ABATTOIR EDITIONS is the imprint appearing on books hand-printed at Cleary House, The University of Nebraska at Omaha, under the direction of Harry Duncan, whose Cummington Press formerly operated at West Branch, Iowa. Armand Schwerner’s Bacchae Sonnets (1974), illustrated by James W. Mall, is a joint production of Abattoir Editions and the Cummington Press, in an edition of 430 copies, with hand-set Romulus type on Ragston paper. Waiting in the Bone and Other Poems by Radcliffe Squires, with fifteen relief etchings by Keith Achepol, was published by Abattoir Editions in 1973 in an edition of 260 copies; and John Logan’s The House that Jack Built, illustrated from drawings by James Brunot, was published in 1974 in an edition of 300 copies.

BERENGARIO DA CARPI, JACOPO. Berengario’s Isagoge Breves, published in Bologna in 1522, is a compendium which furnishes what are believed to be the first anatomical illustrations taken directly from human dissection. The copy recently added to our collection contains not only the twenty usual illustrations but also four additional full-page woodcuts. This unusually rare medical work is basic in the development of anatomy in the pre-Vesalian period. Gift of John Martin, M.D.

BIRD & BULL PRESS. The books produced by Henry Morris’s press in North Hills, Pennsylvania, have typically been concerned in some way with the subject of papermaking, and appropriately these volumes have been printed on handmade paper. Among several earlier titles on our shelves from the Bird & Bull Press are Omnibus: Instructions for Amateur Papermakers (1967); An Exhibition of Books on Papermaking (1968); Old Ream Wrappers (1969); and A Visit to Hayle Mill (1970). Our most recent volume from the press is entitled The Paper Maker: A Survey of Lesser-Known Hand Paper Mills in Europe and North America (1974). This handsome book, quarter-bound in goatskin with paste-paper sides, is one of 175 copies. Samples of handmade paper (or papyrus) accompany brief histories of various mills in the United States, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, Italy, and Poland.

BLUNDEN, EDMUND. A presentation copy of the scarce Poems Translated from the French (July, 1913-January, 1914) joins the printed volumes in our Blunden Collection, while the more extensive recent accessions are manuscripts of several book reviews by Blunden, three autograph letters and a postcard addressed to the novelist Graham Greene, and a file of some 130 items of correspondence between Edmund and Sylva Blunden and the art critic Ian Robertson.

BURROUGHS, EDGAR RICE. One of the American juvenile books described in Jacob Blanck’s Peter Parley to Penrod is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1914). Among our recent gifts is a well-preserved copy of the first edition of this famous Burroughs title, in original maroon cloth, without the publisher’s acorn ornament on the spine. Gift of Mrs. Corinne Carter.

COLEMAN, CARROLL. In earlier years our collection of publications from Carroll Coleman’s Prairie Press has been supplemented by files of correspondence between the printer and certain authors whose works carry the Prairie Press imprint. Among these are more than 40 letters concerning Don Farran’s Ballad of the Silver Ring (1935) and perhaps a hundred letters relating to several of the Christmas publications of the late L. O. Cheever. We are pleased to acknowledge the recent acquisition of 68 letters or cards from Mr. Coleman to another printer, Emerson Wulling of the Sumac Press. Regular readers of Books at Iowa will recall that excerpts from these letters appeared in our November 1975 issue. Gift of Emerson Wulling.

D.A.B. PROJECT. In the first issue of Books at Iowa in the fall of 1964, Professor Stow Persons outlined this Library’s objective of acquiring significant items of Americana, using the Dictionary of American Biography as a selection guide. Three of the items most recently acquired for this project are a first edition of William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham (Boston, 1885); a first edition of Walter Minto’s Inaugural Oration on the Progress and Importance of the Mathematical Sciences (Trenton, 1788), a work which is reputed to be the first American contribution to the history of mathematics; and a copy of Charles W. Upham’s Salem Witchcraft (Boston, 1867), two volumes in four, one of 100 large-paper copies. According to the D.A.B., Charles W. Upham, the author of this work on witchcraft, “is considered the prototype of 'Judge Pyncheon' in The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

DE VINNE PRESS. By the time of his death in 1914, Theodore Low DeVinne had earned a reputation as the foremost printer of America. The DeVinne Press undertook large commercial jobs like the printing of St. Nicholas magazine and the Century Dictionary as well as limited editions for such groups as the Caxton Club and the Grolier Club. In our Springer Collection are more than a dozen monographs on printing authored by Theodore L. DeVinne together with several type-specimen books from the DeVinne Press; and the work of this press is represented in some of our other collections by such titles, among others, as William Loring Andrews’ Roger Payne and His Art (1892), one of 130 copies, and the Love Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1907), one of 62 sets printed for the Society of the Dofobs. Two recent acquisitions from the press are Roman and Italic Printing Types (1891) and Hamilton’s Itinerarium (1907), this latter being the narrative of a journey made by Dr. Alexander Hamilton through the northern American colonies in 1744.

DICKENS, CHARLES. Eight first editions: A Child’s History of England (1852-1853-1854) three small octavo volumes, original gilt-embossed red cloth with marbled edges and endpapers; The Cricket on the Hearth (1846), first issue of first edition, original gilt-embossed red cloth; Hard Times (1854) in the original olive-green cloth binding; The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1839) illustrated by “Phiz,” an early issue with the misprint on page 160; Oliver Twist (1838), three volumes in original maroon cloth, illustrated by George Cruikshank; The Personal History of David Copperfield (1850), with copper engravings by H. K. Browne; Pictures from Italy (1846), in the original deep-blue cloth binding; and A Tale of Two Cities (1859), first issue of the first edition, in full green morocco binding with a hand-painted miniature of the author set into the front cover. Gift of John Martin, M.D.

DODGE, GRENVILLE MELLEN. General Dodge’s Personal Recollections and other publications are represented in our Iowa Authors Collection, and items of his original correspondence are to be found in our Leonard Railroad Collection (described in Books at Iowa, no.8) and in this Library’s collections of personal papers of Peter A. Dey, William Boyd Allison, and Charles E. Pickett. To these earlier holdings we have recently added ten letters from General Dodge to Horatio Collins King and two letters to Oliver Ames, sometime president of the Union Pacific Railroad.

DUBIE, NORMAN. Among the best of the younger contemporary poets is Norman Dubie, a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop who has taught at Ohio University and currently holds an appointment as writer-in-residence at Arizona State University. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Antioch Review, the Quarterly Review of Literature, the New Yorker and elsewhere, and among his published volumes are Alehouse Sonnets (1971), Popham of the New Song (1974), and In the Dead of the Night (1975). Correspondence and drafts of poems relating to these earlier collections have recently been augmented by similar materials for two forthcoming titles, Elegies for the Ochre Deer and The Illustrations. Gift of Norman Dubie.

FAULKNER, WILLIAM. The most recent publication in the Faulkner canon is a one-act play entitled The Marionettes. Faulkner wrote it in 1920, but it was never produced, and it remained unpublished until 1975, when 126 copies were printed by the Garamond Press from type handset at the Alderman Press, the University of Virginia Library. Ours is copy number 46 and consists of six unbound gatherings in a folder and slipcase. It is reproduced from one of the six manuscript copies which Faulkner is known to have hand-lettered and illustrated in a fin-de-siècle style somewhat reminiscent of Aubrey Beardsley.

HELMHOLTZ, HERMANN VON. The inventive genius of Helmholtz produced the ophthalmoscope, now one of the commonest and most useful tools in clinical medicine. A first edition of his important work in physiological optics, Beschreibung eines Augen-Spiegels (1851), has now been added to our collection of landmark books in the history of medicine. Gift of John Martin, M.D.

HOLMES, MARJORIE. Judged by her 25 volumes presently on the shelves of our Iowa Authors Collection, Marjorie Holmes is one of the most popular and prolific of our native writers. Her earlier gifts of author’s manuscripts and letter files have recently been supplemented with a large increment of correspondence relating to her “Love and Laughter” column from the Washington Evening Star, scripts of numerous magazine articles, and a first draft and portions of notes for her screenplay Two from Galilee. Gift of Marjorie Holmes.

JOHN OF GADDESDEN. “Gatisden” is one of the fifteen medical authorities cited by the well-read “Doctour of Phisik” in the prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the Dictionary of National Biography suggests the possibility that Gaddesden may be “the contemporary from whom Chaucer drew this character.” Gaddesden died in London in 1361, when Chaucer was about 21 years old. His manual of therapeutics, the Rosa Anglica, is practically a summary of all the garnered experience of medieval physicians, drawing as it does on Arabic translation of the classical writers, on French and Italian writings, on folklore, and on his own observation and experience. To our continually growing collection of important books in the history of medicine we have recently added a copy of the second edition of John of Gaddesden’s Rosa Anglica, printed in Venice in 1502. Gaddesden was the first Englishman to have his medical book appear in print (in 1492). Gift of John Martin, M.D.

LEONARDO DA VINCI. Two Leonardo manuscripts in the possession of the National Library of Madrid since the mid-seventeenth century have now been published for the first time. This modern edition of The Madrid Codices (1974) consists of two volumes of facsimile pages, two volumes of transcription, and one volume of commentary by the late Ladislao Reti. The two manuscripts deal with such subjects, among others, as mills, water wheels, the theory of gearing, the motion of waves, the flight of birds, the diversion of the Arno River, and the squaring of curvilinear figures.

LINCOLN, ABRAHAM. New books about Abraham Lincoln are added to our Bollinger-Lincoln Collection as they are published, and 29 titles were accessioned during the year July, 1974 through June, 1975. Retrospective additions are less frequent, since Judge Bollinger, before his death in 1951, had acquired the vast majority of the volumes in Jay Monaghan’s Lincoln Bibliography, 1839-1939. One of two older works acquired during the past year is a campaign biography of 1860, the earliest issue of Joseph Hartwell Barrett’s Life of Abraham Lincoln, in salmon-colored paper wrapper with the lithographed portrait of Lincoln in its earliest state. A second nineteenth-century publication recently added to the collection is a French biography, Alphonse Jouault’s Abraham Lincoln, sa jeunesse et sa vie politique, published in Paris in 1875 and based in part on French sources. Judge Bollinger had a special interest in biographies of Lincoln in foreign languages.

MEXICAN SCREEN-FOLD BOOKS. Early in the sixteenth century a number of Mexican painted manuscripts reached Europe, some perhaps being sent from Vera Cruz by Hernando Cortés. These Mexican “books” consist of long strips of deerskin folded into “pages” accordion-style and painted on both sides with figures and symbols in dark reds, blues, greens, and browns on a gesso overlay. In the nineteenth century various Mexican codices were reproduced in facsimile in Lord Kingsborough’s massive nine-volume Antiquities of Mexico (1831-48), a set of which is on our library shelves, and recently a number of true-color facsimiles of Mexican codices owned by the Bodleian Library, the Austrian National Library, and other repositories have been published in separate editions with detailed scholarly commentaries. The most recent of these screen-folds to reach our shelves is a fine reproduction of the nearly 24-foot-long Codex Vaticanus 3773 (B), the most extensive of ancient Mexican manuscripts, which has been in the Vatican Library since the sixteenth century. It is said to be a reference work on auguries, presumably for the use of a fortuneteller.

THE MIDLAND. During the research which culminated in his recent book, The Midland: A Venture in Literary Regionalism (1975), Professor Milton Reigelman of Centre College of Kentucky corresponded with many of the authors who had contributed to The Midland periodical during the years when it flourished, from 1915 to 1933. Among fifteen folders of correspondence and other source materials relating to the history of The Midland are original letters from Irving Brant, Marquis Childs, Paul Corey, August Derleth, Thomas Duncan, Loren Eiseley, James T. Farrell, John T. Frederick, Albert Halper, James Hearst, MacKinlay Kantor, John G. Neihardt, and Henry Nash Smith. Gift of Milton Reigelman.

MORMON AMERICANA. Of some thirty publications of Mormon interest recently presented to this Library, several are more or less uncommon nineteenth-century items. The earliest is John C. Bennett’s The History of the Saints (Boston, 1842), an “expose” by a former associate of Joseph Smith; John S. Fullmer’s Assassination of Joseph and Hyrum Smith (Liverpool, 1855) is a personal account by an elder of the church; and Thomas Gregg’s The Prophet of Palmyra (New York, 1890) is an attempt at history by the publisher of the first newspaper in Hancock County, Illinois. Gift of Mrs. Corinne Carter.

MORRIS, WILLIAM. Morris’s plan for a great illustrated edition of the two dozen tales he had retold in The Earthly Paradise was never realized (see J. R. Dunlap, The Book that Never Was, 1971); but before the project was abandoned, 44 woodblock illustrations for the story of Cupid and Psyche had been designed by Edward Burne-Jones and at least 35 of the designs had been engraved on wood by Morris himself. An edition of Morris’s The Story of Cupid and Psyche, illustrated from these original woodcuts, with the text printed from a new casting of the Kelmscott Troy types, was published in two volumes in 1974 by Clover Hill Editions of London and Cambridge. Also in 1974 (though the imprint states 1975) a full-size facsimile edition of Morris’s Kelmscott Chaucer was printed for the Basilisk Press of London in an edition of 515 copies. Particularly notable is the companion volume to this edition, which reproduces 85 of Burne-Jones’s preparatory pencil drawings for the illustrations in the Chaucer, together with various early studies and rejected designs.

NORTON, CAROLINE. Twenty-three manuscript letters totaling nearly 100 pages, mostly concerning family affairs, have been added to our previous holdings of letters by the early Victorian writer Caroline Norton. A granddaughter of Richard Brinsley Sheridan and the alleged model for George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways, Mrs. Norton is also remembered for her success in agitating for the amelioration of English laws relating to the rights of women.

ORCHIDS. Although it is not so large a work as James Bateman’s 19th-century account of the orchids of Mexico and Guatemala —a book which, when opened, is said to measure over eight feet square—our recently acquired copy of P. Francis Hunt’s Orchidaceae (Berkshire, England: Bourton Press, 1973) is a handsome folio volume containing 40 colored plates accurately drawn by Mary A. Grierson of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The author’s authoritative text ranges over the orchids of Europe, Asia, America, Africa, and Australia, and the plates represent, among others, such exotic specimens as “the Military Orchid” of Southern England and the “Pointed Greenhood” of Australia. The paper used in this limited edition was specially manufactured at St. Cuthbert’s Mill, and the full vellum binding is by Zaehnsdorf of London. Gift of the Friends of the Library.

PENUMBRA PRESS. The Penumbra Press is operated in Lisbon, Iowa, by Bonne Pratt O’Connell. Two volumes of poetry recently issued from her press are Sleeping on Doors by Steven Orlen (1975), one of 200 copies hand printed from Palatino types and bound by the printer, and Stepping Outside by Tess Gallagher (1974), one of 230 copies printed with Centaur types. These volumes join in our collection such earlier titles from the press as Jon Anderson’s Counting the Days (1974) and Donald Justice’s Departures (1973), the latter volume being a joint production with the Stone Wall Press of Iowa City.

THE PRINTERY is a private press operated in Kirkwood, Missouri, by a native Iowan, Kay Michael Kramer. Our two most recent acquisitions from this press are Shaking Hands with Immortality (1975), a collection of tributes to the late Vincent Starrett, edited by Michael Murphy and printed in Bulmer types in an edition of 225 copies; and An Indians Views of Indian Affairs (1973), one of 110 copies of a narrative by Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, hand-set in Ehrhardt type, with wood engravings by Gillian Tyler and an introduction by Dee Brown.

RAGNAROK PRESS. A new book of poems by James Hearst of Cedar Falls, Iowa, Dry Leaves (1975) contains ten poems of autumnal meditation and was printed by the Ragnarok Press in an edition of 200 copies. Poetic illustrations are features of four other recent volumes from the press: Yellow Pears, Smooth as Silk (1975) illustrates prose-poems by Rochelle Holt with three plates by Margaret Taylor in an edition of 50 copies; Golcona (1974), one of 25 copies, uses six large sepia photographs of ancient Mayan sites to accompany poems by Linda Barnes; Landscapes (1974), one of 50 copies, presents eight etchings handprinted by artist Margaret Taylor, with a foreword and titles by Rochelle Holt; and in Passports Out of Loneliness (1975), one of 50 copies, inner weather is epitomized in outdoor scenes photographed by Srdjan Maljkovic, a native of Zagreb, Yugoslavia.

THE ROWFANT CLUB. Publications of the Rowfant Club of Cleveland have been printed by a variety of presses, among them the Torch Press, the Merrymount Press, the Grabhorn Press, the Marchbanks Press, and the Prairie Press, and over the years a number of the Rowfant Club publications have found their way to our library shelves. The latest title to reach us is a copy of Leland Schubert’s Bibliography of the Publications of the Rowfant Club, Part II, 1925-1961, one of 175 copies printed in 1962 by the Anthoensen Press, which continues an earlier list by Henry Arthur Clark. This Clark bibliography, printed by the Torch Press of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1925 in an edition of 140 copies, continues to be one of our Torch Press desiderata.

SAVAGE, MARMION W. An Irish writer who spent the earlier part of his career in Dublin, Marmion Savage later moved to London and for a few years in the late 1850s served as editor of The Examiner, a weekly newspaper which had been founded earlier in the century by Leigh Hunt and his brother John. The most highly regarded of the six novels written by Savage is The Bachelor of the Albany (1848). We have recently acquired a fine copy of the first edition of this title in its original rose-madder cloth binding. (Sadleir, XIXth Century Fiction, item 3032.)