Recent Acquisitions

The earliest printed work added to the University Libraries during the year just past is De Vita et Moribus Philosophorum, published at Nuremberg in 1479. Its author, Walter Burley, was a celebrated scholar of the early fourteenth century. This book, reprinted many times in the last part of the fifteenth century, presents brief biographies of the Classical philosophers together with synopses of their thought.

Sixteenth Century

Among the many sixteenth-century imprints recently acquired are a number of works by Greek and Latin authors, of which probably the most interesting is a German translation of Livius printed at Strassburg in 1574. This volume is especially noteworthy for its very fine woodcuts illustrating scenes from Roman history. First editions include works by Ctesias and Sophocles, the former printed by Henri Estienne in 1557, the latter by Aldus Manutius in 1502. Both are in Greek. Other additions include volumes by Aulus Gellius, Ovid, and Theocritus, this last representing only the second book in Greek to be published in Rome. Imagines Mortis, a selection of Latin verse published in 1566, contains fifty-three woodcuts, copied from Holbein. In addition, the Library has obtained recently a first edition of Tasso’s Il Renaldo, printed in 1562, and a Catalogue des Tres Illustres Ducs et Connestables de France, published in 1555 and listing, with their coats of arms, the major French nobility since Merovingian times.

Seventeenth Century

Books of the seventeenth century coming to the University Libraries during the past year include, among English authors, a first edition of George Herbert’s posthumous works dated 1652. John Dryden is represented by two plays, The Duke of Guise and Oedipus, published during the last part of the century. A Collection of Poems on Affairs of State edited by Andrew Marvell has also been acquired in an edition of 1689. A significant historical document is the transcript of the trial of Charles I of England, issued in three pamphlets in 1648. Francis Potter’s An Interpretation of the Number 666 attempts to demonstrate the connection between that figure and the Antichrist. An early travel book dating from this period, Relation ou Voyage de L’Isle de Ceylan dans les Indes Orientales by Robert Knox, has been acquired, as well as the Histoire du Chevalier Bayard by Jacques de Mailles in a second edition of 1619.

Eighteenth Century

Outstanding among recent acquisitions of eighteenth-century imprints are several early editions of English authors. Samuel Richardson is represented in first and second editions, both dated 1754, of The History of Sir Charles Grandison in a Series of Letters. The second edition of Miscellaneous and Fugitive Pieces by Samuel Johnson is in three volumes dating from 1774, while Boswell’s biography of the same author has been acquired in a first edition. A copy of the first edition of Oliver Goldsmith’s A Survey of Experimental Philosophy has also been obtained. This work boasts many very interesting diagrams, illustrating scientific experiments. Several early editions of tracts by Jonathan Swift, written anonymously or pseudonymously, have been collected, together with pamphlets by Christopher Smart and Henry Fielding. Other works by English writers include a travel book by Joseph Addison published in 1705; A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Laurence Sterne; and The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story by Horace Walpole, published in 1765.

Nineteenth Century

American and English fiction is especially well represented among the nineteenth-century imprints recently acquired. First editions of Henry James include The Awkward Age (1899), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), and Essays in London and Elsewhere (1893). The Aspern Papers and The Princess Casamassima, also by Henry James, have been acquired in editions of 1890 and 1887, respectively. Four titles of James Fenimore Cooper have been added to a collection which included already six first editions and ten other early printings. Home as Found was printed in 1838 and is a first edition, as is Mercedes of Castile, published in 1840. The Heidenmauer; or The Benedictines (1832) and Gleanings in Europe (1837) are other recently obtained works by Cooper. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, already represented in the Library by a highly prized first Brooklyn edition of 1855, has in addition been acquired in a third edition of 1860-1, a spurious third edition of the same date, and in a seventh edition of 1881-2. Other writers of this period collected in first or early editions include Jane Austen, George Crabbe, Thomas Hardy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Southey, Robert Louis Stevenson, Algernon Swinburne, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Anthony Trollope. Of particular interest is William Hazlitt’s Criticisms on Art, published in 1843, which the Library has acquired for the Leigh Hunt Collection. This copy was owned by Leigh Hunt and bears his autograph, as well as marginal notations made by him.

Twentieth Century

Many noteworthy books published in the present century have come to the Library in recent months. Douze Aquarelles Inédites de Rodin (1949) offers a representative selection of watercolors in a limited edition of 600 copies. Also in a limited edition is The Defense of Gracchus Babeuf Before The High Court of Vendôme, printed at the Gehenna Press in 1964 and containing twenty-one portraits etched by Thomas Cornell. Paul Éluard’s Thorns of Thunder, undated, is signed by the author and carries his portrait by Pablo Picasso, while Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a first edition of 1918 with notes by Robert Bridges, has also been obtained. Other English poets acquired in first or early editions include W. H. Auden, Rupert Brooke, T. S. Eliot, Robert Graves, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Siegfried Sassoon, Edith Sitwell, Stephen Spender, and William Butler Yeats, to name but the most prominent. Interesting as an historical document is the Sinn Fein Rebellion Handbook, a detailed account of the Easter Rebellion of 1916, compiled the following year by the Weekly Irish Times. Mention should also be made of the very fine collection of children’s books given to the Library by Dr. Bernice Leary of Grinnell, Iowa. This collection consists of 547 volumes dating from the late eighteenth century to the present and includes books from Germany, Sweden, Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, and other foreign countries, as well as from the United States and England.

Manuscripts

The oldest item to come to the University Libraries during the past twelve months is a manuscript copied in the thirteenth century and attributed to Jean d’Abbeville, a French cardinal who died in 1237. The manuscript consists of commentaries on the gospels and comprises seventy-seven parchment leaves bound in boards. Next in age, and similar in content, is a compilation of scriptural commentaries by Albert of Padua, a noted preacher who died in the third decade of the fourteenth century. Transcribed partly on vellum and partly on paper, this manuscript is believed to have been copied in the fifteenth century.

Adding to his previous gifts, the late Professor Thomas O. Mabbott presented to the Library, shortly before his death, a valuable collection of 185 autograph letters and manuscripts relating to American and British authors of the past two centuries. Mrs. Thomas O. Mabbott has further contributed an important collection of books and manuscripts, including a large group of books dealing with numismatics, together with a collection of commemorative medals, most of which celebrate persons and episodes connected with the 1848 Revolution in France.

The Blunden Collection has in recent months been enriched by the acquisition of sixteen manuscripts and twenty letters to or from Edmund Blunden. The Leigh Hunt Collection has been augmented by the addition of nine letters together with the autograph manuscript of a poem first published by Hunt in 1836, “Wealth and Womanhood”. The University’s growing collection of manuscripts relating to Edith, Sacheverell, and Osbert Sitwell likewise made important gains. Among the nine letters recently acquired, three are addressed to Kingsley Amis from Edith Sitwell. Other writers represented by letters recently acquired include Jean Cocteau, Edna Ferber, John Galsworthy, Hamlin Garland, André Gide, Bret Harte, MacKinlay Kantor, Carson McCullers, George Moore, J. B. Priestley, John Crowe Ransom, and Carl Sandburg.

The Library’s holdings of papers of Henry A. Wallace have recently been supplemented by important gifts, including 312 typed or autograph letters written by Wallace to the donor, George Darrow. In December, Mr. Paul Richards presented the Library many valuable letters and manuscript speeches, while in the same month Mrs. Gladys W. Richards contributed a collection of letters, manuscripts, and signed photographs of Henry Wallace. Additional letters written by Wallace came to the Library during the course of the year as a result of individual contributions.

Iowans prominent in public life are represented in recently acquired papers of Charles Pickett, Nelson Kraschel, Frederick Biermann, and William Boyd Allison. Manuscripts added to the Iowa Authors Collection were contributed by Ruth Cromer Weir, Paul Corey, Carl Glick, and Nick Thimmesch. Another notable gift, that from Clarence Updegraff, consists of ten files of labor arbitration cases and supplements an earlier gift of similar material useful for research in labor history and labor relations.