Recent Acquisitions

ABATTOIR EDITIONS. From the College of Fine Arts of the University of Nebraska at Omaha come five recent handprinted volumes of poetry under the imprint of Abattoir Editions. Ode (1977) by Robert Vas Dias, set in Joanna type, is one of 255 copies; Thistles and Thorns: Abraham and Sarah at Bethel (1977) by Paul Smyth, with wood engravings by Barry Moser, is one of 253 copies, set in Bembo type; Solitary Confinement (1977), poems by Bob Ross, with four blind etchings by Stuart Dayton, is one of 200 copies, set in Cloister Old Style and Ultra Bodoni type; Altamira (1978), poems by Laurence Goldstein, with two relief prints by David Newbert, is one of 300 copies, set in Polyphilus and Blado types, with Fournier Ornate initials; and A Thousand Little Things and Other Poems (1978) by Norman Dubie is illustrated with “Weeds” from pen drawings by Keith Achepol and is one of 180 copies printed from Joanna type.

ALDEN, EBENEZER. Alden (1819-1899) was one of the students at Andover Theological Seminary who became a member of the “Iowa Band,” a group of Congregational missioners to frontier Iowa. He served as a minister in Cedar County, Iowa, from 1844 to 1848. The 37 Alden manuscript items recently acquired span the years 1838-1878 and comprise about 257 pages. Included are reports to the Congregational Home Missionary Society, letters, and papers which date from Alden’s years as a student at Andover.

APOCALYPSE. The Codex Gerundensis, a tenth-century illuminated manuscript in the Cathedral Chapter at Gerona, is a commentary on the Apocalypse of St. John, written by Beatus of Liebana, a monk of northern Spain. The first complete full-color facsimile of this manuscript was published in Madrid in 1975. Its 118 illuminations, beautiful examples of Spanish Mozarabic art, are noteworthy for their Spanish impress: “Before Goya and Picasso, they are perhaps the most genuine and unembarrassed statement of 'Iberianness.'” Noteworthy, also, is the fact that some of these illuminations, dating from circa 975 A.D., are said to have been painted by the first known woman artist, the nun Ende or En.

BATHS. Some 200 baths, located principally in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, are described in the compilation De Balneis, published in Venice in 1553. Works by 70 authors are to be found in this volume, among them Avicenna, Averroes, Conrad Gesner, Agricola, Galen, Hippocrates, and Maimonides, and cures for a wide spectrum of diseases are discussed. Johannes Guenther’s Commentarius de Balneis, & Aquis Medicatis (Strasburg, 1565) is a rare treatise on thermal springs by a physician who taught at the University of Paris. And Petrus de Eboli’s De Balneis Puteolorum et Baiarum is an illustrated poem extolling the virtues of the thermal springs at Baiae and Pozzuoli on the coast of Campania in Italy. It is a facsimile of a manuscript in the Bibliotheca Angelica in Rome, and was printed in 1976 for members of Editions Medicina Rara. Gifts of John Martin, M.D.

BIRD & BULL PRESS. Our holdings of books printed at the Bird & Bull Press of North Hills, Pennsylvania, are augmented by three recent publications: The Mysterious Marbler (1976) by James Sumner, one of “approximately 250 copies”; Ourika (1977) by Claire de Durfort, translated into English by John Fowles, one of 500 copies; and Flyleaves (1977) by Bernard Shaw, edited by Dan H. Laurence and Daniel J. Leary, one of 350 copies.

BOOK OF HOURS. The most detailed study of The Hours of Mary of Burgundy yet to appear is made in the text volume which accompanies a remarkably fine facsimile edition of Codex Vindobonensis 1857 of the Austrian National Library in Vienna. Some of our readers will recall seeing reproductions of the lovely page in this manuscript showing Mary of Burgundy as a young princess sitting at an open casement window which looks into the choir of a Gothic church as she reads her Book of Hours. This attractive facsimile volume, bound in green velvet with a golden clasp, was published in Graz in 1969.

CUMMINGTON PRESS. Three desiderata in our holdings of early Cummington Press publications have been filled with the acquisition of An Herb Basket (1950) by Richard Eberhart, one of 150 copies; Three Academic Pieces (1947) by Wallace Stevens, one of 246 copies; and Three Poems (1950) by Yvor Winters, one of 300 copies and one of only a few sets of unbound sheets.

EVERSON, WILLIAM. Four titles which augment our holdings of works by William Everson are The Springing of the Blade (1968), one of 180 copies printed at the Black Rock Press, Reno, Nevada; A Canticle to the Water Birds (1968), one of 200 copies printed by Lawton and Alfred Kennedy of San Francisco; Who is She that Looketh Forth as the Morning? (1972), one of 250 copies printed in Santa Barbara by the Capricorn Press; and Blackbird Sundown (1978), a signed broadside poem printed by Grant Dahlstrom in an edition of 201 copies.

FREUD. Two first editions of influential works by Sigmund Freud are Die Traumdeutung (1900) and Das Ich und das Es (1923). Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams is considered by many students to be his great contribution to the understanding of the human psyche; Freud himself, however, considered The Ego and the Id as perhaps his greatest contribution to depth psychology. Copies of both works have come to our History of Medicine Collection as the gift of John Martin, M.D.

GILL, ERIC. Five works relating to the typographer and designer Eric Gill include The Way of the Cross (1917), printed from engravings on wood and published by Douglas Pepler; The Lord’s Song, A Sermon by Eric Gill (1934), one of 500 copies printed at the Golden Cockerel Press using Gill’s Perpetua Roman and Felicity Italic types; Work & Property &c (1937) by Eric Gill, with twelve illustrations by Denis Tegetmeier; And Who Wants Peace? (1948), an address by Gill, handset in Gill’s Perpetua type, one of 100 copies printed at the Greenwood Press of San Francisco; and The Letter Forms and Type Designs of Eric Gill (1976), being notes by Robert Harling published in London by the Westerham Press.

GOLDEN COCKEREL PRESS. Acquisitions of books from the Golden Cockerel Press include Moral Maxims by the Duke de la Rochefoucault (1924), number 78 of 325 copies; Sonnets with Folk Songs from the Spanish (1925) by Havelock Ellis, number 400 of 500 copies; Lucina Sine Concubitu: a Letter Humbly Addressed to the Royal Society (1930) by John Hill, number 410 of 500 copies, with three engravings on copper by Hester Sainsbury; Hearts ease and Honesty, being the Pastimes of the Sieur de Grammont (1935), number 137 of 300 copies, in a translation by Helen Simpson; A Compendium of the East, being an Account of Voyages to the Grand Indies made by Sieur Jean de Lacomb, of Quercy (1937), number 143 of 300 copies; We Happy Few (1946), an anthology by Owen Rutter, number 444 of 750 copies; In Defence of Woman (1955) by Wiliam Cynwal, a Welsh poem translated by Gwyn Williams, with colored engravings by John Petts, number 335 of 500 copies; One Hundred and Eleven Poems (1955), by Robert Herrick, selected, arranged, and illustrated by Sir William Russell Flint, number 549 of 550 copies; and The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidius Naso (1958), edited by Sir Samuel Garth, with drawings by J. Yunge Bateman, number 169 of 200 copies.

HAYDON, B. R. Benjamin Haydon (1786-1846) was an historical painter whose work generally failed to find favor with his contemporaries. Denied membership in the academy, he lived a life of penury, and debts and loans are frequent subjects in the 50 letters by him and more than 30 letters by family members that we have recently added to our manuscript collections. Among his correspondents in these letters are Leigh Hunt, Francis Bennoch, and Mary Russell Mitford.

HOMEOPATHY. Samuel C. F. Hahnemann’s Organen der rationellen Heilkunde (Dresden, 1810) was one of the most famous and sensational books in the medical literature of the nineteenth century. Rejecting all belief in anatomy and morbid physiology, Hahnemann revived the old Paracelsian idea that diseases or their symptoms are curable by heightening those symptoms by giving small doses of drugs which produce similar effects (the doctrine of simila similibus curantur). Our first edition of this rare book is a gift of John Martin, M.D.

HUNT, LEIGH. To our Leigh Hunt association books have been added two volumes of John Dryden’s Poetical Works (London, 1854), once owned by Hunt and containing his marginal notes in the first volume. A recently acquired letter from Leigh Hunt to Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne, dated October 5, 1855, apparently concerns the same visit to Hunt that Hawthorne discusses in detail in his English Notebooks. In addition, two letters from Hunt to his long-time friend Charles Ollier have been received as a gift from David Kaser.

INDIAN WARS. John Wakefield’s History of the War between the United States and the Sac and Fox Nation of Indians concerns events that occurred between 1827 and 1832. Our first edition of this scarce volume was published in Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1834. A campaign against the plains Indians is the subject of General Grenville M. Dodge’s The Indian Campaign of the Winter of 1864-65, which was published in Denver in 1907 although it was written thirty years earlier, in 1877. A copy of General Dodge’s book has been acquired for our Iowa Authors Collection.

IOWA AUTHORS. Among the scarce or unusual books recently added to the Iowa Authors Collection are J. Hyatt Downing’s Four on the Trail, a paperback “Western” of which there was no U.S. edition; it was published only in England. Our copy of the Fontana Books edition of 1973 is a gift of the author’s son, John Downing. Only 25 copies of MacKinlay Kantor’s Turkey in the Straw (1935) were specially bound in two-toned suede with a holograph manuscript inserted. This limited edition is now on our shelves, as is a copy of the very scarce “Railway Appliances” edition of Ellis Parker Butler’s Pigs Is Pigs (1905). And among manuscripts of Iowa authors is the original typescript of the book Sacajawea (1933) by Grace R. Hebard.

IOWA CITY IMPRINTS. Two uncommon nineteenth-century publications printed in Iowa City are James M. Morgan’s Speech . . . on the Bill to Submit the Constitution to the People (1845) and Sermons delivered by Noah Troyer, the noted Amishman, while in an Unconscious State (1879).

KEATS, JOHN. Endymion: A Poetic Romance was published by John Keats in 1818, “inscribed to the memory of Thomas Chatterton.” Our copy of this rare first edition includes the half-title and the five-line errata leaf.

KENNEDY, JOHN F. Thirty-three photographs as well as twenty short essays by people who knew Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. (killed in the air over Europe in World War II), were collected in a privately-printed book, As We Remember Joe, edited by his younger brother John F. Kennedy in 1945. Our copy of this uncommon volume bears a signed inscription: “To Mary—a great friend of Joe’s, from Jack Kennedy.” Gift of the Friends of The University of Iowa Libraries.

LIMITED EDITIONS CLUB. Of titles published by the club before 1950, four recent additions to our collection are Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, published in two volumes of 1938, with an introduction by Theodore Dreiser and etchings by John Sloan; John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, published in two volumes in 1940, with lithographs by Thomas Hart Benton; Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 1517-1521, printed in Mexico City in 1942, with illustrations in color by Miguel Covarrubias; and W. H. Hudson’s Far Away and. Long Ago, printed in Buenos Aires in 1943, with an introduction by R. B. Cunninghame Graham.

MILTON. Among several recently received illustrated works by John Milton is a nineteenth-century edition of Paradise Lost with 25 steel engravings by John Martin. Martin’s illustrations are characterized by a startling use of light and shade which often lends to his pictures a sense of deep, receding distance.

MINIATURE BOOKS. To our collection of juvenile literature has been added a new edition of William Roscoe’s The Butterfly’s Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast (1977), which was first issued in book form in London in 1807 and is said to have ushered in a new era in children’s books. The text follows the first edition, with four stanzas added from the second printing, and the ten wood engravings are new for this edition. It is one of 150 copies printed at the Chamberlain Press, handset in six-point Goudy type, in a format measuring 2 3/8 by 1 2/8 inches. And Poems of Life by Emily Dickinson is one of 125 copies printed by William and Raquel Ferguson in 1977 in a format measuring 2 3/8 by 1 6/8 inches.

MUGHAL MINIATURES. In the Cleveland Museum of Art is a sixteenth-century manuscript containing 218 miniature paintings of various sizes illustrating the Indian Tales of a Parrot, the Tuti-Nama. An excellent facsimile edition has recently been published in Austria, together with a volume of scholarly commentary by Dr. Pramod Chandra of the University of Chicago. This manuscript is a landmark in the history of the art of India.

MURDOCH, IRIS. To our collection of manuscripts and printed books by the contemporary English novelist Iris Murdoch have been added advance proof copies of the first English edition of The Sandcastle (1957) and of the first American edition of Bruno’s Dream (1969).

NATURAL HISTORY. Twenty Chinese natural history drawings have been selected from the Reeves Collection in the British Museum (Natural History) and reproduced full-size in full color by the collotype process in a facsimile edition published by the Trustees of the Museum in 1974. Among the animal and plant specimens drawn by Chinese artists in the nineteenth century are butterflies, moths, dragonflies, cockatoos, macaws, monkeys, tiger lilies, poppies, peonies, pineapples, and chrysanthemums. The drawings measure approximately 16x21 inches, and ours is copy number 136 of 400 sets.

NERUDA. Pablo Neruda’s “Oda a la Tipografia,” in an English translation by Enrique Sacerio-Gari, has recently been printed in a dazzling format by printer Richard Bigus. Set in 18-point Bembo on a narrow folio page, “the extremely short lines [observes William Everson] are shaped into scimitar-strokes like vertical lightning . . . Neruda, motivated by that form of bibliomania which is virtually erotic, enumerates and exclaims over aspects of typography as a lover extols the excellences of his beloved.” Ours is copy 23 of an edition of 100 copies printed for Labyrinth Editions at the Yale University School of Art in the spring of 1977.

SCIENCE FICTION (IOWA AUTHORS). The first novel of science-fiction writer Thomas M. Disch was The Genocides, published in 1965. Disch is a native of Des Moines, and a copy of his scarce paperback novel has now been acquired for the Iowa Authors Collection. A French translation of Disch’s Echo Round His Bones, published in Paris in 1972, has also been added. Manuscripts of five novels by science-fiction writer R. A. Lafferty, who is a native of Neola, Iowa, have been given to the Iowa Authors Collection. Two of these are manuscripts of historical novels, The Fall of Rome (1971) and Okla Hannali (1972), and three are manuscripts of science-fiction novels—Fast Master (1968), Fourth Mansion (1969), and Arrive at Easterwine (1971). Gift of R. A. Lafferty.

STOWE, HARRIET BEECHER. Seventy-five or more editions and translations of Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin were received by this library a few years ago as a gift from the late L. O. Cheever. The collection, however, until now, lacked a copy of the first edition, first issue, of this famous book. The two-volume set we have added has the Hobart and Robbins slug on the copyright pages and the J. P. Jewett & Co. imprint stamped in gilt at the foot of the spines.

THOREAU, HENRY DAVID. Among the volumes by Thoreau already on our shelves, in addition to the 20-volume “Manuscript edition” of the Writings, which includes an autograph leaf from a journal, are a first edition of A Yankee in Canada (1866) and the edition of Walden printed at the Merrymount Press in 1936 with photographs by Edward Steichen. A first edition of Thoreau’s Walden (1854) has now been acquired, together with a copy of the second issue (1862), this latter volume being a presentation copy from the publisher, James T. Fields.

TRAVELS IN AMERICA. Ferdinand-Marie Bayard’s Voyage dans L'Interieur des Etats-Unis, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1798), is a record of travels in the United States during the late 18th century. It contains comments on the Revolution, on Washington and Jefferson, on ornithology and agriculture, and on American domestic customs. Observations made during a journey in America in 1788, with reflections on political and economic institutions, appear in Brissot de Warville’s Nouveau voyage dans les Etats-Unis de l’Amerique Septentrionale, fait en 1788, 3 vols. (Paris, 1971). And Pierre-Jean de Smet’s Missions de l’Oregon et voyages aux montagnes Rocheuses, aux sources de la Colombie, de l'Athabasca et du Sascatshawin (Gand, 1848) dates from the middle of the nineteenth century.

VERGIL. The most notable of three recently-acquired editions of Vergil is the Cranach Press Eclogues, with initial letters designed by Eric Gill and 43 woodcut illustrations by Aristide Maillol. Our copy is number 20 of 225 English-Latin copies printed on handmade paper, published at Weimar in 1927. A translation of the first six books of the Aeneid into French verse, published in Paris in 1684, is an example of the use of calligraphic type in three fonts. And a five-volume Latin edition of the complete Works, edited by Henricus Justice and printed at The Hague in 1757, is embellished with numerous engraved illustrations by Marco Pitteri.

WELLS. H. G. Years ago, autographed copies of Star Begotten (1937), The Sea Lady (1902), and The War of the Worlds (1898) by H. G. Wells found their way to our library shelves. The latest arrival is a copy of the first American edition of When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), in a blue pictorial binding.

WHITMAN, WALT. Richard Bigus’s recent printing of Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” is an attempt “to translate the spirit of Whitman’s poem into concrete typography.” Each of the ten leaves, printed on sheets measuring 19x24 inches, is enveloped in folded Japanese paper, and the edition includes a brief afterword by Professor James B. Hall. Our copy of this impressive tour de force is number 12 of 81 copies printed for Labyrinth Editions of Torrance, California, in 1977-1978.