tables in astronomical treatises; the working books of lawyers and notaries; and volumes used by editors preparing new or up-dated editions of the works. The collection documents Renaissance reading in all its diversity and from a personal and individual perspective not otherwise available.

The father of modern agronomy, Olivier de Serres was born in Vivarais in a Protestant family in 1539, and died in his seigneurie of Pradel, also in Vivarais, which he had made into a model farm. He practiced rotation cropping and grew beetroots, rice, corn, hops, and madder. Henry IV called him to Paris to supervise the planting of 20,000 white mulberry trees in the Tuileries garden. At the king's request, he wrote a treatise on the feeding of silkworms in 1599, and in July 1600 published his masterpiece, this Theatre d'agriculture, of which a second, revised edition appeared three years later. The work is dedicated to Henry IV, who is represented enthroned at the head of the engraved title page. The 1,004 pages cover virtually every topic arranged in eight "loci," from "abeilles" (bees) to "yeux" (i.e. eye infections in cattle and poultry). Substantial chapters are devoted to hunting and fishing.

The first state of Nicolosi's important map of southwestern North America. Although the Spanish settlements in New Mexico were already more than half a century old, previous maps of the Southwest relied more upon myth than geographic knowledge. Nicolosi's map was the first to incorporate accurate first-hand information, but it also retains many of the mythological ideas of earlier maps. For example, while the course of the Rio Grande is laid out far more carefully and accurately than ever before, it is called the Rio Escondido; the map continues to show California as an island; and it identifies three locations for "Quivera," the town of gold sought by Coronado. The second state of the map, published in 1670 and present in the Yale collections, corrects some of these errors and adds further information about New Mexico.

This substantial personal diary from the age of Pepys is both unrecorded and unpublished. Gore's (1626-76) principal occupations are the management of his land the administration of local justice and civic works. He records a large number of inns and taverns which he regularly attends, and his visits to London, his family, recreations, reading habits, and religious reflections.

These three volumes gather 312 broadside sonnets, madrigals, ballads, and other occasional poetry, all printed in Siena between 1668 and 1699. The first volume covers the years 1668-74, the second the years 1679-83, and the third 1695-99. The poems were written by various members of local literary academies: many of the authors are identified in a contemporary hand. In the first volume, these inscriptions are by a Camilla Ubaldo Maria Gori, a member of the Accademia degli Sbigottiti (Academy of the Discouraged), himself the author of several pieces.

The poems were prompted by masquerades, feasts, saints' days, spectacles, theatrical and operatic performances, marriages, elections, appointments, and visits by official personages. Many of them are in celebration of women, either members of prominent local families or famous actresses and singers. Most are in Italian, but a number are in Latin and at least one is in French. The subject matter ranges from mythological themes (Orpheus, Paris, Hercules, Apollo, Pan and Syrinx, Pallas, and Mercury) to Christian saints, notably the two Sienese ones, Santa Catarina and San Bernardino, but also St. Joseph, St. Sebastian, St. John the Baptist, St. Paul, St. Philip Neri, and others. It is clear from one poem that the Sienese aristocracy saw nothing wrong about an epithalamium taking as its subject Emperor Hadrian and his male lover contemplating the rising sun. Many of the broadsides are illustrated, some rather crudely, some quite handsomely and elaborately.

Charles Chevillet, a.k.a. Champmeslé (1642-1701), enjoyed a successful career both as a playwright and as an actor. In 1670, he created the part of Antiochus in Racine's Bérénice. The title-role was played by his wife Marie, famous for her many affairs: the son of Mme de Sévigné, and Racine himself for that matter, were among her lovers.

Of the four plays bound together, Le Parisien was Champmeslé's greatest hit. The first one, Delie, has also been attributed to Donneau de Visé. The volume comes from the library of Marshal Vauban (1633-1707), Louis XIV's finest strategist, who designed and built 333 fortified places and was equally renowned on the offensive--"the soul of all the sieges the King had made," in Saint-Simon's words.

Vauban reports on the siege of Lille, "a damnable siege, very long and very bloody for the poor engineers . . . I wish this business would end because it has lasted too long." He then comments on his health. "I keep on drinking asses milk by order of my physicians and this diet will last the entire month unless something very important interrupts it." Vauban's correspondent, Le Peletier de Souzy (1640-1725), then intendant of Flanders, was appointed director general of fortifications in 1700.

The unpublished manuscript of a highly literary diary-chronicle of stag hunts in the Windsor Forest, chiefly in prose but with long passages in mock-heroic couplets and blank verse. A consciously comic, wildly exuberant narrative of some sixty expeditions, celebrating the thrills of the chase, but with emphasis throughout on the inelegant realties: clumsy horsemanship, humiliating spills and collisions, hunters (especially the narrator) getting hopelessly lost, foul weather and bad pathways, bogs, muddy ponds, inadequate hounds.

In his Catalogue of the library of Yale-College in New-Haven, printed in 1742, Yale President Thomas Clapp recorded two copies of the 1707 folio edition of Baxter's works. The one currently housed in the Beinecke was donated by the Honourable Samuel Holden of London, governor of the Bank of England. The other copy was deaccessioned at a later stage by the library, which is now happy to welcome it back.

The only edition, and probably the only work of the Coburg scholar Conradi, this illustrated handbook of optics discusses physiology, theory of colors, projected images, lenses, mirrors, telescopes, microscopes, and the camera obscura. Of particular interest is the fact that Goethe, in his Theory of Colors, refers to Conradi's explanation of why the sky looks blue.

Mary Abney, the wife of Watts's patron Sir Thomas Abney, wrote her notes in a blank book that Watts gave her, presumably for that purpose. Among these sermons are notes on 17 preached by Watts himself; they are believed to be unpublished and several appear to have brief amendments in his hand. After Sir Thomas Abney's death, Lady Abney continued to offer Watts a home, and with it financial independence and freedom from onerous clerical duties, privileges he enjoyed until his death in 1748.

Educated in Edinburgh, the Scottish-born botanist Cadwallader Colden (1688-1776) settled in Pennsylvania in 1708 and ten years later in New York, where he became surveyor-general of the colony and served several terms as lieutenant-general from 1761 until his retirement in 1775, at the age of 87. Though a doctor by training, he was interested in pure science and in 1745, in New York, published a pamphlet entitled An explication of the first causes of action in matter, which he subsequently revised and expanded into the present publication. We know that Colden continued to revise the work, even though no further edition was published. A copy, annotated by his son David acting as amanuensis, survives in the Edinburgh University Library. This copy is similarly annotated in a contemporary hand and provides further evidence that Colden circulated his emendations in a small circle of Scottish scientists.

Last fall, when we prepared a small exhibition to illustrate Professor Cyrus Hamlin's lecture on the year 1795 in Germany, it was found that Yale lacked the first edition of one of the basic texts of that extraordinary period in German literature and philosophy, Fichte's treatise on the foundation of the theory of science. The lacuna was repaired several months later when the book came up at auction in Basel.

A fine long letter from a prominent Unitarian minister to a younger colleague, with observations on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the "new philosophy" of Godwin and his acolytes. Lindsay (1773-1808) was one of the leading Unitarians of the later eighteenth century; he was particularly friendly with Joseph Priestley and Richard Price, both of whom helped him establish a chapel in London upon his arrival there in 1774.

The first edition of this work by one of the new female Irish writers of her day, annotated throughout by the poet, her manuscript notes appearing on 78 pages. This volume joins numerous other manuscripts by Leadbeater (1758-1826) and other members of her family, at whose Quaker school in Ballitore, co. Kildare, her father, Richard Shackleton, and his lifelong friend Edmund Burke were educated.

Born in 1810, Mialhe left France for Cuba in 1838 to become the landscape painter of the lithographic firm newly established by three of his compatriots under the sponsorship of the Royal Patriotic and Economic Society of Cuba. The so-called "French lithographers" became the foremost such venture in Cuba, and Mialhe's album of picturesque sites is considered the best collection of views of the island in the nineteenth century. The lithographs were published in monthly installments of four plates each, but such an ambitious scheme could not be sustained and publication became intermittent after the ninth issue. Although the figure of 49 has been suggested, it is difficult to establish with certainty how many plates were actually produced. Forty-two are currently recorded in the Havana National Library, with 37 bound in one volume, as in this particular set.

A journal kept by Brevet Captain R. M. Morris, a career army officer, during his service in the West between spring 1849 and fall 1852. The journal begins on March 25, 1849, when Morris received orders to travel from Washington, D.C. to Fort Leavenworth, where he describes daily camp life and a cholera outbreak. Approximately 80 pages describe a journey to San Francisco made while he served as head of the escort to General John Wilson, principal Indian agent. Morris records cholera outbreaks, encounters with Indians, stampedes, buffalo hunting, teamsters deserting, General Wilson's dismissal of his escort, and soldiers deserting upon reaching the gold fields.

An unpublished, eye-witness account of the Gold Rush of 1849, this journal is one of a handful known to have been made by military officers.

An unrecorded, anonymously published broadside which satirizes, in verse, Colonel D. S. Stanley's leadership of an army expedition charged with escorting a surveying party along the lower Yellowstone River in July 1872. The party was continually menaced by Chief Gall's band of Unkpapa Sioux, and this piece, probably written by a young junior officer and published on an army field press, reflects the difficult assignment and the tension that existed in the field. The item was found in a scrapbook that appears to have been owned by Captain Augustus Whittemore Corliss, who served as secretary of the Fort Robinson, Nebraska Officers' Club and Mess.

Sumner Matteson, a bicycle salesman from Denver who became a photographer, traveled around the West between 1899 and 1903. He sold his own photographs, wrote articles and provided illustrations for popular magazines, and provided photographs for several books on Southwestern Indians written by others.

The album, created by Matteson, is accompanied by a typescript that identifies it as the "Frank Klepetko Album." The typescript provides detailed captions for each image. The majority of the photographs are of the Hopi Indians and their Snake, Antelope, and Flute ceremonies. They include kiva interiors, as well as the Hopi weaving, grinding corn, courting, working in fields, making pottery, and marketing at the Moenkopi, Mishongnovi, Shipolovi, and Shongopovi Pueblos. There are also photographs of cliffdwellings at Mesa Verde and Mancos Canyon, Colorado; Canyon de Chelly, Arizona; Pueblo Indians at Isleta and Acoma, New Mexico; Navajo and Ute Indians in New Mexico and Colorado; Penitentes in Abiquiu, New Mexico; and views of wagon trains, Indian encampments, mines, and sheepherding in Montana.

The Library has acquired a collection of nine books, some of them children's books, all of them in Yiddish and illustrated by the three great names of the Russian Jewish Avant-Garde: El Lissitzky (1890-1941), Joseph Chaikov (1888-1986), and Marc Chagall (1887-1985). The four Lissitzky books are Sikhes Kholin (Small talk), a Prague legend, by Moshe Broderzon (Moscow, 1917); Yingl Tsingl Khvat (The mischievous boy) by Mani Leib (St. Petersburg, 1917); and two titles by "Uncle Ben Zion" (Ben Zion Raskin) from the Kindergarten series, Di Hun vos hot gevolt hoben a Kam (The rooster that wanted a comb, St. Petersburg, 1919), and Der Milner, di Milnerin un di Milshtayner (The miller, his wife, and their millstones, Kiev, 1919).

Chaikov is the illustrator of Moshe Broderzon's Temerl (Little Tamar, Moscow, 1917), Finf Arbeslakh (Five chick peas, after Hans Christian Andersen, Kiev, 1919), Skulptur (Kiev, 1921), and Dos Kelbel (The calf) by Mendele Mokher Seforim (Kiev and St. Petersburg, 1919).

Chagall's Troyer (Mourning), a collection of poems by David Hofstein, published in Kiev in 1922, evokes the pogroms against the Jews in the Ukraine during the civil war.

Born in 1934 in India, Ved Mehta lost his eyesight at an early age. He was educated first in his native country, then at the Arkansas School for the Blind, an experience he recalls in his autobiography Sound-Shadows of the New World. He then got his B.A. from Pomona College in 1956, read history at Oxford from 1956 to 1959, and obtained an M.A. at Harvard in 1961. He has been associated with The New Yorker since 1961 and has taught history and creative writing at Bard, Sarah Lawrence, Oxford, New York University, Yale, Williams, and Vassar. He is the author of nineteen books and numerous essays and short stories. Among his best-known works are A portrait of India (1970), the controversial Mahatma Gandhi and his apostles (1977), and the multi-volume autobiography Continents of exile, from Daddyji (1972) to Up at Oxford (1993).

The archive now at the Beinecke comprises all his extant papers, and documents the textual and publication history of all his books. In addition to files relating to The New Yorker, especially under the editorship of William Shawn, correspondents include S.N. Behrman, Isaiah Berlin, Timothy D'Arcy, Indira Gandhi, Brendan Gill, Allen Ginsberg, Graham Greene, Shirley Hazzard, Lilian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Alan Pryce-Jones, Bertrand Russell, Muriel Sparks, and Han Suyin, among others.

Published one year before Iliazd's death, Le courtisan grotesque is no less a typographical tour-de-force than the more celebrated earlier productions of the Georgian artist of the book, Poésie de mots inconnus and 65 Maximiliana.

The text is a short satirical treatise by a little-known aristocrat and amateur bellettrist of considerable charm, whose ascendancy under Louis XIII was cut short when Richelieu had him arrested in 1635 and thrown into the Bastille, where he languished until after the death of his persecutor seven years later. Iliazd combined the 1621 and 1623 editions of Monluc's book and embellished the text with emendations of his own, which are printed to be read vertically, making each page a dazzling feat of typesetting virtuosity. Published in an edition of 113 copies, the book is illustrated with sixteen full-page and seven double-page etchings with aquatint in color by Joan Miró, as well as a vellum cover illustrated with a drypoint etching with aquatint in color, also by Miró.