SELECTED RECENT ACQUISITIONS

1997

• October 1997
• April 1997

• Gregory the Great. Regula pastoralis. Germany, 12th century.

  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.

• Servius. Commentaries on Vergil's Eclogues and Georgics. Milan?, 15th century.

  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.

• Giovanni Francesco Suardi. Amor Fugitivus. Mantua, ca. 1505.

  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.

• John of Capistrano. Sermones . Augsburg, 1519.

  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.

• Giovanni Antonio Dosio. Urbis Romae . . . reliquiae . Florence?, 1569.

  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.

• Giacomo di Grassi. Ragione de Adoprar sicuramente l'arme . Venice 1570.

  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.

• Gilles Corrozet. Les Antiquitez croniques et singularitez de Paris. Paris, 1586-88.

  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.

  Italian Theatrical Manuscripts

• Giovanni Nardi. Il disperato . [Veneto?] 1619.

• Niccolo Venturini. La pazzia del dottor Sidonio . Florence, ca. 1650.

• Andrea Radaelli. La beata Margarita di Cortona . Milan, 1668.

• Baldassare Succi. La leale amante . [Cremona, 2nd half of the 17th century].

  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.

First Book on Madagascar

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.

• British Naval Affairs

  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.

• German immigration to New York, 1710-12

  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.

• Compton family, of Compton Wynyates

  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.

• Joseph Spence

  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.

• The literary career of a Dodsley author

  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.

• From the Libraries of Jonathan Edwards, Jr. and his Family

  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 Helvig. Die Schwestern von Lesbos . Frankfurt, 1801.

  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.

• Moscou . [Lithographic panorama] St. Petersburg, ca. 1830-40.

  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.

• Emma Herwegh. Zur Geschichte der deutschen demokratischen Legion aus Paris. Von einer Hochverrätherin . Grünberg, 1849.

  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.

Victorian Sporting Journals

• John MacGregor. Three manuscript log books of canoeing voyages, 1867-69.

  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).

• George MacDonald. At the back of the North Wind . London, 1871.

  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.

• Carl Baermann. "An Lina. Gedicht von Goethe." Manuscript score, Munich, 17 May 1874.

  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.

• Harriet Beecher Stowe. Woman in Sacred History: A Series of Sketches Drawn from Scriptural, Historical, and Legendary Sources. Illustrated with Sixteen Chromo-Lithographs . New York: J.B. Ford and Company, 1874.

  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.

The Frick Collection

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.

Eugene O'Neill. Rehearsal typescript of The Fountain bearing O'Neill's autograph corrections and additions. Inscribed to critic and producer Kenneth MacPhearson, who was part of the creation of the work from the beginning, as O'Neill wrote to him in 1921: "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?"

Archibald MacLeish. Letters from Archibald, Norman, and Kenneth MacLeish to their parents, 1917-21, many from the battlefields of World War I. After Kenneth died in France, Mrs. MacLeish prepared a book of his poems. Included here are the many letters of thanks for the book from friends and relatives including the president of Yale and other luminaries.

Alfred Stieglitz. 147 ALS to Emil C. Zoler, 1924-35. These letters, written to an early associate, document the daily workings of Stieglitz's galleries in New York.

William Einstein. Letters to Alfred Stieglitz; letters to William Einstein from Donald Davidson, Arthur Dove, William and Marion Dove, Louis Eilshemius, Georgia Englehard, De Hirsch Margules, Jerome Mellquist, Georgia O'Keeffe, Cary Ross, The College of William and Mary, Emile Zoler, and other memebers of the Stieglitz circle.

• Louise Talma Papers

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.

• Mary Hunter Wolf Papers

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.

• Susan Jordan Fairfield. "Ezra Pound," oil painting, 1944, with a scrapbook of Ezra Pound's visit to the home of Viola Baxter Jordan, 1939.

• John McPhee, Richard Eberhart et al. Roadkills . Easthampton, Massachusetts: Chelonidae Press, 1981. >

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.

• Christopher Sykes Papers

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.

April

• Renaissance Theater in Siena

  On the 4th of October in 1531 a group of twelve artisans in Siena founded the Congrega dei Rozzi, a company devoted to writing and producing popular theater. The original founders included a sword maker, two blacksmiths, a papermaker, painters, a woodcarver, a saddler, a weaver, and a trumpeter. Throughout the 16th century, only members of the lesser guilds were admitted to the group, which eventually included wool workers, carpenters, cobblers, potters, fishmongers, clock makers, booksellers, printers, hosiers, and barbers. The name ( rozzi means simpletons) was chosen to emphasize the popular and anti-academic character of their theater, and they called themselves a congrega (flock) instead of an accademia for the same reason. When a member was initiated into the Rozzi, he adopted a pseudonym that mocked a personal characteristic (Serious, Skinny, Blunderer, Smoky, Sad-sack).

  The plays of the Rozzi are not only in the vernacular rather than Latin, they are mostly in the Sienese dialect. Based on the everyday life and cares of simple people, they are devoid of any religious or moral preoccupations. All of them are comedies, set for the most part in the countryside, with protagonists who are farmers or other rustics, usually depicted as buffoons. Their comic force is largely straightforward slapstick, the comedy not infrequently crude or obscene.

  The plays were performed only on feast days, an explicit requirement of the group's statutes designed to insure that none of the members lost time or money from their participation. The statutes also insist on "twofold poverty, one of ingenuity, the other of means." But this profession of modesty does not prevent the comedians from continual boasting about their own cleverness and comedic genius. They were in fact so convinced of their own self sufficiency that most of the statutes were designed to prevent infiltration into the group by "anyone important, or a merchant, or who can write Latin." The group even adopted a prohibition against anyone who was not a member reciting one of their plays, and prohibited members from reciting any drama that was not by a member.

  The plays were not only anti-academic, they were also anti-official and as such fell under suspicion at various times during the 16th century, especially during wars and occupations. The group was officially banned in the years 1535-44, 1552-61, and 1568-1603, after which the group was co-opted into a state sanctioned Accademia, and began to produce cultivated, pastoral elegies.

  The comedies of the Rozzi constitute the earliest, the most extensive, and the most influential popular theater of the Italian Renaissance. One need only recall the rustic's play-within-a-play in A Midsummer Night's Dream to appreciate the extent of their influence outside Italy. The plays, however, were produced only for the members, and the printing of them, often undertaken by members of the group, was unsophisticated and of limited circulation. The volumes are short, the format small, the paper mediocre, the printing inelegant--though not entirely lacking in charm. Few of them survive in more than a handful of copies, and with the exception of four or five plays which were later included in anthologies, almost none of them has been reprinted since the Renaissance.

  The Beinecke's acquisition this year of a collection of 136 printed editions of the Rozzi comedies makes a major addition not only to Yale's already outstanding holdings in Italian drama, but to the holdings of such material in North America, for fewer than two dozen of the editions in the collection are recorded in American libraries, and usually only in a single copy.

• Giovanni Francesco Fossati. Memorie historiche delle guerre d'Italia del secolo presente . Milan, 1639.

  This handsome copy of Father Fossati's account of the Italian participation in the Thirty Years War, bound in gold-tooled limp vellum and with gilt and gauffered edges, poses an intriguing bibliographic and historical problem. All the copies of the book known so far bear 1640 as an imprint date. The dedicatory letter to Don Caspar de Guzman, Conte de Olivares and Duca di S. Lucar, the commander in chief of the armies of Philip IV, is dated 28 December 1639. The beauty of the volume, the remarkable freshness of the printing, and the insertion of a long manuscript note in Spanish between pages 254 and 255, criticizing the conduct of the Spanish generals during the siege of Casale, point to the possibility that this was the copy sent to the Count-Duke for comments.

• [John Dryden and others] Miscellany Poems . . . by the most Eminent Hands . London, 1684-1704.

  Dryden was the principal author of these miscellanies (73 poems), but Jacob Tonson was chiefly responsible for soliciting the verse. All the most important poets of the period are represented. These volumes (four bound in three) belonged to Alexander Pope and bear his annotations on many pages.

• Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff. Teutsche Reden . Leipzig, 1686.

  The first edition of this collection of forty-four speeches that, it is claimed, were really made. Few actual speeches, other than sermons and academic lectures, are otherwise preserved in German from this time. The book has an introduction about the art of rhetoric as differentiated from other modes of literary expression.

  Unrecorded French 18th-Century Atlas

• Nicolas Sanson. Introduction à la géographie en plusieurs cartes avec leurs explications . Paris, 1719.

  The Sanson family was the leading French dynasty of cartographers in the 17th century. Nicolas Sanson (1600-67) was succeeded by his sons Guillaume and Adrien. Their nephew Pierre Moullart-Sanson bought the map business from the former in 1694 and in 1704, after Guillaume's death, received a royal privilege to continue to publish the family maps. This reprint by Moullart-Sanson of the Introduction to Geography , generally attributed to Nicolas, is illustrated with 39 maps and plates, many in outline color. Of further interest is that the volume is dedicated to Jean-Paul Bignon, Abbot of Saint-Quentin, an influential member of the French Academy and the nephew of the then secretary of state Pontchartrain, whose favors Moullart-Sanson may have been courting at the time. The atlas is, in any event, unknown to all bibliographers.

• Edward Austen Knight. Diary: autograph manuscript journal of the last leg of his Grand Tour in 1790, from Genoa north to The Hague, 1 June-31 July.

  An unpublished and hitherto unknown manuscript by Jane Austen's older brother, aged twenty. Edward Austen was befriended and adopted as their heir by his wealthy but childless cousins Thomas and Catherine Knight; in turn he later provided for his sisters Jane and Cassandra at Chawton House, Hampshire, after the death of the Knights in 1812.

• Christoph Girtanner. Historische Nachrichten und politische Betrachtungen über die französische Revolution . 17 volumes. Berlin, 1791-1803.

  This contemporary account of events in France during the Revolution was written by a German physician from Göttingen, based in part of firsthand observations made during travels through Holland and France. Girtanner was also wrote medical and chemical tracts; at one time, he was accused of plagiarizing the ideas of the Scottish physician John Brown (1735-88), whose medical system he had learned about during a stay in Edinburgh.

• Ludwig van Beethoven. Dritte Symphonie . op. 55. Leipzig, n.d.

  Gustav Mahler's copy of Beethoven's Third Symphony ("Eroica"), with extensive annotations and revisions throughout the score. There are dynamic and phrasing markings on almost every page, and many orchestral parts have been considerably rewritten and new parts added.

• Aleksander Sergeevich Pushkin. Boris Godunov . St. Petersburg, 1831.

  Undertaken in the summer of 1825, the 23 scenes of Pushkin's Shakespearean historical drama take place between 1598 and 1605, from Boris's accession to the throne to his death and the victory of the false Dimitri. The play terrified Nicholas I's censors. It was not cleared for publication until 1830 and for the stage only in 1866. Three years later, Musorgsky submitted his first operatic treatment of Boris Godunov (in seven scenes) to the Mariinsky Theater Directorate, which rejected it in 1871, as it did a second version the following year. A revised version was finally published in 1874 and on 8 February 1874, the opera was premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. Marina's boudoir scene in the opera was sketched by Pushkin in 1825 but not included in the 1831 edition. As for the Jesuit Rangoni, who plays such a pivotal role in Musorgsky's Polish act, he does not appear in Pushkin's play.

• Charles Dickens. Fifteen autograph letters, signed, to John Pyke Hullah. 1835-37.

  Born in 1812, the composer and choir master J.P. Hullah was a pupil of Crivelli at the Royal Academy of Music in 1833-35 with Fanny Dickens, Charles's eldest sister, and through her became acquainted with the novelist. In 1836, he wrote the music to Dickens's comic opera The Village Coquettes , which was premiered at the St. James' Theatre on 5 December and had a highly successful run of sixty performances. Starting on 29 December 1835 and ending in January 1837, this correspondence documents their collaboration.

• John Patterson Green. Recollections of the inhabitants, localities, superstitions, and Kuklux outrages of the Carolinas . [Cleveland] 1880.

  Described on the title page as "a 'carpet-bagger' who was born and lived there, the author of this lively account of life in the Carolinas in the 1870s was born in North Carolina in 1845 to free black parents. In the 1870s, he attempted to make a living as a farmer while becoming involved in Reconstruction politics. His memoirs evoke the difficulties he and other African Americans experienced as a result of Ku Klux Klan intimidation. Out of lassitude in this unequal battle, Green eventually moved to Cleveland, where he became a lawyer.

  Frank R. Stockton Illustrated

• Frederic Door Steele. The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine [by Frank R. Stockton]. Original drawings by Frederic D. Steele. An Album of ink, pencil, and charcoal drawings on paper produced for the 1898 Century Edition, inscribed by the artist to Walter L. Pforzheimer.

• Charles Dana Gibson. The Merry Chanter , by Frank R. Stockton. Six ink drawings. New York, ca. 1899-1890. Together with posters announcing an "Exhibition in honor of the centenary of Frank R. Stockton sponsored by the Yale Undergraduate Library Associates, from the collection of Walter L. Pforzheimer, Yale 1935," and a "Lecture on Frank R. Stockton by Professor [William Lyon] Phelps."

  The Books of a Collector

  In 1967, the books and papers of the critic, dramatist, and O'Neill biographer Barrett H. Clark were purchased for the American Literature Collection. Clark's library recently yielded several fine additions to the German Literature Collection, including works by Herbert Eulenberg, Walter Hasenclever, Gerhard Hauptmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Georg Kaiser, Arthur Schnitzler, Ernst Toller, Fritz von Unruh, and Stefan Zweig, all signed by the authors with dedications to Clark. There is also a libretto for Der Rosenkavalier signed by Richard Strauss.

• Ezra Pound, Ezra. "Canto XXI." Typescript, sent by Pound to Robert McAlmon, with a T. L. S. to McAlmon. Ca. 1927.

• _____. Correspondence with Achilles Fang, 1950-54, concerning chiefly Pound's work on The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius , which New Directions published in 1954. Included are a few later notes from Dorothy and Omar Pound.

• Laura Riding. No Decency Left . London: Jonathan Cape, 1932.

• James Matthew Barrie. The Little Minister . Screenplay by Jane Murfin. Mimeographed typescript. N.p., 1934.

  This working copy of the 1934 screen adaptation of the novel and play by J.M. Barrie belonged to Donald Crisp, who played Dr. McQueen, and bears his annotations in several places. Directed by Richard Wallace, the film featured Katherine Hepburn as Babbie, one of her first important early roles. It was the fifth film adaptation of this popular Barrie work: the first dates from 1912 and "remakes" followed in 1913, 1921, and 1922.

• Gertrude Stein. "Narration: Four Lectures," A. MS, corrected, 1935. Inscribed to Sir Robert and Lady Abdy.

• Zora Neale Hurston. "Polk County: A Musical Comedy of Negro Life." Three early drafts for her 1944 play, for which Dorothy Waring was to supply the music.

• Paul Celan. Lichtzwang. Gedichte . Frankfurt, 1970; and his translation from Paul Valéry, Die junge Parze . Wiesbaden, 1960. Two first editions by the Romanian poet who spent much of his adult life in Paris.

  The Dimension Archive

  The German Collection's 20th-century holdings have been significantly enhanced by the archive of the bilingual German/English literary magazine Dimension , founded in 1968 and for 26 years edited by Professor A. Leslie Willson of the University of Texas at Austin. The archive includes manuscripts, correspondence, and graphic art, as well as video and audio tapes of interviews with authors. The archive comes with some 3,000 titles from Professor Willson's working library, many of the books with inscriptions from their authors.

  In more than 80 regular and special issues, Dimension published the work of hundreds of German-language authors. Poems, plays, essays, short stories, radio plays, and excerpts from novels appeared in the original German with facing-page English translations. The journal also featured graphics, often by writers, such as Günter Grass, who are doubly gifted as artists. Well-known authors (Grass, Peter Bichsel, Gerhard Köpf, Günter Kunert, Siegfried Lenz, Ernst Jandl, Friederike Mayröcker, Gabriele Wohmann, and Christa Wolf among many more) appeared in the pages of Dimension alongside lesser-known writers, some of them discovered by Leslie Willson.

• N. Scott Momaday. In the Presence of the Sun: A Gathering of Shields . Santa Fe: Rydal Press, 1992.