Recent Acquisitions

BLUNDEN, EDMUND. New acquisitions include number 16, of 150 copies, of Poems on Japan (Tokyo, 1967), a compilation of Blunden’s poems for his seventieth birthday, and Modern Poems for Children (Wisbech, 1935) our copy of which is signed by ten contributors, among whom are Blunden, John Gawsworth, and M. P. Shiel. Frederick Brereton’s An Anthology of War Poems (London, 1930), recently acquired, has a 12-page introduction by Edmund Blunden. Represented by new letters in our collection of Blunden correspondence are Donald Gould, Samuel Loveman, Leonard Clark, and T. R. Leigh-Hunt.

BOOK ILLUSTRATION. Noteworthy among volumes illustrated by outstanding artists are the 1934 edition of Lysistrata by Aristophanes illustrated by Pablo Picasso and the 1935 edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses illustrated by Henri Matisse. Both volumes were issued by the Limited Editions Club, and each signed copy contains, in addition to other artwork, six original etchings by the illustrator. Gift of the Kress Foundation.

BUTLER, ELLIS PARKER. Eighty-four letters from Iowa-born humorist Ellis Parker Butler (1869-1937) written to members of his family between 1934 and 1937 have been given to our Iowa Authors Collection. These letters deal mostly with family affairs, such as weddings, illnesses, visits, and recreational activities, with occasional reference to writing projects. Gift of Henry Butler Chapin.

CARROLL, LEWIS. The Pennyroyal Press’s sesquicentennial edition of Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1982), by Lewis Carroll, is as sumptuous as its companion volume, the "Pennyroyal Alice," published earlier. Printed in four colors on specially made paper, with 95 wood engravings by Barry Moser, the "Pennyroyal Looking-Glass" is bound in three-fourths leather; laid in a one-half leather traycase is an extra suite of signed prints. Of 350 copies, this library owns number 100.

EARLY AMERICAN MEDICINE. Early American treatises acquired for our History of Medicine Collection include first editions of David Hosack’s Observations on the Laws Governing the Communication of Contagious Diseases (New York, 1815), Benjamin Rush’s An Account of the Bilious Yellow Fever As It Appeared in the City of Philadelphia, in the Year 1793 (Philadelphia, 1794), and Noah Webster’s A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases, two volumes (Hartford, 1799). It may be surprising to find Webster’s name linked to any important work other than the dictionary. He was, however, interested in many branches of science. The Medical Flora (Philadelphia, 1828) of Constantine Rafinesque is an extremely rare two-volume set, of which we have acquired the first volume only. Rafinesque was one of the pioneer naturalists of the United States, and his Medical Flora became a vade mecum for physicians whose medical treatment at that time was largely based on vegetable drugs. Gifts of Dr. John Martin.

EVERSON, WILLIAM. Four prints in reds, oranges, and yellows by Hans Burkhart illustrate William Everson’s poem Rattlesnake August. Printed on loose sheets and issued in a folding box by the Santa Susana Press in 1978, this library’s signed copy is number 20 of 50 copies. Poems from the years 1935 to 1942 were selected for Labyrinth Editions’ printing of Eastward the Armies (1980). With an introduction by the author and linoleum block prints by Tom Killion, 250 copies were printed on Japanese Masa and Suzuki paper. Our signed copy is number 90.

GREATRAK, VALENTINE. Greatrak (1628-1666) was one of the most celebrated charlatans of his time, having treated many prominent persons by the "laying on of hands." This treatment had long been used in the "royal touch" in the treatment of scrofula and was followed in the next century by Mesmer and his doctrine of cure by the use of "animal magnetism." According to Garrison (History of Medicine, p. 288) Greatrak was one of Cromwell’s soldiers in Ireland, his cures being effected by "stroking" with his hands and by the application of carrot poultices for scrofula. For the History of Medicine Collection we have recently been given a copy of the first edition of A Brief Account of Mr. Valentine Greatrak and Divers of the Strange Cures by Him Lately Performed (London, 1666). Gift of Dr. John Martin.

HALL, JAMES NORMAN. In 1936 Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall published a South Seas story called The Hurricane. Samuel Goldwyn’s 1937 photoplay of this story, set partly in Samoa, was directed by John Ford and starred Dorothy Lamour. A copy of the unpublished final revised motion-picture script of Hurricane, dated April 20, 1937, and bearing the signature of scriptwriter Dudley Nichols, has now been added to the Hall materials in our Iowa Authors Collection.

HUGHES, RUPERT. Rupert Hughes (1872-1956) spent his boyhood and youth in Keokuk, Iowa, where his father served as mayor of the city and as president of the Keokuk and Western Railroad. Although he was a prolific author of more than 50 published books, Rupert was probably never so widely known as his nephew, the late multimillionaire Howard R. Hughes. To an interesting file of some 50 Rupert Hughes letters already cataloged in our Iowa Authors Collection we have recently added a two-page letter from Hughes to the actress Julia Marlowe, along with a printed copy of a scarce one-act play by Hughes, The Dawn (New York, 1907), which carries Miss Marlowe’s heraldic bookplate. Also added is the typescript of a short story, One Hundred Pairs of Gloves, together with a 40-page screenplay based on this Hughes story.

HUNT, LEIGH. In addition to six holograph letters from the pen of Leigh Hunt acquired during the past year for our Brewer-Leigh Hunt Collection, a volume of unusual provenance has been obtained for our Leigh Hunt association books. This is a copy of Hunt’s Foliage (1818) bound with three other Hunt first editions and bearing a presentation inscription from Hunt to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. This volume subsequently became the property of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who has annotated it with reference to Keats, and still later it passed into the hands of John Drinkwater, whose book label it bears. Gift of the Friends of the Library.

INCUNABULA. Two recently acquired medical treatises printed before 1500 are a commentary on Galen’s Tegni by Hugo of Siena, Expositio Ugonis Senensis super libros tegni Galieni (Venice, 1498), and Alessandro Benedetti’s De observatione in pestilentia (Venice, 1493), which is one of the earliest treatises on the plague. Gifts of Dr. John Martin.

IOWA AUTHORS. A phenomenon that appears to be burgeoning of late is the appearance on the market of advance proof copies of authors’ works. These are, presumably, limited issues which precede even a first edition. Several such items relating to works by Iowa authors have been acquired, among them proof copies of Vance Bourjaily’s A Game Men Play (1980), Thomas M. Disch’s Getting into Death and Other Stories (1976), Stephen Greenleaf’s Grave Error (1979), R. A. Lafferty’s Strange Doings (1972), Frederick Manfred’s Green Earth (1977), and Susan Toth’s Blooming: A Small-Town Girlhood (1981).

JAMES, HENRY. Twelve critical essays by Henry James, most of them collected for the first time from periodicals, have been brought together by Professor Peter Buitenhouse of Simon Fraser University in a volume entitled The Restless Analyst (1979), beautifully printed by the Roger Ascham Press of Toronto. The text is set in Bembo type, with Centaur and Bembo for display, the handmade paper is from Amatruda’s mill in Amalfi, Italy, and the binding of this library’s copy number 89 (of 100 numbered copies) is of dark green Oasis Niger goatskin for the spine, with batiked heavy linen covers, reproducing a foliage design by William Morris in various shades of green, pink, and yellow. The pattern and coloring of each binding in the edition is said to be unique.

KANTOR, MACKINLAY. To the manuscripts by MacKinlay Kantor in our Iowa Authors Collection have been added 32 letters and several memoranda written by Kantor to his editor William Targ between the years 1957 and 1969 as well as a master proof, dated September 14, 1967, of Kantor’s book Beauty Beast (1968).

LIMITED EDITIONS CLUB. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1942) by Ernest Hemingway, with an introduction by Sinclair Lewis and lithographs by Lynd Ward, is one of 17 Limited Editions Club volumes acquired this year. Van Wyck Brooks’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Flowering of New England was prepared by D. B. Updike at the Merrymount Press in 1941. One of the great autobiographies of all times, The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Written by Himself, provides a record of turbulent sixteenth-century Italy. Printed at the Officina Bodoni, this Limited Edition of 1937 is translated and edited by John Addington Symonds and illustrated by Fritz Kredel. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus was created by 19-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as part of a friendly competition to write ghost stories. This 1934 edition is illustrated by Everett Henry.

LINCOLN, ABRAHAM. Among 38 items acquired during the past year for the Bollinger-Lincoln Collection are several sets of sheet music, including the "Funeral March Performed at the Funeral of Abraham Lincoln" (1865) by Gaetano Donizetti. One of six general orders added is number 22 of February 17, 1865, concerning state draft quotas. And Reverend Charles G. Ames’s important defense of the Lincoln administration was first delivered as an address before the National Union Association of Cincinnati on March 6, 1863.

MEDICAL TEXTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. Two notable first editions in eighteenth-century medicine are the Icones anatomicae (Gottingen, 1743-56) of Albrecht von Haller and the Exercitationum anatomicarum fasciculus primus de structura nervorum (Halle, 1796) of Johann Christian Reil. Haller’s book, illustrated with 47 superb plates, is one of the great anatomical works in the history of medicine. Reil was a pioneer in the study of neuroanatomy. He delineated functional areas of the brain and showed the internal structure of peripheral nerves. The three plates of this volume are more detailed and accurate than anything published before that date on the finer structure of the nerves. Gifts of Dr. John Martin.

MINIATURE BOOKS. The Gold Stein Press offers an anecdotal essay, Duke Ellington Remembered (1981) by Whitney Balliett, with brief introductory notes by Ruth Adomeit, J. Lorson, and Robert Massmann. It is one of 750 copies. In a small folding book from Swamp Press, colorful illustrations by Jon Vlakos accent Iowa author Raymond Roseliep’s poem, Swish of Cow Tail (1982). Issued in a slipcase, Alphabetarium is an accordion-style book of 26 delicate wood engravings by Sarah Chamberlain, printed at the Chamberlain Press in 1982. This library’s signed copy is number 69 of 150.

O’CONNOR, FLANNERY. Fine copies in dust jackets of two novels, Wise Blood (London, 1955) and The Violent Bear It Away (London, 1960) and two collections of short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge (New York, 1965) and A Good Man Is Hard to Find (London, 1968) by Flannery O’Connor have been acquired for the American literature section in our rare books collection. Ms. O’Connor studied with Paul Engle and received an M.F.A. from The University of Iowa in 1947.

PERISHABLE PRESS, LTD. Walter Hamady, in his inimitable style, offers comments on technique and equipment in Papermaking by Hand: A Book of Suspicions (1982). Hamady’s suspicions are illustrated with linoleum cuts by Jim Lee. This Perishable Press item, one of 200 copies, is fittingly printed on various kinds and shades of handmade paper. From this same press has come a copy of Joel Oppenheimer’s Del Quien Lo Tomo (1982), one of an edition limited to 228 copies.

POE, EDGAR ALLAN. A copy of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Brentano’s, 1923) with the celebrated illustrations by Harry Clarke, has been acquired for our Mabbott-Poe Collection, along with a copy of The Raven and Other Poems (Detroit, 1936), designed and illustrated by Paul McPharlin for the Fine Book Circle, number 90 of 950 copies. Two-volume sets of Baudelaire’s editions of Nouvelles Histoires Extraordinaires (Grenoble, 1965), and Histoires Grotesques et Serieuses (Grenoble, 1966) are illustrated by Fernand van Hamme. Purchased on the Mabbott Fund.

REZNIKOFF, CHARLES. Eight first editions by the American writer Charles Reznikoff have been acquired. For Nine Plays (1927) Reznikoff himself set the type and did the presswork. This library’s copy is number 255 of 400 copies. In 1934 the Objectivist Press published his Separate Way. a collection of 12 poems. The Lionhearted (1944) is his novel about Jews in medieval England.

THE ROOSEVELT BEARS. The stories of Teddy-B and Teddy-G, told in rhyme by Seymour Eaton and delightfully illustrated by V. Floyd Campbell, were originally published serially in newspapers (see Books at Iowa, no. 20). Three titles new to our juvenile literature collection, all fine copies in the original dust jackets, are The Traveling Bears in Outdoor Sports (1915), The Traveling Bears at Play (1916), and The Traveling Bears in England (1916). If any of our readers who enjoyed these books as children should find it possible to send us gift copies of other titles in this Roosevelt Bears series, we would welcome and gratefully acknowledge such additions.

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY MEDICAL TEXTS. The first edition of Guido Guidi’s De anatome corporis humanis libri VII (Venice, 1611) is embellished with 79 engraved plates. It is a rare book on anatomy. Richard Lower’s The Method Observed in Transfusing the Bloud Out of One Animal into Another (London, 1666) led to the first successful transfusion in human beings in 1667. Marcello Malpighi’s De pulmonibus observationes anatomicae, second ed. (Copenhagen, 1663) describes the capillary system. It is the final chapter in the story of the circulation of the blood and it is a rare book, even in this second edition. Gifts of Dr. John Martin.

SHIEL, M. P. M. P. Shiel’s first book, Prince Zaleski (1895), is bound in purple cloth with a cover design and key device by Aubrey Beardsley. Supplementing this newly acquired first edition are five other Shiel firsts new to our collection, among them Shapes in the Fire (1896), a collection of short stories, The Yellow Danger (1898), a future-war story, The Purple Cloud (1901), one of Shiel’s most highly acclaimed works, The Pale Ape (1911), another collection of short stories, and The Young Men Are Coming (1937), the first American edition of his last novel.

SIGMUND, JAY G. A large addition has been made to the manuscripts by Jay Sigmund (1885-1937) in our Iowa Authors Collection. Here are early drafts of plays and short stories, revised and final drafts of an unpublished novel, holograph or typescript drafts of perhaps 700 poems, as well as a rich file of correspondence in which are letters from Sherwood Anderson, Edmund Blunden, James Norman Hall, Robinson Jeffers, H. L. Mencken, Lewis Mumford, Carl Sandburg, Ruth Suckow, Louis Untermeyer, Carl Van Vechten, and many other writers and editors. Gift of James B. Sigmund.

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY MEDICAL TEXTS. One of the few really great medical texts of the sixteenth century is Jean Fernel’s Universa medicina (Paris, 1567), a treatise on general medicine which we have acquired in its first edition. De medicinali materia libri sex (Frankfort, 1552) is a Latin translation of a medical text written in Greek by Dioscorides, who was a contemporary of Pliny the Elder at the beginning of the Christian era. This is an impressive volume containing 770 illustrations of medical botany. De sanitate tuenda libri sex, interprete Thoma Linacro (Cologne, 1526) is a treatise on hygiene by Galen here translated into Latin by the Renaissance humanist Thomas Linacre, sometime physician to Henry VIII. Gifts of Dr. John Martin.

TORCH PRESS. Of some 20 Torch Press books received this year, three are very dissimilar accounts of travels. Marguerite Eyer Wilbur translated and edited Raveneau de Lussan, Buccaneer of the Spanish Main (1930), a journal of adventures with filibusters in the late 1680s. In Hunting Bookplates in Mexico, Frederick Starr, once a professor at Coe College, comments on several letters of noted collector J. W. Spenceley which relate his search for elusive Mexican ex-libris; of the 100 copies printed in 1927, this library owns number 60. For Recollections of a Long and Somewhat Uneventful Life (1932), Stephen A. Bemis drew upon family letters to detail the highlights of his father’s cattle drive to California in the mid 1800s.

TRAVEL. Jean Baptiste Labat’s Nouveau Voyage aux Isles de l’Amerique (1722) details, in six volumes, with a wealth of engraved plates, a tour from 1693 to 1705. Other volumes are Letters on Iceland (1780) by Uno von Trail recounting Sir Joseph Banks’s trip to Iceland during Captain Cook’s second voyage, and Journal of a Tour in the Levant (1820) by William Turner. Purchased on the Thompson Fund.

TWAIN, MARK. Facsimile editions of the author’s holograph manuscript for two of Twain’s major works have been published within the past year or so. The manuscript of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer owned by Georgetown University now appears in a two-volume edition of 1,000 copies with an introduction by Professor Paul Baender of The University of Iowa. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a two-volume numbered edition of 1,015 copies, makes available a reproduction of the Twain manuscript (about 60 percent of the novel) owned by the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.

UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD. The building of the Union Pacific, the eastern half of the first transcontinental railroad, was one of the most memorable enterprises in American history. This bold undertaking is documented in the libraries by the Levi O. Leonard Railroad Collection of manuscripts relating to the building of the U. P. (See Books at Iowa, no. 8). The personal papers of Thomas C. Durant form part of the Leonard Collection. Among ten scarce printed items relating to the railroad which we have recently acquired is a copy of Union Pacific Railroad: Report of Thomas C. Durant, Vice-President and General Manager, to the Board of Directors, in Relation to the Surveys Made up to the Close of the Year 1864 (New York: W. C. Bryant, 1866), a volume which contains 14 leaves of plates of western scenes.

WINDHOVER PRESS. Motteti/Motets, containing 20 poems by Eugenio Montale in a translation by Charles Wright, was issued by the Windhover Press in 1981 in an edition of 200 copies. Also added is one of 200 copies of William Morris’s Socialist Diary, edited by Florence S. Boos of The University of Iowa for the Windhover Press, 1981. Two hundred copies of this diary which Morris kept from January through April of 1887 were also issued simultaneously by the William Morris Society of England.