One of the most influential works of Pope Gregory was his treatise on the duties and responsibilities of priests. This copy, which opens with an elegant Romanesque initial, was produced in Germany in the late twelfth century, perhaps at the monastery of St. Peter in Merseburg, which, according to an inscription visible only under ultraviolet light, owned it later in the Middle Ages. The inscription states that the book was given to St. Peter's by a monk named Alexander, who also gave the monastery at least two other manuscripts, both of them now in Dresden. Although St. Peter's had a library of over two hundred volumes at the time of its secularization in the mid-fifteenth century, less that a dozen of these manuscripts have been identified and most are presumed to have been destroyed. This Gregory is an important addition to the corpus of surviving Merseburg manuscripts.

A fourth-century schoolmaster, Servius produced the most extensive and widely circulated ancient commentaries on literary works. His best-known productions were his commentaries on the works of Vergil. This mid-fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript contains the Servian explications of the shorter poems of Vergil. The scribe of the manuscript identifies himself as Alvisius de Mombrione; the illumination consists of a frontispiece border including a hairy wildman dressed as Hercules. The manuscript seems to have been owned in Germany shortly after its production, as two Hanoverian coats-of-arms appear in the decoration.

The Este family were renowned as patrons of Italian theater, and their courts in Ferrara and elsewhere were important centers for dramatic performances. When Isabella d'Este was married in 1503, Suardi, a humanist from Bergamo, composed a play in her honor and sent a copy of it to Isabella. The play may have been performed at the court, perhaps as part of the marriage celebrations, but it was never printed, and this is the only known manuscript of the work. It comes from the Este library and is apparently the dedication copy. Additionally, it appears to be the autograph, in the hand of Suardi himself. It is unknown to modern scholarship, the only record of its existence being the mention of it in the inventory of Isabella's library made in 1543.

This is the first and only edition of the sermons of St. John of Capistrano. The sermons were preached in Leipzig while John was on his mission through Eastern Europe in the 1450s. The title-page woodcut shows John preaching to an open-air audience of bourgeois Germans, who are inspired by his teaching to create a bonfire of vanities, where they are torching playing cards, backgammon boards, and dice. The woodcut is by Schäufelein, also a designer of playing cards, notably a very rare Nuremberg deck from around 1535 that is included in the Cary Collection.

Dosio was a noted sculptor, responsible for a number of the statues at the Belvedere Palace. As an architect he created the Niccolini chapel at Santa Croce in Florence, as well as the archiepiscopal palace in the same city. His suite of engravings of the ancient buildings of Rome, shown here in their Renaissance settings, constitutes the purest representations of the period of these monuments. In addition to selecting the subjects, Dosio provided the architectural descriptions, engraved in each plate. The engravings were done by Giovanni Battista de Cavalieri.

Grassi was a fencing master in Treviso, and his Ragione is one of the earliest illustrated works on the art of fencing; its English translation of 1594 was the first book on the subject printed in England. Included in Grassi's account are instructions for fighting with a single sword, with sword and dagger, with sword and cloak, with sword and buckler, and many other combinations. The copper plate engravings, of which there are 22, are uncommonly explicit--indeed mildly revolting--in their depictions of wounds.

Corrozet's study is the earliest illustrated guidebook to Paris. It includes full lists of the streets and churches, prisons and palaces, gates and fountains. Numerous local legends and traditions are recorded by Corrozet, as well as a quantity of inscriptions that have since been lost. The work was issued in two volumes, both included in this copy. The second volume is illustrated with 56 full-page woodcuts, most of them representing the tombs and monuments of the French kings and queens. The illustrations are accompanied by epitaphs in Latin and French, a number of them by Ronsard.

None of the four plays is recorded and little, if anything, is known about their authors. Nardi is described as a physician on the title page of Il disperato, a prose farce situated in the Flemish (now Belgian) city of Liège. La pazzia del dottor Sidonio is a prose comedy in three acts in which the hero, rejected by the beautiful Livia, roams naked through the streets of Florence, until a necromancer finally cures him. The play contains echoes of Ariosto and is dedicated to Alessandro Rinuccini. La beata Margarita di Cortona is a "sacra rappresentazione" in verse based on the life of the 13th-century saint. Radaelli was a Franciscan theologian and preacher and the manuscript is in the hand of a friar from the convent of Sant'Angelo in Milan. The attribution of La leale amante to Succi--about whom nothing is otherwise known--is based on an inscription on the title page. It is a "village comedy," in verse, the five acts of which take place in the Cremonese countryside. It is interspersed with musical intermezzi.

Étienne de Flacourt. Histoire de la grande isle Madagascar [followed by] Relation de la grande isle Madagascar, contenant ce qui s'est passé entre les Français et les originaires de cette isle, depuis l'an 1642. jusques en l'an 1655. Paris, 1658.

Born in 1607, Étienne Bizet de Flacourt was director of the French East India Company when he launched an expedition in 1648 to colonize Madagascar, then known as Ile Bourbon, where he remained until February 1655. The expedition was not a success and Flacourt's pillaging triggered a revolt of the island's inhabitants. On the positive side, Flacourt gathered the geographic and ethnological data he brought back in his Histoire and Relation, which both appeared (in two different imprints) in 1658, and constitute the first full-fledged description of the country, with particular emphasis on its population and botany. The book is illustrated with six maps and nine plates bound in. The first part is dedicated to the Duc de La Meilleraye, who had received the Ile Bourbon as a fief, the second part to Nicolas Fouquet, then at the height of his power. Two years later, Flacourt reembarked for Madagascar but his ship was attacked by pirates and he and most of his men perished.

A remarkable volume of material describing late 17th-century British Navy affairs, consisting of Sir Henry Capell's documents as First Lord of the Admiralty, 1679-80, comprising manuscripts relating to the management of the Navy, duties of officers and commissioners, details on the cost of supples, debts, etc.

Papers of the Commissioners of Trade relating to the Palatine settlement of New York, 1710-12, collected by Robert Hunter, governor of New York. Together they chronicle an extraordinary initiative by Hunter. Poor Protestant refugees from Germany sought asylum in England between May and December 1709, and Hunter proposed to settle them at New York. Hunter was appointed governor of New York and sailed with the refugees early in 1710. By 1712 the settlement faced insurmountable difficulties, among them the failure of the Crown to pay promised subsidies. Hunter returned to England in 1719 and died in 1734.

Papers of James Compton, 5th Early of Northampton, and his wife, Lady Elizabeth Compton, consisting of a collection of verse written by Lady Elizabeth Compton or addressed to her, and Lord Compton's account book of personal expenditures from 1716 to 1734, an account so detailed as to be a virtual diary of his attendance at plays and operas, purchases, losses and occasional winnings at cards, etc. Together they offer a remarkable insight into the town and country pursuits of an important aristocratic family.

To our important collection of manuscripts by and about Joseph Spence, critic, friend of Alexander Pope, and professor of poetry at Oxford, we have added the autograph draft of an essay by his friend the classical scholar Edward Holdsworth, "Of the Fountains of Egeria & the Muses. To Mr Spence," ca. 1741-46. Later published by Spence as "Dissertation the Fourth" in Remarks and Dissertations on Virgil, . . . by the late Mr. Holdsworth, 1768, this is a wonderful relic of two classical friends in the days of the Grand Tour.

A series of 40 letters, 1746-78, to the bookseller and publisher James Dodsley, at his shop in Pall Mall, from the Rev. Thomas Hooke, translator and novelist. They concern literary and publishing activities over three decades, costs of production, wholesaling copies, collecting subscriptions, etc., and the purchase or sale of other books. Information in the letters identifies Hooke for the first time as the author of at least three works of fiction and nonfiction hitherto unattributed.

The Beinecke Library has recently received from a descendant of Jonathan Edwards the gift of a collection of books which belonged to Edwards's son, Jonathan Edwards, Jr. (1745-1801), his daughter Jerusha, his son-in-law Calvin Chapin, Yale 1788 (1763-1851), and their son Edward Chapin, Yale 1819. Among them are a second edition of Thomas Haveis's Evangelical Principles and Practice (London, 1763), signed "Jona. Edwards. 1771," John Williams's Concordance to the Greek Testament (London, 1767), signed "Jonathan Edwards's Book, 1793," a 1780 edition of Cicero's Orationes, with the youthful signatures of Calvin Chapin ("Bought at Hartford March 1784") and Edward Chapin, Jonathan Edwards, Jr.'s Dissertation Concerning Liberty and Necessity (Worcester, 1797), with the ownership signature of Calvin Chapin, Abbé Barruel's Memoirs (Hartford, 1799), signed and dated 1799 by Jonathan Edwards Jr., and the 1800 Philadelphia edition of the Works of the Rev. John Witherspoon (president of Princeton), signed in both volumes Jonathan Edwards, 1800.

Amalia von Imhoff, who later married the Swedish general von Helvig, was born in Weimar and returned there in 1790 with her widowed mother, the sister of Charlotte von Stein. Talented, well travelled, and gifted in foreign languages, Amalia von Imhoff was a lively member of the Weimar court, attracting the attention of both Goethe and Schiller. The epic poem Die Schwestern von Lesbos, first published in Schiller's Musenalmanach for 1800, recounts the story of two sisters who love the same man. The book contains six copper plates by Wilhelm Jury.

This large lithographic panorama by Ingeiseff, drawn on stone by the Parisian lithographers Benoist and Aubrun, printed in Paris by Lemercier, and published in St. Petersburg and Moscow under the imprint of Daziaro, shows Moscow seen from the Kremlin under the reign of Nicholas I. Its eight large sections are hand-colored. On the far left section, the tsar and tsarina can be seen in their carriage on their way to the New Imperial Palace on the far right section. The panorama forms part of the collection of books on Russia collected by Valerian and Laura Lada-Mocarski.

Wife of the poet Georg Herwegh, Emma Siegmund was an active participant in Herwegh's abortive attempt to invade Germany from France at the head of a band of revolutionary workers in April 1848. The invaders were quickly routed by Würtemberg troops, and Georg Herwegh's safe escape to Paris was in no small part thanks to his wife's courage. This rare pamphlet, published the next year, contains Emma's account of these events.

The patron saint of British canoeing, John MacGregor (1825-92) was the founder of the Royal Canoe Club, which still flourishes today, and one of his century's great eccentrics. Shipwrecked twice before the age of 18 months, he inspired the following lines from the 80-year-old Hannah More:

     Sweet babe, twice rescued from the yawning grave,
     The flames tremendous and the furious wave.

After a distinguished career as a philanthropist, MacGregor discovered the joys of canoeing at the age of forty and went on an extensive voyage, which he described in his book A Thousand Miles in the Rob Roy Canoe, published in 1866 and so successful that it went through thirteen editions. A much impressed Napoleon III invited McGregor to the boat show he organized on the Seine in 1867 to promote canoeing among French youth. MacGregor thus sailed his new, improved Rob Roy solo to France and back: the first of the Beinecke journals documents this journey. The second, well illustrated, is based on his 1868 expedition to the Middle East, which he related in his next book The Rob Roy on the Jordan, Red Sea and Gennesareth. The third notebook, also illustrated, is from an 1869 trip in the Zuider Zee and remains unpublished. MacGregor was a direct inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson's canoe trip with Sir William Simpson from Antwerp to Grez-sur-Loing, which forms the substance of his first book, An Inland Voyage (1878).

At the back of the North Wind was George MacDonald's first long fairy story to appear in book form, after being serialized in 1869-70 in Good Words for the Young. The author himself appears in this story of a little boy named Diamond and his involvement with the North Wind Fairy. The uncredited 76 woodcut are by Arthur Hughes (1832-1915), who also illustrated MacDonald's Dealing with the Fairies (as well as books by MacDonald's children). Hughes had joined the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood at the age of eighteen and collaborated with Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris on the decoration of the debating room of the Oxford Union.

A song for voice and piano in D-major on the text of Goethe's poem, "Liebchen, kommen diese Lieder/ Jemals wieder dir zur Hand." Baermann was the son of the well-known German clarinetist Heinrich Baermann. He also performed on the clarinet and basset-horn, although he is remembered principally as a teacher of clarinet.

Salesman's dummy, one of a very few copies, preceding the first edition. This elaborate publication is illustrated with 16 chromolithographs after paintings by old masters. Twenty-four of the 142 pages are in German, a sample of the German edition. Descriptions of the German and English editions precede pages at the back of the book for subscribers, all of which are blank. No German edition is listed in BAL.

A new era began for the Yale Collection of German Literature last spring when the Beinecke Library acquired about 5,000 first editions and periodicals amassed by Hans-Jürgen Frick of Founex, Switzerland. Mr. Frick, who works for one of the United Nations agencies based in Geneva, has been collecting for some thirty years, concentrating on literature in German published in the early 20th century through 1945. Last year the German government awarded him its Federal Service Cross for the way his collection preserves books and writing by victims of the world wars.

The Frick Collection includes most of the better-known writers of the period, such as Thomas and Heinrich Mann (34 and 15 titles, respectively), Bertolt Brecht (34 titles, including a nearly complete gathering of the early Versuche), Alfred Döblin (51 titles, including Berlin Alexanderplatz of 1929), Gerhard Hauptmann (23 titles), Franz Kafka (7 titles), Robert Musil (10 titles), Ernst Toller (26 titles), Franz Werfel (24 titles), and Arnold Zweig (58 titles).

Embedded in the Frick Collection is an astonishingly complete gathering of the writings of the German Expressionists, including anthologies, publishers' series (such as Kurt Wolff's Der Jüngste Tag books and Die Silbergäule series published in Hanover by Paul Steegemann, 1919-22), and periodicals, including a complete run of Die weissen Blätter, 1913-20.

The Expressionist authors present in the collection range from the well-known, such as Trakl and Heym, to the barely remembered. An abbreviated list may suggest the scope: Ernst Barlach, doubly gifted as dramatist and artist/sculptor (23 works); Johannes R. Becher, whose long career led to a ministry post in East Germany (48 works); the poet Georg Britting (19 works); the Austrian dramatist Arnolt Bronnen (26 works, his complete oeuvre); Theodor Däubler (38 works); Albert Ehrenstein (29 works); Kurt Heynicke (20); the prolific dramatist Georg Kaiser (54); Klabund (Alfred Henschke, 77 works); Wilhelm Klemm, who went on to a career in publishing (9 titles, his complete output for the Expressionist period); Alfred Lichtenstein, a casualty of the First World War (5 volumes of poetry, his complete output); Walter Mehring, associated with Berlin Dada (23); H. J. Rehfisch, a dramatist and American exile (19); Gustav Sack, another casualty of World War I (3 titles, his complete works); the early Futurist Paul Scheerbart (29); René Schickele (31); and Franz Wedekind, whose plays in the mode of naturalism led into the Expressionist movement.

Special mention should be made of 9 titles in the collection by Arthur Ernst Rutra, who, in addition to being an Expressionist writer, collected books by Heinrich Heine. Rutra's Heine books were bought by George Alexander Kohut in the 1930s and by that means they came to the Yale University Library. One of the books by Rutra in the Frick Collection--a volume of stories--has the author's handwritten dedication to Thomas Mann and stamps indicating that the book was confiscated from Mann's library by the Nazis.

Beyond the Expressionist movement, the Frick Collection covers the 1930s and 1940s in depth, including not only the well-known authors of the period such as Heimito von Doderer (19 titles), but also many lesser-known writers whose books are rarely seen in contemporary editions, either because they were suppressed by the Nazis, or because they were Nazi collaborators whose works fell into disrepute after the war. Among the latter is the playwright Hanns Johst (32 titles), who became head of Goebbels's litarary academies.

Many of the authors in the Frick Collection met their death at the hands of the Nazis or because their lives were made intolerable by the Nazi regime. Among these writers are Georg Hermann, who died at Ausschwitz, the author of novels of Jewish life in Berlin (34 titles in the collection); Jochen Klepper, a Christian poet and novelist who committed suicide with his Jewish wife in 1942 (7 titles); Paul Kornfeld, author of Expressionist plays, who died at Lodz in 1942 (11 works in the collection, his complete oeuvre); the revolutionary Erich Mühsam, who was executed by the Nazis in 1934 (20 titles); Ernst Weiss, a fiction writer who took his own life in Paris in 1940 (25 titles); and the poet Alfred Wolfenstein, another suicide (15 titles in the collection).

The Frick Collection is also rich in works by authors who spent part of their careers in exile, among them--to cite only a few from a large group--Lion Feuchtwanger, who achieved international fame in 1925 with his novel Jud Süss (41 titles); Oskar Maria Graf (39 titles); Yale's own Hermann Broch; and the mysterious novelist B. Traven, who died in Acapulco in 1969 (21 titles).

In most cases, the Frick Collection includes post-war publications of authors whose careers continued after 1945. A few later authors are also represented, among them H. C. Artmann, Paul Celan, the Swiss dramatists Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch, and the experimental novelist Arno Schmidt, who is represented by 26 titles, including a signed and numbered copy of his gargantuan novel of 1970, Zettels Traum.

The Frick Collection was acquired through the good offices of Alain Moirandat of the Moirandat Company in Basel. Mr. Moirandat has written that for many authors, the holdings of the Frick Collection exceed those of the major German libraries. The Beinecke Library, he believes, has made a "quantum leap" with this acquisition.

"I want to ask a favor of you. I intend to start right in now with the preliminary work for the Fountain of Youth play and stick right to it until I get at least a tentative first draft of it done. Could you suggest any books to read that might be of help in the way of atmosphere, mood, method or myth?"

Correspondence, musical scores, printed material, photographs, audio tapes, reel to reel tapes, and microfilm by or relating to Louise Talma. Includes letters to Louise Talma from Thornton Wilder; "The Alcestiad," musical scores and libretti, and other musical scores.

Audio tapes, correspondence, financial papers, notes, personal papers, photographs, printed material, scripts, scrapbooks, writings, and ephemera by or relating to Mary Hunter Wolf. Includes files relating to The American Actors Company, The American Shakespeare Festival Theatre and Academy, and The Center for Theatre Techniques in Education. One of the first women to direct plays on Broadway in the 1940s, Mary Hunter Wolf was active in theater education in the Northeast for many years and most recently in Alaska where she founded theater workshops in Anchorage and Valdez.

One of 250 copies each signed and numbered by the artist from a total edition of 300. The text is a collection of prose and poetry by John McPhee, Gillian Conoley, Gary Snyder, Madeline DeFrees, William Stafford, and Richard Eberhart.

The Yorkshire-born Christopher Sykes (1907-86) had a distinguished career as diplomat, novelist, essayist, biographer, playwright, journalist, and editor. This latter part of his archive includes manuscript material relating to Sykes's 1959 biography of Orde Wingate (including letters from Winston Churchill, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Lord Montgomery of Alamein, Harold Nicolson, and Graham Greene), his 1965 book Crossroads to Israel, and his biographies of Nancy Lady Astor (1972) and Evelyn Waugh (1975), as well as a corrected typescript of his stage adaptation of Waugh's Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Other manuscripts include "Albert and Emerald," a fairy story written during the war for his son, Dates and Parties (1955), and The Damascus Road. The correspondence files include letters from Harold Acton, Isaiah Berlin, Compton-Burnett, T.S. Eliot, Rose Macaulay, Anthony Powell, Stephen Spender, and Evelyn Waugh.