Recent Acquisitions

ADAMIC, LOUIS. An exchange of correspondence between Iowa author Leola Bergmann and the sociological writer and novelist Louis Adamic (1899-1951) is concerned mainly with the development of the book Americans from Norway (1950), which Mrs. Bergmann wrote for the Peoples of America series edited by Adamic. This correspondence, spanning the years 1944 to 1948, includes 9 letters and 4 postcards from Adamic, together with carbon copies of 7 letters written by Mrs. Bergmann to Louis Adamic. Gift of Leola Bergmann.

AMERICAN INDIANS. Two dissimilar works concerning American Indian tribes are James Adair’s The History of the American Indians (London, 1775) and Monroe Tsa Toke’s The Peyote Ritual: Visions and Descriptions (San Francisco, 1957). Adair was an English historian who traded among the Indians of Georgia and the Carolinas in the mid-eighteenth century; our large untrimmed copy of his rare first edition is from the library of Frank C. Deering. Monroe Tsa Toke (1904-1937) was a Kiowa Indian artist, 15 of whose paintings are here reproduced in full color, together with his own explanations of these symbolic visions of the Peyote cult. Our copy, one of 325 printed in hand-set Goudy New Style at the Grabhorn Press, is from the library of Robert Strong and carries his Grabhorn Press bookplate.

ANDERSEN, HANS CHRISTIAN. A translation by Mary Howitt of Wonderful Stories for Children (London, 1846) is regarded as the correct first edition in English, inasmuch as it was the only one done with permission from Andersen. The translation by Caroline Peachey of Danish Fairy Legends and Tales (London, 1846) is one of four translations of Andersen’s book into English published in 1846. Gifts of James M. and Christine K. Wallace.

ANESTHESIA. The first published announcement of the discovery of surgical anesthesia was made by a young American surgeon, Henry J. Bigelow (1818-1890), in the November 18, 1846 issue of the Boston Medical & Surgical Journal. Bigelow’s paper, explaining the administration of ether and the results of a series of operations under ether anesthesia, is entitled “Insensibility during Surgical Operations Produced by Inhalation.” A copy of this journal for the years 1846-47 has been added to our History of Medicine Collection as a gift from John Martin, M.D.

BAER, KARL ERNEST von. Baer’s De ovi mammalium et hominis genesi (Leipzig, 1827), which for the first time described the mammalian ovum and the notochord, is said to be one of the most significant books in all medical history. It initiated the new age of accurate knowledge of embryologic processes. Our copy, which includes the half-title, the colored plate, and the corrigenda leaf, is a gift of John Martin, M.D.

BIRD PAINTINGS. In the Zoological Society of London repose 43 volumes of drawings by a British army officer, Major Henry Jones (1838-1921), containing some 1,200 watercolors of birds. To mark the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the society’s foundation, two dozen of these drawings have been beautifully reproduced in a folio volume entitled The Bird Paintings of Henry Jones (London, 1976), each plate accompanied by a facing text prepared by Bruce Campbell. Among the birds depicted are ptarmigans, pheasants, bustards, turacos, kingfishers, orioles, and jays. Our copy is number 146 of 500 copies printed at the Country Press, Bradford.

BLUNDEN, EDMUND. Thirty-three autograph letters by the English poet Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) have been acquired in recent months for our Blunden Collection. They are addressed to such correspondents as Cyril W. Beaumont, Gertrude Cross, Roy Morrell, Samuel Loveman, Jacob Schwartz, and Frank Sidgwick.

D.A.B. PROJECT. Six volumes recently acquired for the Dictionary of American Biography project are Richard Hildreth’s The History of Banks (Boston, 1837), number C4395 in the Kress bibliography; James Hillhouse’s Propositions for Amending the Constitution of the United States, Providing for the Election of President and Vice-President, and Guarding against the Undue Exercise of Executive Influence, Patronage, and Power (Washington, 1830), a signed presentation copy to Daniel Webster; Thomas Bradbury Chandler’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, D.D., the first President of King’s College, in New York (New York, 1805); Samuel L. Knapp’s Lectures on American Literature (New York, 1829); Sumner L. Fairfield’s The Cities of the Plain, a Scripture Poem (Boston, 1827); and an early American edition of Peter Mark Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words as revised by Barnas Sears (Boston, 1854).

DANIEL PRESS. The books printed at Oxford by the Reverend C. H. O. Daniel between 1876 and 1903 contributed to a typographical renaissance at the turn of the century through their revival of the Fell types, which had been donated to the University nearly two centuries earlier by Dr. John Fell. Poems by Robert Bridges (1884) is in part an editio princeps; our copy is number 111 of 150 copies printed, and contains an inserted autograph letter from Daniel to Thomas Hutchinson. And The Daniel Press: Memorials of C. H. O. Daniel, with a Bibliography of the Press (1921) is one of 500 copies printed on the Daniel Press, which is now in the Bodleian Library.

DE ANGELI, MARGUERITE. Twenty-seven titles by the children’s writer Marguerite De Angeli have been added to our collection of juvenile literature. Most of these are first editions, and many bear inscriptions from the author. Supplementing the books are four original drawings by Marguerite De Angeli. Gift of James M. and Christine K. Wallace.

DONOSO, JOSÉ. To our collection of books and manuscripts by the Chilean author José Donoso we have recently added a copy of the signed limited edition of Charleston & Other Stories (Boston: David R. Godine, 1977), translated by Andrée Conrad, together with uncorrected page proofs of this title and of Sacred Families: Three Novellas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).

EGOIST PRESS. The Egoist Press imprint was devised in 1916 to facilitate the publishing of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; publications bearing this imprint have been printed by commercial presses. Three examples recently acquired, all dating from 1921, are Cock and Harlequin, Notes Concerning Music by Jean Cocteau, with a portrait of the author and two monograms by Pablo Picasso; Explorations by Robert McAlmon; and Poems by Marianne Moore.

EVERSON, WILLIAM. A span of 42 years separates the earliest and the most recent Everson publications which we have lately added. The earliest is a small collection of poems entitled These Are the Ravens, printed in San Leandro, California, in 1935; the most recent is The Mate-Flight of Eagles, number 22 of 100 signed copies published by the Blue Oak Press of Newcastle, California, in 1977. From years intervening come The Residual Years, one of 330 copies of a mimeographed publication issued in 1944 by the Untide Press, Waldport, Oregon; The Poet Is Dead: A Memorial for Robinson Jeffers (San Francisco: The Auerhahn Press, 1964), one of 205 copies, signed as “Brother Antoninus”; and Tendril in the Mesh, number 221 of 250 copies printed at the Cranium Press, San Francisco, in 1973.

FIELDING, HENRY. An addition to our collection of eighteenth-century editions of Henry Fielding (described in Books at Iowa, no. 15) is the first collected edition of the Works (1762) in four large volumes, with a long prefatory essay by Arthur Murphy.

FROST, ROBERT. Several of the annual Robert Frost Christmas poems have lately been acquired for our Frost collection. These include A Young Birch (1946), Closed for Good (1948), Greece (1948), Doom to Bloom (1950), A Cabin in the Clearing (1951), From a Milkweed Pod (1954), Some Science Fiction (1955), Kitty Hawk, 1894 (1956), My Objection To Being Stepped On (1957), Away! (1958), A-Wishing Well (1959), Accidentally on Purpose (1960), and The Wood-Pile (1961). With one exception, these were all printed by the Spiral Press. Greece (1948) was printed in Chicago at the Black Rose Press.

GALEN. The most complete edition of Galen’s collected works is apparently the Opera Omnia edited by V. Trincavalla and A. Ricci in ten volumes (Venice, 1541-1545). Our fine set of this beautiful edition includes plates of anatomical figures, scenes of orthopedic treatment, and some interesting woodcut initials. Gift of John Martin, M.D.

GREGYNOG PRESS. Three additional volumes from the Gregynog Press of Newtown, Montgomeryshire, Wales are Robert Vansittart’s The Singing Caravan: A Sufi Tale (1932), number 182 of 250 copies hand-set in Gill Perpetua type; The Star of Seville: A Drama in three Acts and in Verse, attributed to Lope do Vega, translated out of Spanish by Henry Thomas (1935), number 81 of 175 copies, printed in black and red, with hand-colored initial letters in green; and Lyrics and Unfinished Poems by Lascelles Abercrombie (1940), number 28 of 175 copies hand-set in Romulus type, bound in Morocco-backed boards by the press binder.

HAWKING AND HUNTING. Two early manuscripts dealing with the chase are De arte venandi cum avibus by the German Emperor Friedrich II (1194-1250), and Le livre de la chasse by Gaston III Phoebus, Count of Foix (1331-1391). The manuscript of the first is owned by the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Codex Ms. Pal. Lat. 1071), and the second is to be found in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (Manuscrit Français 616). Well-produced color facsimiles of both manuscripts have recently been printed in Austria, each with a volume of commentary.

HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL. Better known, perhaps, as a teacher and man of letters, Holmes was also a physician. His paper on “The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever” was one of the great American contributions to medicine in the nineteenth century. It was published in 1843 in the New England Quarterly Journal of Medicine and Surgery, a periodical which had a run of only one year. Our copy of this unusually rare journal, containing the first printing of Holmes’s historic essay, is a gift of John Martin, M.D.

IOWA CITY IMPRINTS. Recent small-press items bearing an Iowa City imprint are A Garland of Iowa Songs, Traditional Folk Lyrics of Iowa and the Midwest, selected by Harry Oster, number 59 of 200 copies printed in two colors at the Meadow Press in 1977; France Poems by John Birkbeck, with illustrations by Gail Hodge and Kristine Lynnes, published by the Left Bank Press; Romanian Poems, translated by Stavros Deligiorgis, number 55 of 200 copies printed at the Corycian Press in 1977; Nine Lives, poems by Kent Zimmerman, one of 240 copies printed at the Ocotillo Press in 1975; and Wicca: The Celtic Tradition by Dirk Dykstra, number 13 of 24 copies published in 1976 under the imprint “Ravenswood.” Oxides by Chuck Miller (1976) and Odd Weather by Scott Wright (1976) are small books of poems produced in Iowa City by Kay Amert and Howard Zimmon at the Seamark Press. Both volumes were assisted by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Iowa Arts Council.

KIPLING, RUDYARD. First editions of Kipling’s Captains Courageous (1897), The Jungle Books (1894-5), The Just So Stories (1902), Rewards & Fairies (1910), and Stalky & Co. (1899) have been presented to our juvenile literature collection, the gift of James M. and Christine K. Wallace.

KRIM, SEYMOUR. Seymour Krim is the author of such books as Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer (1961) and Shake It for the World, Smartass (1970). Our manuscript collection includes drafts of the latter work and of many of his reviews, articles, and stories, as well as an impressive file of correspondence, with letters from Saul Bellow, Vance Bourjaily, William Burroughs, Paddy Chayefsky, Malcolm Cowley, James T. Farrell, Allen Ginsberg, James Jones, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, William Saroyan, Tom Wolfe, and many other contemporary writers. Among the items in our latest increment of correspondence to the Krim file are letters from Henry Miller, Alfred Kazin, and Richard Yates. Gift of Seymour Krim.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE. The 1840 London edition of The Landscape Gardening and Landscape Architecture of the late Humphry Repton, Esq., edited by J. C. Loudon, presents the published writings of Repton in one octavo volume. The work is illustrated with more than 250 engravings. A more lavish publication, number 154 of 750 sets, is A. Holland Forbes’s Architectural Gardens of Italy (1902), which presents, in three portfolios of plates, a series of photogravures of 39 villas or gardens, including views of the Villa Borghese and the Villa Medici in Rome, the Villa D’Este in Tivoli, the Villa Mondragone in Frascati, the Capuchin Garden, Amalfi, and the Boboli Garden, Florence.

LANG, ANDREW. Twelve of Andrew Lang’s varicolored fairy books in first editions (1890 to 1910) are supplemented by a large-paper copy, first edition, of Prince Prigio (Bristol, 1889), along with an original manuscript (typewritten, with corrections in Lang’s hand) of King Prigio and the Wicked Stepmother. Gifts of James M. and Christine K. Wallace.

LATIN BIBLE. The Bible printed at Paris in 1527-28 by Robert Stephanus is a forerunner of the official Roman Vulgate Bible and represents the earliest attempt at a critical edition of the Vulgate text. Our folio volume has the large printer’s device of the Olive tree in its first state, signed with the Lorraine cross of Geoffrey Tory, who also designed the beautiful initials. The contemporary binding of blind-stamped calf is the work of Nicholas Spierinck, who flourished at Cambridge between 1505 and 1535.

LINCOLN, ABRAHAM. Two nineteenth-century items are among titles recently acquired for the Bollinger-Lincoln Collection. One is an Illinois state legislative document, “Report No. 1 on the Condition of the State Bank,” dated 1840. Lincoln was a member of the committee from the House and took part in the committee meetings. The second item is a pamphlet published in Cincinnati in 1866, entitled “A Few Passages in the Life of Dr. Francis Tumblety, the Indian Herb Doctor,” concerning the doctor’s brief incarceration in the Old Capitol Prison for alleged complicity in Lincoln’s assassination.

MILNE, A. A. First English limited editions of Winnie The Pooh (1926), Now We Are Six (1927), and The House at Pooh Corner (1928) are supplemented by first English trade editions of these titles and of When We Were Very Young (1924) and Toad of Toad Hall (1929), together with American limited editions of Now We Are Six (1927), The House at Pooh Corner (1928) and the Christopher Robin Story Book (1929). An original drawing by Ernest H. Shepard which was used as an illustration in Now We Are Six accompanies these Milne volumes. Gifts of James M. and Christine K. Wallace.

MODERN POETRY. Volumes of poetry recently accessioned are copies of Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930), the first American edition; Poems (1930) by W. H. Auden; Flowering Cactus (1950) by Michael Hamburger, printed at the Hand & Flower Press; Anselm Hollo’s The Going-on Poem (1966); Howl for Carl Solomon (1971) by Allen Ginsberg, one of 275 signed copies, printed by Robert Grabhorn and Andrew Hoyem in San Francisco; William Stafford’s The Design on the Oriole (1977), from the Night Heron Press of Bloomington, Indiana; and Jon Silkin’s The Peaceable Kingdom (1975), one of 50 copies printed at the Heron Press of Deerfield, Massachusetts.

PARIS IMPRINTS. Among recently acquired English-language books printed in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century are Marsden Hartley’s Twenty-five Poems (Contact Editions, 1923); John Hermann’s What Happens (Contact Editions, 1926); Ludwig Lewisohn’s The Case of Mr. Crump (Black Manikin, 1926), a presentation copy to Dorothy and Lewis Galantiere; Edwin M. Lanham’s Sailors Don’t Care (Contact Editions, 1929); Norah C. James’s Sleeveless Errand (Babou and Kahane, 1929); Harry Crosby’s Aphrodite in Flight (Black Sun Press, 1930); Morley Callaghan’s No Man's Meat (Edward Titus, 1931); Ernest Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring (Crosby Continental Editions, 1932); Harry Crosby’s War Letters (Black Sun Press, 1932); Cyril Connolly’s first novel, The Rock Pool (Obelisk Press, 1932); Peter Neagoe’s Storm (New Review Publications, 1932); Eugene Jolas’s Wanderpoem (Transition, 1946); and J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man (Olympia Press, 1955).

PAUPER’S BIBLE. The Weimar Biblia pauperum together with its illustrated Apocalypse was created, in all probability, in the scriptorium of the Benedictine monastery of Saints Peter and Paul, Erfurt, between 1340 and 1350. A fine facsimile edition of the original manuscript, which today is in the possession of the Zentralbibliothek der deutschen Klassik, Weimar, has recently been published in the United States by Hacker Art Books, Inc.

PERISHABLE PRESS. Six more lacunae in our holdings of publications from the Perishable Press Limited are filled with the acquisition of Since Mary: Seventeen New Poems by Walter S. Hamady (1969), one of 167 copies; The Eggplant Skin Pants and Poems by Mary Laird (1973), one of 175 copies; Open the Flower, poems by Norman Russell (1974), one of 125 copies; Pulsars: Three States of a Single Poem by Harry Lewis (1974), one of 150 copies; Thumb-nailing the Hilex by Walter S. Hamady (1974), one of 125 copies; and Kicking the Leaves by Donald Hall (1976), one of 125 copies.

PETER RABBIT. Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit was first privately printed in an edition of only 250 copies. Our copy of this rarity is in mint condition and comes to our juvenile literature collection as the gift of James M. and Christine K. Wallace.

POE. A first edition of Charles Baudelaire’s French translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel, The Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym, has been acquired for our Mabbott-Poe Collection. This scarce volume was published in Paris in 1858.

POWELL, JOHN H. Iowa author John H. Powell (1914-1971) wrote many historical works such as Richard Rush, Republican Diplomat (1942) and Bring Out Your Dead (1949), a study of the yellow fever epidemic of 1793. The Powell papers contain three linear feet of correspondence and working papers. Correspondents include historians Catherine Drinker Bowen, Julian Boyd, Lyman Butterfield, and Caroline Robbins. Copies of two unpublished plays are part of the collection.

RIO DE JANEIRO. A collection of lithographs by the Dutch painter Pedro Godofredo Bertichem showing views of Rio de Janeiro in the middle of the nineteenth century was published in 1856 under the title O Rio de Janeiro e seus Arrabaldes. In 1976 a facsimile of this very rare album was made available by Livraria Kosmos Editora of Brazil in an edition of 500 copies. Among the 24 colored and 23 black and white illustrations are views of the customs warehouses, the interior of the church of the Monastery of Saint Benedict, the naval arsenal, the public gardens, the church of Our Lady of Gloria, the Club Fluminense (which today houses the traffic police), and the botanical gardens, showing an avenue of imperial palms.

STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS. Two very fine first editions of Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), one in the original binding and one bound in full leather at the Doves Bindery by Sarah T. Prideaux, and also a first edition of Kidnapped (1886), have been presented to our juvenile literature collection by James M. and Christine K. Wallace.

THUMB BIBLE. The Thumb Bible of John Taylor (1580-1653) is both a miniature book and a classic of juvenile literature which takes its place with the New England Primer and Watts’s Divine Songs “as a molder of the youth of our ancestors.” Our copy of this rhymed paraphrase of the Bible, entitled Verbum Sempiternum, is stated to be “the third edition, with amendments,” and it includes the rare imprimatur leaf dated October 6, 1693. The volume, bound in leather with metal clasps, stands a full two inches tall and is a gift from James M. and Christine K. Wallace.

WINDHOVER PRESS. From the Windhover Press in Iowa City we record three titles new to our collection: Tale of the Caliph Stork, translated by Mark Twain, with illustrations by Eleanor Simmons, number 20 of 100 copies handprinted from Bembo types in 1976; Colophons, poems by Charles Wright, one of 200 copies printed in 12-point Palatino types in 1977; and The Afterlife, poems by Larry Levis, one of 175 copies printed in 1977.

YEWELL, GEORGE. Street and village scenes in France and a portrait of Iowa’s Civil War Governor Samuel Kirkwood are represented in a portfolio of prints presented this past year to The University of Iowa Libraries. Entitled Nine Original Copper Plate Etchings by George Yewell, N.A., 1830-1923, the portfolio was printed in June 1978, at Tenacre, Solon, Iowa, by Virginia A. Myers assisted by Dellas R. Henke and is number 5 of only 8 sets printed. In addition to the 9 etchings from recently discovered plates by Yewell, the portfolio has an original cover etching by Virginia Myers. Gift of Virginia Myers.