Recent Acquisitions

ADDISON, THOMAS. The first clinical, documented description of what is now known as pernicious anemia appeared in Thomas Addison’s On the Constitutional and Local Effects of the Supra-Renal Capsules (London, 1855). This work started a new epoch in clinical medicine—investigations in endocrinology and the treatment of pleuriglandular diseases. Our copy of this rare book contains the 11 hand-colored lithographic plates. Gift of John Martin, M.D.

ALCUIN (c. 735-804) was an Anglo-Saxon humanist who served for a time as librarian at the cathedral school of York and then for more than two decades distinguished himself as a councilor to Charlemagne, king of the Franks. His letters are highly regarded, and his liturgical writings were influential. His Liber de officiis divisnis, seu Ordinis Romani expositio was printed at Cologne in 1568, together with writings of other medieval liturgists, in a collection entitled De divinis Catholicae Ecclesiae officiis ac ministeriis varii vetustorum aliquot Ecclesiae patrum ac scriptorum libri, edited by Melchior Hittorp. Our copy of this rare volume is bound in contemporary blind-stamped pigskin and carries a sixteenth-century colored woodcut bookplate of an abbot of the monastery of the Holy Cross at Augsburg. Gift of John Martin, M.D.

ASTRONOMY. Works on astronomy by four Greek writers appear together in a volume published in Antwerp in 1553 with Greek and Latin texts on facing pages. One of these four works is Cleomenes' De mundo, a handbook in which is recorded, among other data, the method used by Eratosthenes for estimating the circumference of the earth. The other three works are editions of Proclus' De sphaera, the Phenomena of Aratus of Soli, and the Descriptio orbis habitabilis of Dionysius Periegetes.

BALDWIN, C. B. In the 1930s Calvin Benham Baldwin (1902-1975) served as an assistant to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace. From 1948 to 1954 he was secretary of the Progressive Party. His papers, recently acquired by the University of Iowa Libraries, supplement both the Wallace papers (see Books at Iowa, no. 21) and the Progressive Party papers (Books at Iowa, no. 16) already in this Library. The Baldwin papers consist of approximately 25 linear feet of correspondence, speeches, scrapbooks, clippings, sound recordings, and press releases.

BLUNDEN, EDMUND. Three booklet-length collections of Blunden’s poems, handwritten by the author for presentation to Siegfried Sassoon, are entitled The Silver Bird of Herndyke Mill (written January 27-28, 1916), Musa Professoria, or Poems Written by E. Blunden in Tokyo & now copied for the recreation of his ever honoured Siegfried Sassoon (February, 1927), and From Yalding to Monte Verita (April, 1931). Another bound manuscript of 124 pages, entitled The Coppice: Prose & Verse in Honour of Siegfried & Hester (1932), is a commonplace-book selection of excerpts from a diversity of authors, among them Christopher Smart, William Shenstone, William Cowper, Robert Curzon, William Beckford, Leigh Hunt, and Henry David Thoreau. One letter addressed to Walter E. Peck, two letters to Samuel Loveman, three to Leslie A. Marchand, four to Siegfried Sassoon, and six to Lady Mander augment the Blunden correspondence file.

BOCCACCIO. Il Codice Chigiano L. V. 176, a manuscript in the Vatican Library entirely in the handwriting of Giovanni Boccaccio, has recently been reproduced by color photography in a facsimile edition published in Rome and Florence (Archivi Edizioni/Fratelli Alinari, 1974). The manuscript contains, in addition to Boccaccio’s own Vita di Dante and his hymn in praise of Petrarch (Italiae iam certus honos cui tempora lauro), transcripts of Dante’s Vita nuova and Cavalcanti’s Donna me prega, together with Canzoniere by Dante and by Petrarch.

BOOKBINDING. Nearly two dozen titles on the art of bookbinding find a place on the shelves of our Springer Collection, to say nothing of related titles in other collections. The first practical manual on this subject written by an American is reputed to be James B. Nicholson’s A Manual of the Art of Bookbinding (Philadelphia, 1856). Our recently acquired copy of this scarce volume includes seven samples of marbled papers and 13 full-page woodcuts of binding styles, with numerous smaller illustrations of contemporary binding tools and machinery. Purchased for the D. A. B. Project.

CARROLL, LEWIS. Lewis Carroll: Photos and Letters to His Child Friends (1975) is a large handsome book, bound in clerical black, its text printed in Italy on startlingly blue handmade paper. If the editorial commentary in this volume, and the pairing of letters and photos, seem more mixed up and nonsensical than anything ever produced by the author of Alice in Wonderland, the 41 prints, mostly of young girls, are brilliant examples of Victorian photography by the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

CLEMENS, SAMUEL L. The outstanding item among a fine gift of 58 first or early editions of works by Mark Twain is a beautifully preserved copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) in which was inserted an original letter from Twain, written on August 29, 1887, concerning an alleged instance of plagiarism. Gift of Mrs. Harvey C. Knowles in memory of her husband.

CODY, WILLIAM F. Two handwritten letters from Iowa-born Buffalo Bill to his lawyer, Henry J. Hersey, dated in 1915 and 1916, concern the termination of an agreement with the Sells-Floto Company. In the earlier letter, which extends to five pages, Cody mentions that because of lawsuits regarding gas and oil wells, there are 18 lawyers staying that day at a hotel he owns in Cody, Wyoming. He concludes this letter whimsically by remarking that “Denver would make a city in time if it was not so close to Cody.”

EMBLEM BOOKS. This Library’s holdings of emblem books have been mentioned previously in these pages (see “A Gathering of Emblem Books” in Books at Iowa, no. 14). Two recent additions are Homo Microcosmus by Martin Meyer and Emblemata by Joannes Sambucus. Our copy of Meyer’s book was published in Frankfurt in 1670 and contains 74 engravings developing the theme that man is a microcosm. The volume by Sambucus is a first edition, printed in Antwerp in 1564 by Christopher Plantin, and contains 167 emblematic woodcuts as well as 46 woodcuts of antique coins. The latter volume is a gift of John Martin, M.D.

ENGRAVING AND ETCHING. Henry Aiken’s The Art and Practice of Etching (London, 1849), Abraham Bosse’s De la manière de graver à l’eau forte et au burin (Paris, 1758), George Woodberry’s History of Wood Engraving (New York, 1883), and William Gilpin’s An Essay upon Prints (London, 1768) are four volumes from among a collection of books, catalogs, and other art publications presented to the University Libraries as a gift from Gustave von Groschwitz.

FORSTER, E. M. Ten original letters and two postcards, dating from the early 1930s, written to the English writer John Collier by the author of Howards End and A Passage to India. The letters mostly concern Forster’s reactions to Collier’s novels. Also an edition of E. M. Forster's Letters to Donald Windham (1975), one of 300 copies printed in Verona, Italy, by the Stamperia Valdonega.

GALTON, SIR FRANCIS. Galton (1822-1911) was a cousin of Charles Darwin and one of the great men of science of his time. His studies ranged through the fields of biological variation, heredity, eugenics (a term which he coined), statistical theory, and fingerprints. First edition copies of two of his books, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883) and Finger Prints (1892), have recently been acquired for our collection of notable books in the history of medicine. Galton’s role in the development of the science of psychology is probably not properly appreciated; his studies in the classifying of fingerprints entitle him to be named the founder of fingerprint identification. Gift of John Martin, M.D.

GAWSWORTH, JOHN. Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong (1912-1970) was an English poet, critic, and editor, most of whose writings were published under the pseudonym John Gawsworth. “He was as much of a Londoner as Lamb or Leigh Hunt or Hazlitt,” wrote his longtime friend Lawrence Durrell, but nonetheless he sometimes styled himself King of Redonda, claiming that he had inherited the islet of Redonda (an uninhabited square mile of land in the Leeward Islands) from M. P. Shiel. His literary reputation seems never to have reached the mainstream, although his sequence of lyrics called Kingcup won him election to the Royal Society of Literature. To this Library’s collection of published and unpublished poems and essays, and correspondence which includes letters from Havelock Ellis and E. H. Visiak, have recently been added eight manuscript notebooks of poems, two drafts of The Mind of Man, and corrected proofs of New Poems (1939).

GOLDEN COCKEREL PRESS. Recent additions to this Library’s collection of books printed in England at the Golden Cockerel Press are Procreant Hymn (1926) by E. Powys Mathers, one of 175 copies, with five engravings by Eric Gill; Together and Alone (1945), two short novels by Christopher Whitfield, with engravings by John O’Connor, one of 100 large-paper copies; A Pilgrim in Arabia (1943) by H. St. J. Philby, one of 350 copies; The Silver Crescent (1943) by Somerset de Chair, one of 500 copies; La Belle O’Morphi, a Brief Biography (1947) by Patrick de Heriz, one of 750 copies; A Journey from This World to the Next by Henry Fielding, with six etchings by Denis Tegetmeier, one of 500 copies printed in 1930; and The Cricket on the Hearth by Charles Dickens, with an introduction by Walter De La Mare and seven illustrations by Hugh Thompson, one of 1,500 copies printed in 1933 for members of the Limited Editions Club.

HERBST, JOSEPHINE. Four letters written to her editor in 1939 supplement two previously acquired letters written to the same editor during the same year. These letters concern her trip to South America and Cuba and her book Rope of Gold. Also a copy of her scarce publication, Behind the Swastika, issued by the Anti-Nazi Federation in 1936. Miss Herbst in 1948, had presented to our Iowa Authors Collection a corrected typescript of her novel Somewhere the Tempest Fell.

HUNT, LEIGH. Some 70 books once owned by Leigh Hunt are presently on the shelves of our Brewer—Leigh Hunt Collection, and in more than a few of these Hunt has written marginal comments. (See “Leigh Hunt Association Books’’ in Books at Iowa, no. 1.) A recent addition to these association books is a four-volume set entitled The Philosophical Dictionary: or, the Opinions of Modem Philosophers on Metaphysical, Moral, and Political Subjects (London, 1786). In his Autobiography Hunt remarked that this compendium “was for a long while my text-book, both for opinion and style. ... I can repeat things out of it now.” That Hunt read it closely is attested to by his 30 or so handwritten marginal notes commenting on passages in this Dictionary from Rousseau, Priestley, Helvetius, Voltaire, Hume, Montesquieu, and other authors.

HYDRAULICS. The 450 or so volumes which presently comprise the History of Hydraulics Collection in this Library range in date from sixteenth-century editions of Archimedes and Vitruvius to a modern edition, printed in the Netherlands in 1974, of The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, an illustrated treatise on machines written by the thirteenth-century Arabic engineer al-Jazarī. Among recent additions to the History of Hydraulics Collection is a German work of the late eighteenth century, Reinhard Woltmann’s Theorie und Gebrauch des Hydrometrischen Flügels, published in Hamburg in 1790. Gift of Arthur H. Frazier.

HYMNALS. Twenty-five nineteenth-century American hymnals are part of a gift collection which strengthens the Library’s resources in music. Lowell Mason, a noted Boston musical educator and composer of “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” is represented by editions of The Boston Handel and Hayden Society Collection of Church Music (1832), The Juvenile Singing School (1840), Carmina Sacra (1843), The Psaltery (1847), and The National Psalmist (1848). Among other titles are Daniel Belknap’s The Evangelical Harmony (1800), Isaac Woodbury’s The Cythara (1854), Henry W. Greatorex’s Collection of Sacred Music (1855), and Lilla Linden’s Linden Harp (1855). Gift of Ada Holding Miller.

JOYCE, JAMES. A manuscript of Ulysses was acquired from Joyce by the American collector John Quinn and sold in 1924 to A. S. W. Rosenbach. This Rosenbach manuscript of 837 leaves has recently been made available to scholars in a facsimile edition, printed by offset lithography, together with a photocopy of the Paris edition of Ulysses (1922) which has been marked to show differences between this Rosenbach manuscript and the published version, including the installments which appeared in The Little Review. A critical introduction to this three-volume facsimile edition has been furnished by Harry Levin, and the bibliographical preface and annotations are the work of Clive Driver.

LIMITED EDITIONS CLUB. Two hundred and ninety-one volumes printed for the Limited Editions Club by various fine presses, with illustrations by notable artists, range from the early 1950s to the present. The volumes are in mint condition in their original slipcases, and most are accompanied by the “Monthly Letter” of the Club. Gift of John Martin, M.D.

MURDOCH, IRIS. With the addition of manuscript drafts of three recent novels by Iris Murdoch, there are now in the University of Iowa Libraries early handwritten drafts for 16 of Miss Murdoch’s novels. The latest accessions are manuscripts (two drafts each) of An Accidental Man (1971), The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), and A Word Child (1975).

PHOTOGRAPHY. Among notable works of early photography in this Library’s collections are the two volumes of Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the [Civil] War (1865-66) and two large folio scrapbooks, apparently compiled by the wife of an early Iowa governor, Samuel J. Kirkwood, containing prints of photographs described in W. H. Jackson’s Descriptive Catalogue of Photographs of North American Indians (1877). Recent acquisitions in the field of photography are the final numbers 49-50 of Camera Work, the quarterly edited by Alfred Steiglitz, which fills out the Library’s run of this periodical; and an original untrimmed proof calo-type or salted-paper portrait print of Samuel R. Curtis, prepared by James E. McClees in 1858. Curtis was a Congressman from Iowa in 1857-61, and he had earlier been involved, as an engineer, in railroad construction from Fort Wayne to Council Bluffs.

ROSSETTI, WILLIAM MICHAEL. In 1884 William Michael Rossetti sent to Charles Aldrich, an Iowa autograph collector, nearly 100 letters that had been written to him or to his brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti by various English editors, authors, and artists. These letters were subsequently presented by Mr. Aldrich to the University of Iowa Libraries. In recent months our Rossetti correspondence has been augmented with letters written by William Michael Rossetti to John Frederick Lewis, Frederick Locker-Lampson, and Mrs. E. V. Tebb.

VER DUFT, LEE. A native of Prairie City, Iowa, Lee Ver Duft is an artist and author now resident in Des Moines. His second book, The Double Heart and Other Poems, was printed in Argentina in 1948 in a limited edition of 305 copies, with Spanish and English texts of the poems on facing pages. Among recent additions to the Iowa Authors Collection is the original carbon typescript of this book, with items of related correspondence, together with two of the original illustrations drawn for the volume by one of the translators, Félix A. Ramírez. Other illustrations for Lee Ver Duft’s books were created by J. Mastrofski, and this artist’s original pen-and-ink cover drawing for Lee Ver Duft’s first book, Ho! Watchman of the Night Ho! (1945) as well as certain illustrations for his third book, Inner Course in Time, Flesh, and Eidolon (1948) have recently been presented as a gift from Lee Ver Duft.

WALLACE, HENRY A. Three hundred and sixty-four letters from Wallace to Dr. William A. Brown, a cytogeneticist and president of Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Inc., together with carbon copies of Dr. Brown’s side of the correspondence, have been added to the Wallace Papers. This series of letters spans the years 1950-1965, and deals in part with the writing of the book Corn and Its Early Fathers (1958), which was co-authored by Wallace and Brown. The letters allude also to genetic experiments with onions, squash, sunflowers, strawberries, gladioli, red clover, chickens, and petunias. In one letter Wallace remarks that “I am struck again and again how much like a murder mystery is our effort to solve a breeding problem. Just as exciting. You have to run down all the clues.” In one or two of these letters Wallace refers to the book New Green World by Josephine Herbst: “She does with the Bartrams of Pennsylvania (18th Century botanists and exporters of plants to scientists in England) what I would like to see us do with a long succession of men beginning with James Logan.” Gift of Dr. William A. Brown.

WILLIS, N. P. Several manuscript letters of Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806-1867), who was a magazine writer and friend of Edgar Allan Poe, came to this Library a few years ago as a gift from the late Thomas Ollive Mabbott. These holdings have recently been augmented with a sheaf of 14 letters written by Willis to the military and social figure Baron de Trobriand, a gift of the Friends of the Library, together with an additional five letters addressed to the poet Juliet Campbell, the latter group purchased on the Mabbott Fund.