SELECTED RECENT ACQUISITIONS

1998

• October 1998
• April 1998

• Justinus. Epitome Historiarum . Germany, ca. 820.

  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.

• Bestiary. France, 14th century.

  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.

• Johannes Reuchlin. Vocabularius breviloquus . Basel, 1481.

  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.

• Playing Cards. France, 15th century.

  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.

• Cicero. De Officiis [German]. Augsburg, 29 April 1531.

  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.

• Orlando di Lasso. Motets . Prague, late 16th century.

  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.

• Bartolomeo Ricci, S.J. Triumphus Iesu Christi Crucifixi . Antwerp, 1608.

  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.

• Anglo-Flemish Organ Manuscript. Mid-17th century.

  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.

• St. Bride's, Fleet Street, ca. 1677-78.

  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.

• Francesco Piacenza. L'Egeo Redivivo o'sia Chrorographia dell'Arcipelago, e dello stato primiero, & attuale di quell'isole, regni, città, populationi, dominii, costumi, sito & imprese, con la breve descrittione particolare sì del suo ambito littorale, che della Grecia, Morea, o'Peloponnese, di Candia, e Cipri . Modena, 1688.

  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.

  German Baroque Novels

• Anton Ulrich, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. Die durchleuchtige Syrerinn Aramena . Nürnberg, 1670-72.

• Gaultier de Costes, signeur de La Calprenède. Des durchleuchtigsten Pharamunds curiöse Liebs= und Helden=Geschicht, oder frantzösische Kriegs=Siegs=Lob= und Liebes=Thaten . Nürnberg, 1688-99.

• Joachim Meier. Durchl. Römerin Lesbia . Leipzig, 1690.

• Georg Christian Lehms. Des israelitischen Printzens Absalons und seiner Princessin Schwester Thamar Staats= Lebens= und Helden= Geschichte . Nürnberg, 1710.

  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.

• Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux. La vie de Marianne ou les avantures de Madame la comtesse de *** . Paris and The Hague, 1731-45.

  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.

• Richard Oswald. Letterbooks, 1759-84.

  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.

  Sturm und Drang: for & against

• Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg. Briefe über Merkwürdigkeiten der Litteratur . Schleswig and Leipzig, 1766-67.

  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.

• Johann Friedrich Schink. Marionettentheater . Wien, Berlin, Weimar, 1778.

  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.

  Manuscript Arawak Moravian Hymnal

• Theodore Schulz. Aruwakkishes Gesang-Buch . Hope, Surinam, 1804.

  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.

  From the library of William Beckford

  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.

• Joseph Gwilt. Diary, 1816.

  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.

• Nicolai Vail'evich Gogol. Mirgorod: povesti. Slushashchia prodo prodolzheniem Vecherov na khutore bliz Dikan'ki . St. Petersburg, 1835.

  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.

  Mary Butts Papers

  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.

• Georg Heym. Umbra Vitae. Nachgelassene Gedichte . Munich, 1924.

  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.

• André Messager. Coups de roulis . The complete holograph manuscript, short score [ca. 1927-28]

  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.

  Jean-Paul Sartre Collection of John Gerassi

  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.

• Ralph Mannheim. Letters to Wolfgang Sauerlander, with carbons of responses, 1968-76.

  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.

• From a collection of 105 Books with Titles from T. S. Eliot Poems

• 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

April

• Magical text? Hebrew papyrus. Egypt, 5th century C.E.

  This leaf from a Late Antique Hebrew codex is the first Hebrew papyrus in the Beinecke collection, Hebrew being the rarest of the languages preserved on papyrus. Fewer than two hundred papyri inscribed in Hebrew are known worldwide, and this one appears to be among the half dozen most extensive examples. The leaf comes from a codex, not a roll, and is one of the few known examples of a Hebrew text written in this format. The text is only beginning to be deciphered by Hebraists at Yale and in Tel Aviv and Berlin, but it appears to be a series of magical spells or incantations, mostly seeking God's protection from harmful forces.

• Jacobus Mazochius. Epigrammata antiquae urbis . Rome, 1521.

  The fundamental work on the epigraphy of Rome, the Epigrammata is also the finest of the books printed by Mazochius. It describes the collection of Roman inscriptions formed by Angelo Colocci and others, and includes along with the inscriptions engraving of the monuments on which they were found. This copy belonged to the future Cardinal Antonius Seripandus, a friend and patron of Paulus Manutius, and the owner of an important Roman library of the mid-16th century.

• Alfonso Chacon. Historia utriusque belli dacici a Traiano Caesare gesti. Rome, 1576.

  Chacon's suite of engravings of Trajan's column constitutes one of the greatest and most ambitious illustrated books of the Renaissance. The plates for the engravings are the work of Raphael and his pupils Giulio Romano and Giovanni Polydoro. Trajan's column was erected in 114 to commemorate his victories against the Dacians and has a spiral band containing over 200 meters of bas-reliefs depicting scenes from the campaigns. Its high quality as well as its prominent location at the focal point of Trajan's Forum made it one of the best known ancient monuments in Rome. In addition to 130 plates reproducing the scenes from the column, Chacon has included in this publication two fold-out engravings of the entire column with interior and exterior views and floor plans. The accompanying explanatory text, in a much smaller format, is here ingeniously bound into the plate volume, apparently at an early date.

• Alonso de Ercilla y Zuniga. Araucana. Primera y segunda parte. Madrid, 1578.

  Ercilla y Zuniga was a volunteer in the Spanish army invading Chile in 1550s in an effort to subdue the Araucan Indians. He composed this epic poem in part while still in Chile, and beyond his account of the bloody conquest, describes in considerable detail the culture of the Araucans and the natural beauty of Chile. The poem was praised by Cervantes, Voltaire, and many others, and is often referred to as the Chilean Iliad . Among the first works of imaginative literature written in and about the New World, it is present here in its first collected edition.

• Muse Chrestienne, ou Recueil des poësies Chrestiennes tirées des principaux Poëtes François. Paris, 1582.

  A collection of 250 poems by six of the leading Renaissance poets of France: Pierre Ronsard, Joachim Du Bellay, Jean Antoine de Baïf, Etienne Jodelle, Rémy Belleau, and Philippe Desportes, all but the last, members of the Pléiade. The selection, which includes 56 poems by Ronsard, was made to inspire virtue in young readers, but this copy in an elegant gilt leather binding is more likely to have graced the shelves of an aristocratic bibliophile than that of a schoolboy.

• Acts of the Apostles and Epistles. Ukraine, 16th century.

  The recently increased interest in Eastern Europe among Yale's faculty and graduate students has led us to begin for the first time to collect early manuscripts in Slavic languages. This modestly decorated manuscript appears to have been a lectern Bible for a Ukranian church or monastery, and contains in Old Church Slavonic the Epistles, the Acts of the Apostles, and, most importantly, a table of liturgical readings specifying which passages are read on each feast day throughout the year. Tables of this sort are of great value to scholars in determining local practices and customs. The manuscript was heavily read and annotated, and appears to have traveled widely: though produced in the Ukraine, it was later in Russia, and then in Poland by the 18th century.

• Desiderius. 1856.

  This manuscript translation of El Deseoso , a Catalan religious romance, predates the first printed English translation by seven years. It is entirely different from the two earliest printed translations, and a highly finished, idiomatic text, with a two-page "Proeme" which is otherwise unknown. It is therefore possibly the earliest dated manuscript of fiction in English.

• Martin Opitz. Vidi Fabri Pibracii . Danzig, 1634. Bound with his Variarum lectionum liber, in quo præcipue Sarmatica . Danzig, 1637.

  Two works by the reformer of German poetry in the 17th century: his translation of Pibrac's pedagogical verses and a treatise on the ancient Sarmatians as the ancestors of the Poles. The second work is based on material Opitz gathered after 1635, the year he became royal historian to Wladyslaw IV. The first text also has a Polish connection, in that Pibrac, the 16th-century French jurist and poet, was sent to Poland in 1573 by Charles IX as chancellor to his brother Henry, who had been elected king of that country.

  Spanish Judaica

• Jacob Bernal, ed. Elogios, que zelovos dedicaron a la felice memorià de Abraham Nunez Bernal, que fue quemado vivo santificando l nombre de su criador en Cordova a 3 de Mayo 5415 . [Amsterdam, 1655].

  Abraham Nunez Bernal was the head of a family of Marranos, Spanish Jews who remained in Spain after the 1492 expulsion and continued to practice their faith. Six members of the Nunez clan were victims of the Inquisition. Abraham himself was burned at the stake in Cordova in 1655 and his nephew Ishac de Almeyda Bernal suffered the same fate in Galicia. This memorial volume, edited by his family, contains prose panegyrics of both the uncle and nephew, a "word labyrinth," and poetry in Latin and Spanish by various members of the Sephardic Spanish community--elegies, sonnets, epigrams, songs--, the longest being a "canto panegyrico" in 138 stanzas. The few words of Hebrew are all transcribed phonetically, and God is referred to throughout as "Dios," a remarkable departure from the usual Hebrew shorthand. Only one other copy is recorded in this country.

• Schau-Bühne englischer und frantzösischer Comödianten . Frankfurt, 1670.

  These three volumes, of great rarity as a set, contain the first known German translations of Molière, who is represented by five plays: Amour médecin, Precieuses ridicules, Sganarelle, L'Avare , and George Dandin. Also present are works by Thomas Corneille Donneau de Visé, Philippe Quinault, Boisrobert, and Gabriel Gilbert, as well as several works from the English, the authors of which have not yet been determined.

• Pierre Corneille. Suréna general des Parthes. Tragedie. Paris, 1675.

  Suréna , Corneille's last play, was staged in early December 1674 in Paris and this first printing came out in January of the following year. The subject was borrowed from Plutarch's "Life of Crassus." Corneille, however, transformed the cruel, lecherous, duplicitous character portrayed by Plutarch into a figure of great nobility. His adversary, King Hyrodes (Orode in the play), is similarly softened and the killing of Sur‚na at the end seems to result from a tragic, inevitable misunderstanding rather than from the devious cynicism of his Plutarchian counterpart. Suréna , now considered a genuine masterpiece, obtained little more than a succès d'estime . It was soon succeeded on the stage of the Hôtel de Bourgogne by Racine's Iphigénie . As his younger rival triumphed, the 69-year old playwright had bidden farewell to the theater forever.

• Richard Palmer. Palmyra: or, poems on several subjects never before publish'd . London, 1712.

  This anonymous collection of twenty poems, all on the theme of love, is dedicated to a mysterious Palmyra. The use of masking and unmasking imagery ("To Palmyra putting her mask on," "To Palmyra pulling her mask off slowly" etc.) may suggest an elaborate play on the name of the author, Richard Palmer, whose identity is revealed in a most curious way: at the foot of each of the first 19 pages is a single letter, not unlike a press figure, those letters spelling out "Richard Palmer author." The suggestion of a conceit is confirmed by other passages ("Dear Palmyra, when from you I part, / Tho' it seems strange, yet still with me thou art..."). On the reverse of the half-title is a commendatory poem signed "W.F." This copy of this uncommon book (only two copies of which are recorded in this country) contains a presentation from the author. The ownership inscription ("Ex libris W. Fendal Dono R. Palmer") seems to indicate that the dedicatee of the book was none other than the "W.F." who prefaced it.

• The Northumbrian Bard

  Thomas Whittell, of Northumberland, born 1683, was a lively local celebrity, and this is his original manuscript of his verses, composed for local occasions and celebrating local events. A few of Whittell's poems were printed in Newcastle in 1815. With little formal education, Whittell is one of the earliest truly "provincial" poets of any real artistry or achievement. A confirmed Northerner, he seems never to have migrated to the University or to London.

• The Grand Tour

  A collection of 77 Grand Tour engraved visiting cards from the 18th century. Twenty-five of them have the visitor's name written in manuscript, 30 have printed names, and 22 are blank with spaces left for names to be added. One is in the form of a playing card and another is hand colored and decorated with sequins.

• Dr. Bowles's European Geographical Amusement, or Game of Geography; designed from the Grand Tour of Europe , 1798. Each player of this board game has a small pillar and four counters, and takes it in turn to spin the special die. Whoever arrives first in London becomes the best instructed and speediest traveler in Europe.

• W. Ludwig Wekhrlin. Taschenbuch der Philosophie auf 1783 . Nürnberg, 1782.

  With his sharp tongue and critical pen, Ludwig Wekhrlin managed to offend people wherever he went. Thus he led a peripatetic life, with intervals in prison, while editing two popular journals, Chronologen (1779-81) and Das graue Ungeheur (1784-87). The "Pocket-Book of Philosophy for 1783" contains essays on such topics as music, art, and the theater.

• Benedikte Naubert. Ulrich Holzer. Bürgermeister in Wien. Leipzig, 1793.

  Benedikte Naubert, the translator of many English novels, also wrote a series of original narratives that introduced the genre of medieval historical fiction to German literature in the 1780s. Her collection of fairy tales, published in the early 1790s, is said to have influenced such writers as E.T.A. Hoffmann. The historical background of the novel Ulrich Holzer is the revolt of the mayor of Vienna against the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich III in 1462/63.

• Sophie von La Roche. Herbsttage . Leipzig, 1805.

  Sophie von La Roche, friend of Goethe and Wieland, has appeared frequently in these reports as we attempt to gather her many novels, memoirs, and travelogues. The current acquisition--a miscellany--has a four-page music insert, an aria for canto, bass, and two flutes by Nicolo Jommelli on a text by the Italian poet and librettist Pietro Metastasio.

  First Appearance of Limericks

• The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women, illustrated by as many engravings, exhibiting their principal eccentricities and amusements. [London, John Harris, ca. 1827].

  This 16-page hand-colored booklet, which survives in a handful of copies, appears to be the very first appearance of limericks. It precedes by at least one year Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen , published by John Marshall with illustrations attributed to Robert Cruikshank, which Edward Lear acknowledged as his inspiration for the Book of Nonsense (1846). This copy of The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women has the plates, dated 1820, printed on paper watermarked 1827. It comes from the collection of Marjorie Moon, herself an authority on children's literature.

• Heinrich Laube. Politische Briefe . Leipzig, 1833.

  The is the second, separately published part of Laube's first book, a collection of essays called Das neue Jahrhundert . Dashes are retained throughout the text to show where passages were deleted by the censors. After his beginnings as a radical journalist, Laube turned to the theater. He was a prolific playwright, director of the Burgtheater in Vienna from 1849 until 1867, and founder of the Stadttheater in the same city.

• The Charles Babbage Collection of Alfred Van Sinderen

  Charles Babbage, the English mathematician and scientific reformer, was born at Walworth, Surrey (now in Greater London), in 1791. He was educated at Trinity College and Peterhouse, Cambridge. From 1828 until his death in 1871, he lived in London. In 1816 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1828 to 1839. In the early 1820s, Babbage designed and built his "Difference Engine." Based on the principle of finite differences, already in use by human calculators of tables at the time, the engine would calculate without the need for division or multiplication. In an effort to perfect the Difference Engine, Babbage uncovered a new idea in 1834 and began a lifelong attempt at developing his "Analytical Engine," which anticipated the modern computer. Babbage also played a major role in reforming the teaching of mathematics in England. His interests and work extended to such varied fields as astronomy, geology, cryptology, operations research, statistics, and the theory of manufacturing, while his salon attracted scientists, writers, scholars and the nobility.

  The collection formed since 1964 by Alfred Van Sinderen is one of the finest ever assembled. It comprises more than 100 printed titles, several important manuscripts, and more than 120 letters.

  Highlights are Babbage's account books from 1810 to 1816, covering the years when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge; his own annotated copy of "An essay towards the calculus of functions," his first important mathematical paper, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Academy (1815); "Sir Alphabet Function," a partly unpublished autobiographical poem (1819); a presentation copy of Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (1830), inscribed to Lord Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury; Michael Faraday's copy of the same book, with his annotations; a 23-page autograph letter from Babbage to Alexander Dallas Bache (August 1854), in which Babbage tells the story of his life and explains his views on science; and Babbage's autobiography Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), inscribed to the wife of his favorite son Henry.

  Western Siberia Atlas

• Ivan Dem'yanovich Bulychev. Puteshestvie po vostochnoi Sibiri... Chast' 1. Voyage dans la Sibérie occidentale. Première partie. St. Petersburg, 1855.

  The author of this handsome atlas of Western Siberia, whose name is given as Ivan de Boulitchoff on the title page, was a councilor of state and chamberlain of Nicholas I and a member of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society. The expedition he conducted to the Far East in 1844 was part of the expansionist ambitions of some of the Czar's advisers. In Irkurtz, he recruited as an artist Leopold Niemirowski, who had been deported to Siberia following his involvement with the Novembrist movement in 1830-31.

  Published more than ten year later, the atlas is organized into two series, one of picturesque and one of ethnographic views, the latter dealing mostly with the native populations of Katchamka. This copy lacks plates 15 and 43 in the first part, but it is more complete than any of the five other copies recorded (one in the British Library and three in this country). As the presentation inscription from the author is dated 1864, it may be a later issue with a few added lithographs.

• The Stenzel Collection of Western Art

  Over three decades, Mrs. Kathryn M. Stenzel and her husband, the late Dr. Franz R. Stenzel, of Portland, Oregon, amassed their distinguished collection of original art, prints, manuscripts, and printed material concerning the American West. As a gift from the Stenzels, the Collection of Western Americana has received 53 oil paintings, over 300 works on paper, several hundred prints, and some 1600 volumes, which greatly enhance Yale's already important collections on the art and history of the Far West.

  The Stenzel gift includes 79 sketches and watercolors by James Madison Alden, an artist who worked in California and the Pacific Northwest during the 1850s with the U.S. Coast Survey, as well as an archive of books, manuscripts, and art concerning James G. Swan, an important pioneer figure in the development of the Pacific Northwest and one of the area's earliest ethnographers. Among the 88 drawings and sketches in the Swan archive are many done for Swan by Northwest Coast Indian artist Johnny Kit Elswa. The gift also includes collections of work by Gutzon Borglum, J.W. Kehoe, T. Mower Martin, William F. McIlwraith, Luke Pease, Peter Toft, and Daniel Winter as well as more than four dozen "bird's-eye views" of Northwestern towns and cities. In addition to the original art and rare books in their collection, the Stenzels have donated to Yale their extensive research collection that contains information on over 1000 artists who worked in the West during the 19th and early 20th centuries as well as great array of art exhibition and art sale catalogs.

  Dr. and Mrs. Stenzel were married in 1951. They began their study of Western art and history five years later and soon gained renown for their knowledge and energy. They eventually assembled over 2500 paintings, watercolors, sketches, and prints. Their collection was exhibited at museums throughout the United States, and in 1973, when the United States Information Agency arranged the first American-organized exhibit of American art to travel behind the Iron Curtain since World War II, the Stenzels contributed four paintings to the seventy-one works included in the exhibit. Dr. Stenzel, who received his B.S. from Bates College and his M.D. from Harvard, retired from private practice in 1970 to write two books based on his collections and research. Cleveland Rockwell, Scientist and Artist, 1837-1907 was published in 1972 and received an award from the American Association for State and Local History. James Madison Alden: Yankee Artist of the Pacific Coast, 1854-1860 was published in 1975 to accompany an exhibition of Dr. and Mrs. Stenzel's collection of Alden paintings at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. [The Yale Weekly Bulletin reported on the Stenzel Collection in its April 20-27 issue.]

• Balduin Möllhausen. Der Lechtturm am Michigan und andere Erzählungen. Stuttgart, 1882.

  Möllhausen, the author of many novels about America, toured the Rocky Mountains with the Duke of Württemberg in the 1850s. Subsequently he served as royal librarian in Potsdam. This collection of three tales with American settings has an introduction by the novelist Theodor Fontane, a personal acquaintance of Möllhausen.

• Pietro Mascagni. Autograph manuscript of "Sol che il sole risplenda," alternative finale for I Rantzau , 1894.

  I Rantzau was Mascagni's third opera. Set in Alsace like its predecessor, L'amico Fritz , the opera was premiered in Florence in November 1892 with a dream cast gathering Hariclea Darclée, future creator of Tosca, and the legendary tenor Fernando de Lucia and baritone Mattia Battistini. It was a success for the 29-year old composer, whose career had been spectacularly launched with Cavalleria rusticana two years previously. The Vienna and Berlin productions did well in 1893. At Covent Garden, however, in spite of Mascagni in the pit and Nellie Melba as the female lead, the work was a dismal failure and was withdrawn after one performance--a disaster from which it never recovered. This unpublished alternative finale for the third and last act was evidently written for the Milan production at the Teatro Lirico, which opened on November 3, 1894. This full-score manuscript is almost entirely in Mascagni's hand; it is signed and dated Milan, November 1, 1894, and contains a presentation inscription dated the following day.

• Witold Gombrowicz Papers

  Witold Gombrowicz, one of the great names of 20th-century European modernism, was born in Maloszyce in 1904. After studying philosophy and law, he published a volume of tales in 1933. His first novel, Ferdydurke (1937), and his first play, Iwona, Ksieznicka Burgunda (Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy), earned him a preeminent position among the most audacious writers of the Polish avant-garde. From 1939 to 1963, Gombrowicz lived in Argentina. There he wrote the novel Trans-Atlantyk , published in 1953 at the same time as his play The Wedding . In 1957 came out the first installment of his Dziennik (Journal), followed in 1960 by his novel Pornografia . In 1965, the year of publication of his final novel, Kosmos , Gombrowicz moved to Vence, in the south of France, where he died in 1969.

  The archive acquired by Yale from Rita Gombrowicz, the writer's widow, comprises the entirety of his extant papers: all surviving manuscripts and typescripts of his works, including his third and last play, Operetka, Kosmos, Testament (otherwise known as Conversations with Dominique de Roux ), Dziennik 1963-69, Wedrowki po Argentyne (Peregrinations through Argentina), and Wspommenia Polskie (Memories of Poland); manuscripts and typescripts of various shorter texts by Gombrowicz and manuscript fragments of his longer works; correspondence with his family, with Polish émigré writers and organizations, such as Kultura in Paris; correspondence with friends, mostly from Poland, France, and Argentina, with publishers, translators, and theaters; books from Gombrowicz's library; various editions of his works; texts of stage and film adaptations, published and unpublished, of his works; clippings; documents relating to his death and various subsequent commemorations; bibliographic files, academic research, works on Gombrowicz, and audiovisual documents.

  Correspondents represented in the archive include Mariano Betelu, François Bondy, Martin Buber, Albert Camus, Joseph Czapski, Jean Dubuffet, Jerzy Giedroyc, Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Konstanty Jelenski, Mauricio Kagel, Tadeusz Kantor, Maria Kuncewicz, Czeslaw Milosz, Artur Sandauer, and Joseph Wittlin.

• Jerzy Kosinski Papers

  Born in Lodz, Poland, in 1933, Jerzy Kosinski was educated in his native country, where he read sociology and history. He emigrated to the United States in 1957 and lived there until his suicide in 1991. Following two volume of essays published under the pseudonym of Joseph Novak, he came to prominence in 1965 with the immensely successful novel The Painted Bird , followed by Steps (1968), Being There (1971), The Devil Tree (1973), Cockpit (1975), Blind Date (1977), Passion Play (1979), Pinball (1982), and The Hermit of 69th Street (1988). The papers donated to the Beinecke by his widow, Katherina von Fraunhofer-Kosinski, include corrected typescripts and various drafts and galleys for most of Kosinski's works, including The Painted Bird , as well as printed material, photographs and other ephemera.

• Walker Evans. Portfolio of 14 photographs. New Haven: Sillman-Ives, 1971.

  With an introduction by Robert Penn Warren. No. 88 of 100. Both Evans and Warren were Yale faculty members when this portfolio was produced. Included are signed photographs from negatives made in the 1930s, among them scenes from Alabama, Massachusetts, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania, along with the famous "Tenant Farmer's Wife" of 1936.

• Günter Grass. Love Tested. Liebe geprüft. Seven Poems with Seven Etchings. Translated by Michael Hamburger. New York, 1975.

  "The seven signed and numbered original etchings have been pulled by hand in the Werkstatt Andre, Anselm Dreher, Berlin. The seven poems were hand set and printed by hand on handmade paper by Martin Gietz, Berlin." The portfolio was printed in 120 copies plus 10 copies not for trade. The translations are laid in. This is copy 32. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, published in the United States by Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.