The sole surviving work of the third-century Roman historian Justinus is his epitome of the world history of Pompeius Trogus. Justinus's work was widely read in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, but our newly acquired fragment appears to be the second oldest surviving manuscript containing the work. It is now the oldest manuscript of a classical Latin author in the Beinecke collection. The manuscript is written in a pre-Caroline script of the type used in the German and Swiss monasteries that were founded by Anglo-Saxon missionaries, and the writing preserves distinct traces of the Anglo-Saxon script, decoration, and manufacturing techniques brought from England to the continent by the missionaries. Such characteristics as the red dots surrounding the capital letter, the peculiar forms of the letters g and r, and the unusual pattern of ruling demonstrate the influence of Insular manuscript production.

Among the most popular secular texts of the Middle Ages were the collections of scientific and moral stories about birds and beasts that circulated under the rubric of bestiaries. Such volumes provided practical information about animals, not always exceptionally accurate, mythological and fantastic tales, and moral precepts to be drawn from the characteristics or behavior of various animals. The moralizing aspect of the treatises made them especially popular sources for sermons. The present Latin bestiary, the first in the Beinecke collection, has chapters devoted to about thirty different species of birds and as many animals. Previously unrecorded, our manuscript appears to have been produced for an Augustinian house.

One of Reuchlin's earliest publications, the Vocabularius is a systematic dictionary of Latin words. Preserved in a contemporary binding and with original rubrication, this copy is extensively annotated by a fifteenth-century reader, who added new words to the dictionary from a broad range of classical authors as well as from earlier dictionaries, and expanded many of Reuchlin's entries by adding additional meanings and sources.

These twelve fragments, apparently removed from the pasteboards of a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century binding, preserve portions of an otherwise unknown sheet of playing cards printed, apparently, in France in the fifteenth century. The surviving pieces include several face cards, among them the Queen of Coins and Goblets and the King of Swords. The cards would have been printed on a single large sheet of paper and colored with the help of stencils before being cut apart. It is evident from the surviving pieces that the stencil was improperly laid on this sheet, so that the coloring is off center. Presumably for this reason the sheet was discarded before the cards were cut out, and a binder recycled the paper.

In the 1530s a number of classical Latin works were printed in German for a growing bourgeoise clientele created by the mercantile success of German banking and trading companies. As in the present case, these books were often lavishly illustrated, increasing their popular appeal. This edition of Cicero's treatise on duties was translated by Schwarzenberg and illustrated with over a hundred woodcuts by Hans Weiditz. The woodcuts provide a panorama of German Renaissance life and costume, including scenes of a painter's studio, a magician, an armorer, a graduation ceremony, an astronomer, and a card game.

This collection of printed and manuscript texts contains the tenor parts of sacred motets by Orlando di Lasso, Jacob Regnart, and Franz Sales. The volume was apparently assembled by a singer at the court of Emperor Rudolph II at Prague. Since Regnart and Sales were themselves tenors at Rudolph's court, it is possible that the collection may have been made by one of them. The manuscript portions of the volume comprise 40 motets, of which 24 are in Czech and 16 in Latin.

A characteristic production of the Counter-Reformation, this book can be described as a sort of crucifixion encyclopedia, reminiscent of the frescoes which famously adorn the church of San Stefano Rotondo in Rome. Short accounts of seventy martyrdoms, written by the Jesuit priest Bartolomeo Ricci (1542-1613), are illustrated on the opposite pages with full-page engraved plates by the Antwerp artist Adriaen Collaert (1560?-1618). Names combine the famous (the apostles Andrew, Peter, and Philip, not to mention Christ himself) with the less famous (Apollonius, Blandina, Marcus and Marcianus, Nestor, Trophimus) and the downright obscure (Beturius, Cythinus, Draconensius, Gudelia, Hesychius . . . ). "Simple" crucifixions alternate with upside-down crucifixions, group< crucifixions, child crucifixions (e.g. Hugo of Lincoln, "crucified by the Jews"), maritime crucifixions, and crucifixions combined with a variety of other tortures. Recent martyrdoms include victims of the Wars of Religion in France as well as Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries to Japan. That of St. Tarbula (No. 25) deserves to be singled out as particularly gruesome.

A collection of organ music, a folio of 329 pages, several dated 1651, the majority written in an English hand of the 1650s, including music by Sweelinck, Kerckhoven, Hendrik Liberti, Jacobus de Cherf, and others. Roman Catholic music, including two complete organ masses and other liturgical pieces. The evidence suggests that the various sections of the manuscript were used by English-speaking musicians, presumably recusants, who sought refuge from religious persecution in England in exile in the Low Countries. The first known owner of the manuscript was the organist John Watts, who gave it to Vincent Novello, who in turn presented it to the Musical Antiquarian Society in 1844. Later it passed into the hands of Camille Saint-Saëns, and to his pupil, Eugène Gigout. It appears to have remained in France from the late nineteenth century until the present day.

An itemized bill headed "Joyners Worke done in St. Bride's church by Wm Grey," with detailed specifications for sixty items of work, providing a record of a Wren interior, now destroyed. St. Bride's, one of Sir Christopher Wren's finest churches, boasted an elliptical barrel vault over the nave, intersected and lighted from clerestory windows, and Wren's tallest steeple. The seventeenth-century interior was gutted in the Blitz.

First edition of this extensive description of the islands of the Aegean and the coastal areas of mainland Greece in response to the victories of Morosini, illustrated with 63 maps. Of these, 59 are printed in the text and four, all signed by Piacenza, outside collation: Archipelago, Morea, Crete, and Cyprus. The descriptions of each island go into considerable detail about terrain, location of town and villages, churches, and monasteries. They mention the presence of ancient ruins and provide information on medieval history. The lesser-known islands are particularly well treated.

Celebrity soap-operas of seventeenth-century Germany, these four courtly novels are as long as their (here abbreviated) titles suggest. Anton Ulrich's works in this genre are said to have been written by committee. Pharamund wins the prize for length, at approximately 4,320 pages (12 parts in 10 volumes). Meier's novel includes translations of all the poems of Catullus, apparently the first appearance of so many in German, while the Lehms novel contains a cantata text. Multiple engravings enhance all the novels.

The greatest French playwright of the eighteenth century, Marivaux was also one of its greatest novelists. The first of his two masterpieces in the genre, La vie de Marianne has a publication history which spans nearly fifteen years. The first part was published in May 1731, probably from sheets printed as early as 1728, and the second part three years later. Parts III to VII appeared between November 1735 and February 1737. Parts VIII to XI were printed in Holland, owing to new French legislation destined to curtail serialized publications, between 1737 and 1742. Marivaux then left the novel unfinished, and the twelfth and final part was written by Mme Riccoboni to be incorporated in a Dutch reprint of the work. Owing to the novel's complex publication history, few complete sets of first editions for all parts are recorded. This particular one came from the library of Charles de Rohan, prince de Soubise. It is described by Jules Le Petit, in his Bibliographie des principales éditions originales, as the only authentic example he has seen in a contemporary binding.

Oswald, a leading English merchant, was British peace negotiator at the end of the Revolution. The ten bound volumes of letters and documents contain nearly a thousand individual pieces. The letters are the original collected correspondence written to Oswald at his estate near Ayr, Scotland, from his London agent, from his three nephews whom he had taken into his business, and from his Edinburgh lawyer and other business associates. They provide much evidence of the affairs of a leading merchant, especially in the American and African slave trade; they give detailed information on the intelligence which reached well-placed persons about disturbances in America; and they reveal the background of the key British negotiator involved in the Peace of Paris and the settlement of American independence.

Gerstenberg is a precursor of the Sturm und Drang, and this short-lived journal discourses on the ideas and authors held in enthusiastic esteem by Herder, the young Goethe, and the others writers associated with that< literary movement: Shakespeare, Homer, nature, the idea of genius.

This book, which also has a lot to say about genius, contains two plays that satirize the Sturm und Drang, the first of which, "Hanswurst von Salzburg mit dem hölzernen Gat," is a parody of Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand. Goethe, in his Xenien, got back< at Schink, a writer and dramatist who eventually held the post of librarian to the Duchess of Sagan.

Born in East Prussia in 1770, Schulz had joined the Moravian Brotherhood in 1796 and was ordained in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1800. He then joined the Hope Mission to the Arawak on the Wironje River. The Arawak hymnal he compiled is written in roman characters, with headings in German. It appears to predate any known printed works in Arawak. Schulz, who left Hope in 1806, brought his manuscript back with him to America, where he continued his missionary work in Pennsylvania and the Carolinas until the end of his life. In 1847 he presented his Arawak hymnal to Brother N.O. Tank in Salem, N.C. The Hope Mission had long disappeared, burned to the ground in 1808.

Beckford's copy of William Coxe's History of the House of Austria, from the foundation of the monarchy by Rudolph of Hapsburgh, to the death of Leopold the Second (London, 1807) includes a total of 152 lines of manuscript comments, bound in, as usual, at the beginning of each volume, which underline the collecting habits and extravagances of the Austrian monarchy. After the dispersal of Beckford's library, the set was owned by Archibald Philip, Earl of Rosebery. In Arthur Edmondston's A view of the ancient and present state of the Zetland islands (Edinburgh, 1809), Beckford makes curious comments on the topography, history, architecture, and religious mores of the island. Most interestingly, Beckford's notes in his copy of Memoir of the early life of William Cowper, Esq. written by himself (London, 1816) throw light on his own obsessions with sensuality and inevitable damnation. He expresses his conviction that Cowper was insane and comments on his suicidal tendencies and religious morbidity. This book was subsequently in the library of Robert Crewe-Milnes, Second Baron Houghton, as was Leaves from a journal; or, Sketches of rambles in North Britain and Ireland, by Andrew Bigelow of Medford, Massachusetts (Edinburgh and London, 1824), in which Beckford's comments range from the explanatory to the sarcastic: "Excuse me Mr Bigelow if I cannot help observing that a sort of innate vulgarity peeps forth through all your fine phrases & redundant periods . . ." These four titles will join the 500-odd books from Beckford's library already preserved in the Beinecke.

Autograph manuscript, recording his Italian travels, with numerous ink sketches, chiefly architectural plans, elevations and details, or topographical views. On his return to England, Gwilt prepared the result of his travels for publication as Notitia Architectonica Italiana, or Concise Notes of the Buildings and Architects of Italy, 1818, which began his career as a voluminous architectural writer. His Encyclopedia of Architecture, first published in 1842, ran to four editions by 1876 and remained for many years a useful work for the professional student of architecture.

Gogol's first collection of Ukrainian tales, An evening at a farmstead near Dikan'ka, had been published anonymously to great acclaim in 1831, followed by a second part in 1832. Mirgorod, which came out in two volumes in March 1835--this time under Gogol's own name--presented to the public four more tales, which, in contrast with the earlier simple, shorter folk stories, depict provincial Russian society in a manner heralding the Inspector General and Dead Souls. The longest, Taras Bulba, set in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was immediately acknowledged as a masterpiece. Gogol revised it considerably in 1839 and 1840. The new version, published in 1842 in Gogol's Collected works, was, in the critic Belinsky's words, "twice as long and infinitely more beautiful" than the original.

Born near Poole, Dorset, in 1890, Mary Butts was the great granddaughter of Thomas Butts, the friend and patron of William Blake. After attending boarding school in Scotland, she settled in London where she became acquainted with the literary and artistic avant-garde of the day, especially Ezra Pound, who championed her work, and Wyndham Lewis. In 1918 she married John Rodker, founder of the Ovid Press. Butts's stories and poems appeared in The Egoist, The Dial, Life and Letters, and The Little Review. She published three novels, Ashe of rings (1925), Armed with madness (1928), and Death of Felicity Tavener (1932), two historical novels, two pamphlets, and a volume of Imaginary letters, published in Paris in 1928 with illustrations by Jean Cocteau. After the breakup of her short-lived marriage to Rodker, she had an affair with Cecil Maitland, and later married the watercolorist Gabriel Aitken, who left her in 1934. After her death in 1937, her autobiography, The Crystal Cabinet, was published in an expurgated edition.

The archive acquired by Yale from Mary Butts's daughter comprises 60 volumes of her manuscripts, including many unpublished poems, 27 volumes of journals covering the years 1916-21 and 1924-37, and correspondence from Djuna Barnes, Jean Cocteau, Jean Desbordes, Lord Dunsany, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Edward Garnett, Douglas Goldring, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Alan Pryce-Jones, Edward Sackville-West, May Sinclair, A.J.A. Symons, and Glenway Wescott, among others. The archive also includes letters between Mary Butts and John Rodker and family correspondence.

This second edition of Heym's Umbra Vitae is adorned with 47 woodcuts and cover illustration by the Expressionist painter, sculptor, and printmaker Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a leading figure of the group Die Brücke. The idea for the book goes back to conversations between Kurt Wolff and Giovanni Mardersteig in 1922. Wolff undertook the project as publisher, and some 500 copies were printed at the Spamersche Buchdruckerei in Leipzig. They failed to sell very well at first (Wolff complained of financial losses), but now the book is regarded as one of the finest productions of German Expressionism.

Born in Montluçon, in central France, in 1853, Messager was the preeminent French operetta composer from 1890 until his death in 1929. He was also a prominent musician and conducted the premiere of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande at the Opéra-Comique in 1902. Coups de roulis, his last work, was first performed at the Théâtre Marigny in September 1928, with a cast which included the famous stage and film actor Raimu. Based on a popular novel by Maurice Larrouy adapted by the prolific librettist and screenwriter Albert Willemetz, it is set on a boat, in Anything goes fashion. Coups de roulis was very successful and is considered one of Messager's best works. It was being performed on the day the composer died, 24 February 1929.

Gerassi is the son of a Loyalist Spanish painter who became a close friend of Sartre at the time of the Spanish Civil War and figures in his trilogy Les chemins de la liberté, where the younger Gerassi also appears as the child Pablo. The Gerassi family emigrated to the United States in 1940 but remained in touch with Sartre. John Gerassi became a political activist with a particular interest in revolutionary movements in Latin America and the Caribbean. It was at Sartre's own suggestion that he undertook a biography of his older friend, which was published in 1989 as Jean-Paul Sartre: hated conscience of his century.

The collection now in the Beinecke includes recordings of 36 interviews with Sartre prior to the writing of the biography (approximately 200 hours), as well as numerous interviews with Sartre's entourage and contemporaries (about 100 hours), including Raymond Aron, Simone de Beauvoir, Claude Lanzmann, Henri Jeanson, Arlette El Kaim, and Benny Levy. Also in the collection are manuscripts given by Sartre to Gerassi: an unpublished 4-hour lecture on ethics given at the Gramsci Institute, Rome, in 1964; 800 pages of notes, also unpublished, for lectures on ethics Sartre intended to give at Cornell (he cancelled his visit to protest American bombing of North Vietnam); the uncorrected typescript of a volume on ethics, differing from the text published by Gallimard; and four pages of autobiographical notes.

Mannheim, who has contributed much to the reception of German literature in the English-speaking world, was translating Grass, Handke, Brecht, Jung, the Brothers Grimm, and Hesse, among others, when he wrote these letters to Wolfgang Sauerlander. Sauerlander gives help with puzzling expressions, obscure allusions, problems of tone and style. The letters document the process of translation in a way that would now, given today's technology, likely be lost as thousands of e-mail messages.

Sauerlander was the first employee of Kurt Wolff's Pantheon Books, where he eventually became production manager of the Bollingen Series. He was later employed at Random House, but by the time of these letters, he was working free-lance in Switzerland.

• Dannie Abse. Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve. London: Hutchinson, 1954

• Louis Auchincloss. The Dark Lady. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977

• Louis Auchincloss. The Lady of Situations. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990

• Elwyn M. Chamberlain. Then Spoke the Thunder. New York: Grove Press, 1989

• Joseph Epstein. With My Trousers Rolled: Familiar Essay. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995

• Michael Gold. The Hollow Men. New York: International Publishers, 1941

• Charles Gorham. The Gilded Hearse. New York: Creative Age Press, 1948

• John Ives. Fear in a Handful of Dust. New York: Dutton, 1978

• Alfred Kazin. Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin. New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1996

• Patrick Lawler, ed. The Remembered Gate: Poets of LeMoyne College. N.p.: LeMoyne College, 1979

• Sharon Kay Penman. Falls the Shadow. New York: H. Holt, 1988

• Robert Silverberg. Born with the Dead. New York: Random House, 1974