Recent Acquisitions

The addition last year of a volume containing works by Guilermus Textor and by St. Anselm, early twelfth-century Archbishop of Canterbury, increased the number of incunabula held by the University Libraries. A third essay in this volume, De Planctu Beatae Mariae, has been attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux. Although some uncertainty exists regarding the printer, the book is thought to have been issued at Basel at some date before late 1486.

Sixteenth Century

The University Library’s expanding collection of early editions of classical Greek authors was significantly enriched during the past twelve months by the addition of the works of Xenophon in an editio princeps of 1516. The Aethiopicae of Heliodorus, also a first edition, was obtained in a copy bearing the handwritten dedication of Herwagen, the book’s publisher. Other first editions include the Misopogon of Julian the Apostate (1566), the works of Philo Judaeus (1552), and the Dionysiaka of Nonnus, printed in 1569 by Christopher Plantin. A second edition of Herodianus; Plutarch’s Parallel Lives; the complete Hesiod; and a 1573 issue of Herodotus were likewise added; as was the Theriaca of Nicander, published in 1557. This last is a long poem dealing with poisons and venomous animals and presents a pharmacopoeia of medical lore in the second century. The most attractive recently-acquired volume dating from this century is indisputably the edition of the poetry of Tito and Ercole Strozii, printed by Aldus Manutius in 1513, and dedicated to Lucretia Borgia. Tito (1425-1505) and his son Ercole (1481-1508) were Renaissance poets writing in neo-Latin. The Library’s copy has gilt edges and is bound in gold-tooled blue morocco.

Seventeenth Century

Recently-acquired imprints of the seventeenth century are particularly notable for works on the history of France, of which Les Memoires of Philippe de Comines, printed in 1649, is most important. Unquestionably the ablest historian of his day, Comines was also the most influential counselor of Louis XI, having previously served that king’s celebrated rival, Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Other seventeenth-century histories of France include the Recueil des Roys de France by Jean du Tillet, containing portraits of the French kings, published in 1602. The Histoire du Mareschal de Guébriant by Jean Laboureur is a biography and travel book dealing with the period of the Thirty Years’ War. Gabriel-Barthélemy de Grammont issued his Historiarum Galliae ab Excessu Henrici IV in 1643. He has been criticized, among other faults, for abject flattery of Cardinal Richelieu, while one writer has remarked that his book is “peu de chose.” The rule of the king who initiated an unfortunate series of military adventures in Italy is treated in Jean Chartier’s Histoire de Charles VII, Roy de France (1661). Regional accounts have been acquired for Franche-Comté (1647), Normandy (1631), Toulouse (1623), Provence (1614), and Poitou (1647). Finally, a most important monthly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Mercure Historique et Politique, has been acquired in an almost complete run for the years between 1687 and 1774.

Eighteenth Century

English authors in early editions have been collected in considerable numbers during the past year. Oliver Goldsmith is represented by five first editions, as well as by a second edition of The Vicar of Wakefield and a 1774 printing of She Stoops to Conquer. A pirated edition of The Dunciad Variorum by Alexander Pope has been obtained, as has his 1715 translation of Homer’s Iliad, published in six volumes. Tobias Smollett’s translation of Don Quixote has been acquired in a third edition of 1765. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1792) and The Adventures of Roderick Random (1774), both by Smollett, have also been added. Two travel books by James Boswell, An Account of Corsica . . . (1768) and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson . . . (second edition, 1785), Fielding’s Tom Jones (second edition, 1749), and An Essay Upon the Life, Writings, and Character, of Dr. Jonathan Swift (1775) augment the Library’s holdings for the period.

Nineteenth Century

From Mr. Lawrence O. Cheever of Iowa City have come fine examples of a nineteenth-century fore-edge painting and of a volume printed by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press. This latter book is the copy of The Tale of King Florus and the Fair Jehane (1893) which Morris inscribed to William Harcourt Hooper, his engraver. It is bound in full green morocco bearing gold filigree medallions with centers of amethyst and sapphire and its gold filigree clasp is set with moonstones.

A first edition of The Moonstone is yet to find its way to our holdings, but three other works by Wilkie Collins have been acquired: No Name (1862), My Miscellanies (1863), and The Legacy of Cain (1889). Two books which were once owned by Leigh Hunt have been acquired. Hunt’s copy of Componimenti lirici de piu illustri poeti d’Italia (1819) is a four-volume anthology compiled by Thomas James Mathias, noted nineteenth-century student of Italian literature and sometime librarian at Buckingham Palace. Hunt’s copy of The Poems of Ossian by James MacPherson is a two-volume London edition of 1822 with marginal scorings and a few brief notes in Hunt’s handwriting. This set bears the bookplate of H. Buxton Forman and is described in the auction catalogue which dispersed Forman’s books in 1920.

Twentieth Century

A long-standing lacuna in our Blunden Collection has been filled with the acquisition of a copy of the very scarce Horsham edition of Poems by E. C. Blunden, Of Christ’s Hospital, printed in 1914 in an edition of one hundred copies. In 1923 Holbrook Jackson reprinted, in an edition of only fifty copies, a poem by Edmund Blunden entitled Dead Letters. The inspiration for this poem came from Blunden’s investigation of a group of letters written to Thornton Leigh Hunt. Our recently-acquired copy bears a fourteen-line inscription from Blunden to Frederic Prokosch in which Blunden remarks that “Sir E. Gosse was not at all pleased with the poem; he reproved especially the attempt to negotiate a stanza half in rhyme and half not.”

Many of the twentieth-century volumes added to our special collections are books printed by notable private presses. Three recently-arrived examples of the work of Cobden-Sanderson at the Doves Press are his printings of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, 1912, and Lucrece, 1915, and a selection of poems by Goethe entitled Auserlesene Lieder Gedichte und Balladan; ein Strauss, 1916. A few years ago our library acquired a portion of the archives of the Beaumont Press, and to the volumes from this press now represented in our holdings have been added a translation of Pushkin’s O zolotom petushka (The Golden Cockerel), 1918, as well as W. H. Davies’ Raptures, 1918, Richard Aldington’s Images of War, 1919, and Walter de la Mare’s Crossings, 1921.

Geoffrey Keynes’ edition of Pencil Drawings by William Blake, 1927, makes available eighty-two collotype reproductions. Published under the Nonesuch Press imprint, it was printed by the Chiswick Press in an edition of 1,550 copies. Among the twentieth-century items in the Thomas O. Mabbott gift are unbound sheets of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Shunned House, printed at the Recluse Press in 1928.

In 1805 the Italian type-designer Bodoni printed the Lord’s Prayer in 155 languages. This polyglot edition was reprinted in 1967, along with the speech that Pope Paul VI delivered at the United Nations in October of 1965, in a two-volume folio edition of 700 copies. The University of Iowa copy is number 174. Volume one contains a preface by U Thant, Secretary General of the United Nations, which concludes with his autograph signature. A recent item of note from a local private press is Ezra Pound’s Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII. This edition of 310 copies, signed by Pound, was hand printed by K. K. Merker at the Stone Wall Press in Iowa City. And mention should be made of a recent eye-pleasing production from the Catfish Press of Davenport, Iowa. This is Father Edward M. Catich’s The Origin of the Serif: Brush Writing and Roman Letters, one of fifty signed copies containing additional sheets on which the author has brush-written the letters of the Roman Imperial alphabet.

Manuscripts

Among the eleven letters acquired for the Leigh Hunt Manuscript Collection during the past year is a four-page letter from Hunt to his daughter-in-law Kate (Mrs. Thornton Hunt); a three-page letter from Hunt to Charles Ollier dated May 3, 1853; a three-page letter of 1839 from Southwood Smith addressed to Hunt; and an undated two-page note to Hunt from Walter Savage Landor. Two recently-acquired manuscript items are a six-page fair copy of an essay entitled “Poisoners” with corrections in Leigh Hunt’s handwriting, and a two-leaf holograph poem, “On Ships Coming Up the River and Stars Voyaging in the Heavens,” which does not appear in Milford’s edition of Hunt’s Poetical Works.

Letters by other nineteenth-century English writers, many of them from Leigh Hunt’s circle of acquaintance, have been acquired, including twenty-two letters from B. W. Procter and twelve by his wife Anne; twelve letters by William Harrison Ainsworth; six by Laetitia Landon; six by Thomas Noon Talfourd; five by the painter Holman Hunt; three by Thomas Campbell; two by Laman Blanchard; two by Caroline Norton; and two by William Rossetti; as well as single letters by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Douglas Jerrold, and Benjamin R. Haydon.

Eight essays or poems and twenty-three letters have recently augmented our collection of writings by the contemporary English poet Edmund Blunden. The most interesting of these are two letters from Siegfried Sassoon to Blunden and three from Robert Graves concerning Blunden’s appointment to the Chair of Poetry at Oxford, with comments on Robert Lowell.

To the collection of original manuscripts by the contemporary English novelist Iris Murdoch have been added two drafts for each of these four novels: The Bell, Bruno's Dream, The Red and the Green, and Time of the Angels.

A collection of nearly 150 letters exchanged between Laurence Housman, brother of A. E. Housman, and a young American writer, George Galloway, increases our resources for the study of the early twentieth-century literary scene. Twentieth-century English writers are also represented by recently-added letters or other manuscript items by George Moore, Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell, Richard LeGallienne, Dom Moraes, and Angus Wilson.

The Iowa Authors manuscript collection has been enriched during the past year by several significant gifts. In correspondence files pressented by Paul Engle of Iowa City are to be found letters by poets Edmund Blunden, Robert Frost, Archibald MacLeish, John Crowe Ransom, Stephen Spender, and Robert Penn Warren. Thirty-five letters written by Ruth Suckow to John T. Frederick, spanning some thirty years, have been presented by Mr. Frederick. A book-length typescript of an unpublished autobiography by Hervey White (1866-1944) has come as a gift from Mr. John J. Pasciutti, his literary executor. Paul Corey, whose earlier novels dealt with middlewestern farm life, has presented the manuscript of his first science-fiction novel, The Planet of the Blind, which was first published in England in 1968 and is now available in this country in a paperback edition. Three boxes of papers from Carl Glick supplement his earlier gifts and include manuscripts and correspondence relating to his lectures and radio appearances, as well as correspondence concerning his autobiographical work I'm a Busybody and letters from Captain Ansel O’Banion, who figures in two of Mr. Glick’s children’s books. Susan Welty, author of a recently-published historical work on Jefferson County, Iowa, entitled A Fair Field, has presented her correspondence and source material for this book. Manuscripts of her two latest books have been added to the papers of Marjorie Holmes Mighell; and the corrected carbon typescript of an unpublished novel, Wind from the River, by the late Iowa author Katherine Roberts, has come as a gift from Mrs. Frank McClurg of Fort Madison, Iowa. Recent accessions have also been made of individual letters by Ellis Parker Butler, William F. Cody, Lee de Forest, Susan Glaspell, Rupert Hughes, and MacKinlay Kantor.

The past year has seen several additions to the Library’s holdings of papers of twentieth-century political figures. Former Governor Herschel C. Loveless donated twelve linear feet of his gubernatorial files, which include letters from former Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, as well as letters from numerous other national political figures. Also acquired were most of the extant papers of the late Iowa Governor Dan W. Turner; several boxes of correspondence, speeches, and campaign literature from Jake S. More, who held the chairmanship of the Democratic State Central Committee for seventeen years; and the papers and records of U.S. Representative Ed H. Campbell.

Accretions to a number of existing collections were received during the year, among which were additions to the Progressive Party papers, the Victor Animatograph collection, and the Milo Reno papers. The George Sylvester Viereck papers were increased by the addition of nine letters from Upton Sinclair to Viereck. Two letters from former Iowa Governor Leslie M. Shaw and one from former U.S. Senator and Secretary of Interior James Harlan were also acquired. The growing assemblage of Henry A. Wallace material was supplemented by nine original letters and copies of nearly sixty others given by thirteen different donors. Edward L. and Frederick H. Schapsmeier, coauthors of the recently-published book Henry A. Wallace of Iowa: The Agrarian Years, 1910-1940 presented sixty-six letters relating to Wallace.

From Reeves Hall came a gift of papers of his father, W. Earl Hall, well-known newspaper editor and publisher of Mason City, Iowa. Included are correspondence files, business and civic activity files, editorials, and scripts of radio broadcasts.

Miscellaneous historical items include three letters from J. W. Denver to his wife; a three-page letter from General Halleck; and a hundred-page manuscript by General J. C. Tidball concerning General McClellan and the Civil War. The University Library also obtained during the year 23,000 photographic negatives taken from 1928 to 1952 by the Kadgihn Studio of Iowa City.