SELECTED RECENT ACQUISITIONS 2005

Berengaudus. Expositio super septem visiones libri Apocalypsis. Northern France, 11th century.

One of the earliest extant manuscripts of the widely circulated commentary on the Apocalypse by Berengaudus, a ninth-century monk of Ferrières. The work is misattributed in this manuscript, as in many others, to Ambrose. Bound by Katherine Adams in 1904 for Douglas Cockerell, it was later owned by Sydney Cockerell and Brian S. Cron.

Israel di Curiel. Derashot.. Near East, 16th century.

A collection of the sermons, many of them explications of Midrash and Talmudic aggadah, by the sixteenth-century rabbi, known for his involvement in the “Semikha Controversy” between the rabbinical authorities in Safed and Jerusalem. Curiel belonged to a family exiled from Spain and was raised in Adrianople and other cities in Turkey before moving to Safed, where he served in the court of Rabbi Joseph Karo. This manuscript, which may be an autograph of Curiel, includes an index by one of his students.

Baldassarre Castiglione. Ad Henricvm Angliae regum Epistola de vita et gestis Guidubaldi Urbini ducis. Fossombrone, 1513.

The first edition of Castiglione's first book and an important precursor of his most important work, Il Cortegiano. This treatise, dedicated to the English king Henry VII, is a eulogy of Castiglione's lord and master, Guidobaldo de Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, who died in 1508. Castiglione describes him as an enlighted prince, graceful, learned, sympathetic. His years of service to the duke inspired Il Cortegiano, which is set in the duke's court and features his wife Elisabetta Gonzaga as the moderator of the dialogue.

Ricoldo da Montecroce. Verlegung des Alcoran, Wittemberg, 1542. Translated by Martin Luther.

First edition of Luther's translation of a virulent thirteenth-century attack on Islam by Ricoldo da Montecroce. Luther says in the preface that he had read Ricoldo's treatise but could not believe his account of the Muslim faith. But when, on Shrove Tuesday in 1542, he acquired and was able for the first time to read a translation of the Koran, he saw that it supported some of Ricoldo's claims. Luther thereupon decided to translate Ricoldo's work in order to give it a wider circulation.

Giovanni Battista Benedetti. Resolutio omnium Euclidis problematum. Venice, 1553.

First edition of the first book by Benedetti and an important contribution to modern physics. Benedetti argues for the equal speed of falling bodies of different weight but of the same material and thus provides an important step towards the theories propounded in Galileo's De Motu.

Matthäus Merian. Todten-Tantz, wie derselbe in der weitberümbten Statt Basel als ein Spiegel menschlicher Beschaffenheit . . . zusehen ist. Basel, 1621.

This is the true first edition of Merian’s plates illustrating the fifteenth-century Dance of Death frescoes on the cemetery walls of the Predigerkirche in Basel. Soon after they were produced, as early as 1616, Merian sold or gave the plates to his cousin Johann Jakob Merian for this Basel imprint 1621. Some two decades later, sensing the approach of his own death, he bought them back, revised them, and published them himself in Frankfurt in 1649. The paintings themselves were not maintained after the seventeenth century and the walls were torn down in the nineteenth.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Specimen demonstrationum politicarum pro eligendo rege Polonorum. Vilnae, 1659 [i.e. Königsberg, 1669]

The scarcest of Leibniz’s early works, this tract addresses the election of the Polish king. The 23-year-old author was commissioned by the Elector of Mainz to produce a defense for the candidacy of the Count Palatine, Philipp Wilhelm von Neuburg. The result was Leibniz’s first substantial political work, an attempt to apply mathematical principles to the political process.cc

The rarity of the volume (there are no other recorded copies in the United States and only two in Europe) stems from the circumstances of its publication. Composed in the winter of 1668/69, the manuscript was sent to the Count Palatine in March. The Count sent an excerpt to Königsberg to be printed—a publication that has apparently not survived. The entire manuscript followed in April 1669, and by the end of that month the printer, Stratman, was promising copies within weeks. Then as now, however, there were delays in the print shop. Election proceedings opened in Warsaw in early May, and by mid-June a native Pole, Michael Korybut Wisniowiecki, was elected. When Specimen demonstrationum politicarum left the presses in Königsberg, probably in late June, it was already obsolete for its original purpose.

The size and fate of that first print run is unknown, but the tract seems to have had little contemporary resonance. Later in life, Leibniz acknowledged the work, which had been published under the pseudonym Georgius Ulicovius Lithuanus, a formulation that retained his initials and, along with the falsified imprint, was probably intended to suggest that the work had a Polish origin (Lithuania and Poland were ruled by the same king and legislature at that time). It is unknown whether the imprint date—1659—was a simple printing error or an intentional misdating to conceal the fact that the book was commissioned specifically to influence the Polish election. There is still no German translation, although a Polish version appeared recently.

Quirin Kuhlmann. Der hohen Weissheit fürtrefliche LehrHoff in sich haltend schöne Jugendblumen geistlicher und weltlicher Moral. Jena, 1672.

Kuhlmann (1651-89) is one of the most eccentric authors of seventeenth-century Germany. Before being burned at the stake in Russia as a heretic, he had been expelled from the University of Leyden, traveled to England, and gone to Constantinople to try to convert the Sultan. His poetry is marked by religious fanaticism and a world view that established his own role in religious history: he called his vision of the Kingdom of God the “Kühlmonarchie” and his best-known work has the title Der Kühlpsalter. This fairly early work of Kuhlmann is a kind of commonplace book.

Pietro Antonio di Venezia. Guide fedele alla S. Città di Gierusalemme, e descrittione di tutta Terra Santa. Venice, 1703.

This guide to Jerusalem and the Holy Land contains 135 woodcuts and a folding plate showing a schematic map of the Via Dolorosa with twelve sacred locations identified along the route. Based on the author’s own pilgrimage, the guide is thoroughly practical, including details about distances between cities and estimates of the costs a traveler might expect to incur.

Congregatio de Propaganda Fide. Absolutum est Specimen hoc Idiomatum et Characterum exoticorum. Rome, 1784.

First edition of this type specimen book produced by the printing house of the Catholic Church. A poem celebrating the visit of Gustave III of Sweden to Rome in 1784 is printed in forty-six languages to show off exotic typefaces, which include Syriac, Armenian, Coptic, and Chinese fonts.

Georg Bruyn. Aufforderung an meine Mitbürger zur Theilnehmung an dem Canal-Handel. Altona, 1784.

This description of the new canal between the North Sea and the Baltic covers its construction and the enhanced trading opportunities it would produce for Schleswig-Holstein and for the Baltic ports. Four folding engraved plates include a map, a profile view of the canal bed, a view of the eastern end of the canal, and a depiction of canal buildings and locks. This canal was superseded by the Nord Ostsee Kanal constructed at the end of the nineteenth century.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urtheile des Publikums über die französische Revolution. Danzig, 1793.

Fichte wrote this “Contribution to correcting the judgment of the public about the French Revoltuion” just before his first appointment at the University of Jena. His account, radical by contemporary German standards, established its author as a leader in liberal causes and led to difficulties with his new employer.

Mary Wollstonecraft. Rettung der Rechte des Weibes. Schnepfenthal, im Verlage der Erziehungsanstalt, 1793-4.

A translation of Wollstonecraft’s landmark A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Georg Friedrich Christian Weißenborn. This first German edition includes notes by Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, the education philosopher and founder of the institute in the Thuringian forest where the book was printed. Wollstonecraft had earlier (1790) translated Salzmann’s Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children, notable for plates engraved by William Blake.

Darby and Joan, commonly called the little man and his gun. To which is added what was said by Little Jessie. [ca. 1810]

This curious manuscript of the English rhyme, accompanied by six watercolor illustrations, appears to have a provenance in the Caribbean, making it a delightful blend of old and new world influences.

The Library of a Queen.
Books from the collection of Marie, queen of Hanover

In 1843, Princess Marie Alexandrine of Sachsen-Anhalt (1818-1907) married the future Georg V of Hanover, a grandson of George III and first cousin to Queen Victoria. Maria’s book collecting had begun before her marriage, but accessions to her library ended in 1867; with the annexation of Hanover by Prussia in 1866, Maria had gone into exile in Austria for the rest of her life. The library amassed by the Queen was rooted in the nineteenth century, strong in contemporary literature and particularly in books by women. Translations from the English and historical novels, then at the peak of their popularity in Germany, were prominent in the collection. Two Hanoverian bookbinders, Wilhelm Ermold and August Meyer, were employed to bind the Queen’s books, many of which bear her arms or initials stamped in gold.

From the portion of Marie’s library offered recently by the Berlin antiquarian dealer Wolfgang Braecklein, we acquired titles by Friedrich Gerstäcker, Karl Gutzkow, Ida, Gr&aumpfin Hahn-Hahn, Fanny Lewald, Alfred Meissner, Balduin Möllhausen, Theodor Mundt, and Friedrich August Strubberg. The Strubberg titles are all narratives on American themes from the 1850s and 60s. Strubberg, who wrote under the pseudonym Armand, has also been collected by the Western Americana Collection and figures in the archive of the Verein zum Schutz deutscher Auswanderer in Texas.

Rudyard Kipling. The Light that failed. [November 1890?]

Marked proof sheets, typescript for the text which appeared in Lippincott’s Magazine for January 1891, corrected by Rudyard Kipling and an unidentified American copy-editor, Accompanied by an autograph letter, signed, to "The Editor, Lippincott's Magazine," from Rudyard Kipling.

The founders of the Insel Verlag

In 1899, three authors, Rudolf Alexander Schröder, Alfred Walter Heymel, and Otto Julius Bierbaum, banded together with the idea of founding a journal for literature and art, to be called Die Insel. The illustrated magazine first appeared in 1901, issued by a new press, the Insel Verlag, that had been set up by Heymel. Five years later the press was taken over by the bibliophile and Goethe-collector Anton Kippenberg, who in 1912 founded the series Insel Bücherei, whose slim volumes, covered in colorful decorative paper, are familiar to all students and collectors of German literature. The Insel Verlag, having survived both wars and the division of Germany, is now united as an imprint of the Suhrkamp Verlag. The German Literature Collection recently added a gathering of books by the three founders of the Insel Verlag, many of them limited, deluxe editions.

Llewelyn Davies photographic archive and family morgue [1911-25]

The single most significant lacuna in the Beinecke’s J. M. Barrie collection is filled with the acquisition of the remaining documentary and photographic archives of the family that inspired Peter Pan. Included are letters between Barrie and family members, as well as early evidence of the Llewelyn Davies and Du Maurier families.

Edna St. Vincent Millay. Commencement Week Vassar College. Poughkeepsie, NY, Vassar College, 1917. Includes Millay's "Baccalaureate Hymn."

Norman Straus. 5 autochrome photographs, 4 housed in diascope cases, of Flora Stieglitz Straus, and other members of the Stieglitz family.

Harry Crosby. Anthology. Paris: Darantière, 1924.

The 1928 Berlin Presseball

The Berlin press ball has a long history as a charitable fundraiser (the 103rd gala took place at the Berlin Ritz Carlton in January 2005). This is an extraordinarily well-preserved and complete copy of the keepsake given to the sponsors of the event in 1928. Included are facsimiles of handwritten quatrains by twenty-six well-known writers of the time (including Gerhart Hauptmann, Alfred Döblin, and Arthur Schnitzler) and thirteen original lithographs by contemporary artists. The suite also includes two entrance tickets–one for a lady, one for a gentleman, two raffle tickets, and the menu. Guests feasted on goose liver parfait, turtle soup, fillet of sole, and Cornish hen, and for dessert, Bombe Sicilienne.

Noel Coward. After the ball. A musical play by Noel Coward. Based on Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere's fan, 1954.

An unpublished typescript of Coward’s “operette” version of Wilde’s play, which premiered in the United States only in 2004, fifty years after its first staging in England. This material complements manuscripts of lyrics and printed scores in the Frederick R. Koch Collection.

Wilda Hamerman. Correspondence with Bryher and Norman Holmes Pearson, along with photographs and printed material. Hamerman worked as secretary to Pearson in the early 1970s before resigning to run for the Connecticut House of Representatives.

Wright Morris. Wright Morris Portfolio. Roslyn Heights: New York, Witkin-Berley, Ltd., 1981.

This suite contains twelve gelatin silver prints printed by Morris and is accompanied by the author-photographer's statement about his photography of the American heartland in the 1930s and 1940s. The Nebraska born novelist frequently combined his writer's eye and his camera's lens to produce lasting images of life in rural and small-town prairie communities.

Mark Beard. Manhattan Third Year Reader. New York: Vincent Fitz Gerald & Company, 1984 (Copy AP5, hors-serie out of 30 copies)

A wondrous combination of an artist’s imagery and texts by a painter who recently had a show at Yale. The story of his early years of struggle in New York, illustrated by reduction linoleum cuts, recast the definition of an “artist’s book.”

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Richard Tuttle. Hiddenness. New York: Library Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1987.