Recent Acquisitions

The earliest printed book to be acquired by the University Libraries during the past year is a folio volume, Scriptores Historiae Augustae, printed in Venice in 1490. This anthology of lives of the Roman emperors purportedly brings together works by several authors, Aelius Spartianus, Julius Capitolinus, Trebellius Pollio, and others, though its date of composition and true authorship remain in doubt.¹ The provenance of our copy can be traced back to the sixteenth-century Pillone family of Belluno, Italy.

Sixteenth Century

Among the sixteenth-century imprints added to the collections in recent months are books by Heinrich Bullinger, Bartolommeo Cavalcanti, Pietro Bembo, Girolamo Parabosco, Duns Scotus, Bishop John Fisher, Sebastian Brant, Jean Froissart, and Miles Coverdale. A small volume published in Florence in 1598, Orazio Lombardelli’s I Fonti Toscani, deals with the formation of a library of good Italian and Tuscan books. Johann Lauterbach’s Enchiridion Veteris et Novi Testamenti, published in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1573, is embellished with over two hundred and fifty woodcut figures by Jost Amman, one of the prolific book illustrators of the century. The earliest English imprint to be acquired in recent weeks is the important account of Spanish treatment of Indians in the New World, Bartolomé de las Casas, The Spanish Colonie, or Brief Chronicle of the Acts and gestes of the Spaniards in the West Indies, trans. M.M.S. (London, 1583). This copy, the first English edition, is from the library of Frank C. Deering.

Seventeenth Century

English books of the seventeenth century are represented, among others, by first or early editions of Lancelot Andrewes’ The Morall Law Expounded (1642), Richard Baxter’s Church-history of the Government of Bishops and Their Councils Abbreviated (1680), Gilbert Burnet’s The Memoires of the Lives and Actions of James and William, Dukes of Hamilton and Castleherald (1678), Richard Corbet’s Certain Elegant Poems (1647), John Donne’s The First Sermon Preached to King Charles at Saint James (1625), John Jewel’s Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1639), and Jeremy Taylor’s Eniautos (1678). Among the important recently-acquired Continental publications of the seventeenth century is Louis Hennepin’s Nouveau Voyage d’un Pais plus grande que l'Europe (Utrecht, 1698), a gift of the Old Gold Development Fund.

Eighteenth Century

Noteworthy among eighteenth-century titles is a first edition of Charlevoix’s Histoire et Description generale de la Nouvelle France, published in three volumes in Paris in 1744. This work relates to the Indian tribes and settlements that the author visited in Canada and in the French dominions on the lower Mississippi. John Churchman’s An Explanation of the Magnetic Atlas is a scientific work published in Philadelphia in 1790. English authors of the century represented by first or early editions include William Congreve, Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Richard Savage, and Edmund Waller. A periodical of the time, recently acquired, is The Anti-Jacobin; or Weekly Examiner, in thirty-six numbers, published in London in 1797-1798 under the editorship of William Gifford.

Nineteenth Century

First editions of works by English novelists of the nineteenth century have been obtained in considerable numbers; a selected few, from among many, are George Moore’s A Modern Lover, 3 vols., 1883; Sir Walter Scott’s Rob Roy, 3 vols., 1818, and The Pirate, 3 vols., 1822; Anthony Trollope’s Doctor Thorne, 3 vols., 1858, Framley Parsonage, 3 vols., 1861, and John Caldigate, 3 vols., 1879; as well as two novels by Anthony Trollope’s mother, Frances Trollope: The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, 1840, and The Widow Married, 3 vols., 1840. Travel books of the nineteenth century include William Beckford’s Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaca and Batalha, 1835; Henry Brackenridge’s Voyage to South America, 1819; and Sir William Parry’s Journal of a Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-west Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, 1826. Poets of the era newly obtained in one or more first editions are Robert Browning, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, Algernon Swinburne, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Paul Verlaine, and William Wordsworth.

Twentieth Century

Modem poetry is represented by Marvin Bell’s Two Poems (1965), one of fifty copies set up by Stephen Tudor at the Typographic Laboratory, University of Iowa School of Journalism, and issued under the imprint of The Hundred Pound Press; Charles Bukowski’s It Catches My Heart In Its Hands (1963), published in New Orleans by the Loujon Press; Richard Eberhart’s Brotherhood of Men (1949), one of two hundred and twenty-six copies hand set and printed at the Banyan Press in Pawlet, Vermont; Paul Eluard’s Thorns of Thunder (n.d.), translated from the French by Samuel Beckett and others, and signed by the author; Robert Frost’s The Gold Hesperidee (1935?), one of two hundred copies; Robert Graves’ Colophon to Love Respelt (1967), a signed copy printed at the Stellar Press; Christopher Greve’s The Eemis Stane (1967), a broadside poem printed at the Gehenna Press in Northampton, Massachusetts, and a selection from the same author entitled Poet at Play and other Poems (1965), privately printed in an edition of fifty-five copies; Walter Hall’s Spider Poems (1967) and Walter Hamady’s Plum-foot Poems (1967), both hand printed at the Perishable Press in Madison, Wisconsin; James Hearst’s A Single Focus (1967) printed at the Prairie Press in Iowa City; an autographed copy of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Dionysius in Doubt (1925); and William Butler Yeats’s Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (1932), printed by the Cuala Press in Dublin.

Manuscripts

To the Leigh Hunt Collection have recently been added nine original letters from Hunt to such correspondents as J. W. Parker, Peter Cunningham, J. Stirling Coyne, and John Hunt, this latter a gift of the Elkader, Iowa, Public Library. Seven letters addressed to Leigh Hunt have likewise been acquired, three of them written by John Forster, B. W. Procter, and Horatio Smith.

Twenty-nine letters and nineteen manuscripts by Edmund Blunden have been obtained for the Blunden Collection, some of these having come from the archives of the Beaumont Press. Founded in 1917, by Cyril W. Beaumont, a London bookseller, the Beaumont Press published a number of important authors during the years of its existence. Its archives, recently acquired by The University of Iowa Libraries, have yielded letters and/or manuscripts of A. E. (George Russell), Richard Aldington, Gordon Bottomley, Walter de la Mare, John Drinkwater, Ronald Firbank, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, Arthur Symons, Henry Williamson, the Sitwells, and others, as well as the Blunden items.

Holograph manuscripts by Sacheverell Sitwell include an untitled three-page poem beginning “Nymphs were mentioned,” a twenty-seven page holograph essay entitled “Verse des Fleurs,” and a notebook of seventy leaves containing an untitled prose work. The manuscript of Iris Murdoch’s first novel, Under the Net, in seven holograph notebooks, is discussed elsewhere in this issue. Mention may also be made of a collection of manuscripts and typescripts of Dom Moraes; a collection of proofs and typescripts with corrections by Paul Claudel; and a manuscript on F. Scott Fitzgerald by James T. Farrell.

Several book-length manuscripts have been presented to the Iowa Authors Collection by their respective authors, and among these are an unpublished novel by J. Hyatt Downing entitled Garth, Marjorie Holmes’s Love and Laughter, several children’s books by Ruth Cromer Weir, and Martin Yoseloffs A Time to Be Young.

A recent gift from Professor Thomas Ollive Mabbott has increased our holdings of manuscript letters of both English and American authors. Among these are letters from Thomas Campbell, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Crabbe, R. H. Horne, Thomas Moore, B. W. Procter, D. G. Rossetti, Robert Southey, and William Wordsworth. American authors include Margaret Fuller, Fitz-Greene Halleck, Caroline Kirkland, George Sterling, Henry Timrod, and N. P. Willis.

Manuscript collections, each numbering several thousand items, have been received from editor and publisher David E. Archie and from former Congressmen Frederick E. Bierman, Charles B. Hoeven, Ben F. Jensen, and John R. Hansen. Collectively they contain letters from presidents, cabinet members, senators, congressmen, governors, and other notables.

One or more letters of the following historically prominent Iowans have also been acquired: Senator William Boyd Allison (1829-1908), Secretary of War William Belknap, (1829-1890), Amelia Bloomer (1818-1894), Harry Hopkins (1890-1946), Secretary of Agriculture Henry Cantwell Wallace (1866-1924), and Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson (1836-1920). More than one hundred and fifty letters of the late Henry A. Wallace have been presented to the University Library as gifts from seventeen different donors.