Author Archives: Julie Mellby

Rare Book School goes dark


Terry Belanger’s students engrave copper plates, James Mosley’s students cast metal type, and so it should come as no surprise when Richard Ovenden’s students disappeared early into a nearby darkroom to develop a photograph. Although many had tried this at some time in the past, waiting long minutes between the dozens of separate steps to see what went right or wrong gave us a new appreciation for the medium. Back in the library, it is amazing to find so many prints that actually worked.

Large format, medium format, and tiny cell phone cameras.

Before (above) and after (below). Can you pick out the mistake?

And  the biggest mystery of all: the silver recovery system. This was not in Gernsheim.

 

Cigarettes and Gymnastics


The British American Tobacco Company was formed in 1902 in a merger between the British Imperial Tobacco Company and the American Tobacco Company. The first chairman, James ‘Buck’ Duke was a global thinker and a master of merchandising. Each package of machine-rolled cigarettes included trading cards from and/or for countries throughout Europe.

This 1908 set honors athletes from Denmark. Vægtløfter [bottom center] is Danish for weightlifter; Køllesvinger [above] is Danish for club swings. Some of the athletes include Severin Ahlkvist, Camillus Evertsen, Carl Fredriksen, Axel Hansen, Albert Jensen, Eiler Jensen, C.H.R. Neilsen, Ebbesen, Jul. Jörgensen, Hans Poulsen, Axel Larsen, Neuheimer, S. M. Jensen, Palme, Egeberg, Hjalmar Jocobsen, and Victor Hansen.

Unlike other cards, the backs of these are blank.

Giacomo Lauro

Last fall, Victor Plahte Tschudi, Director of the Oslo Centre for Critical Architectural Studies, published Baroque Antiquity: Archaeological Imagination in Early Modern Europe (Classics DG82 .T78 2017). This led to Anthony Grafton’s review “Invented Antiquities,” in the July issue of London Review of Books.

This led to a search for Giacomo Lauro, “a printmaker, whose albums of prints of Rome, the Antiquae Urbis splendor, command the lion’s share of Baroque Antiquity.” It is much more pleasant reading about old master prints while looking at them.

The earliest dated prints by this engraver, printer, and print publisher are from 1585 and carry the address of C. Duchetti. From 1590 he tried to establish himself as a publisher of his own work by acquiring old copper plates, restoring them, and publishing reprints. According to the British Museum, his Antiquae Urbis Splendor was published in parts from 1612. In the volumes issued in 1614 and 1615 Lauro refers to having worked on it for 28 years which would mean that he began it about 1586.

Grafton writes,

“At a cursory glance, Lauro’s slick, neatly engraved images give an impression of erudition and professionalism. . . But Tschudi’s close and tenacious examination reveals that Lauro was neither a professional antiquarian nor even a skilled draughtsman. His images were adapted from a vast range of existing sources: the drawings and prints of Pirro Ligorio and others, which the enterprising publisher Antoine Lafréry had gathered in albums in the 1570s. Lauro not only copied these, he used them to represent buildings for which no ruins or records survived.”

“…Lauro and [Athanasius] Kircher, in other words, were not making and commissioning these sometimes highly imaginative prints at random. They had a precise notion of the market at which they were aiming. Their work didn’t involve creating images anew, after long weeks camped out at the ancient sites, but reusing existing prints. . . They used the work of others as soon as the privileges that protected them ran out, while invoking privileges of their own to protect the value—and price—of their own work. They were not explorers of ancient sites but aficionados of modern prints.”

Giacomo Lauro (active 1583-ca. 1645), Splendore dell’antica e moderna Roma (Roma: Nella Stamparia d’Andrea Fei, 1641). Pt. 1: Antiquae urbis splendor hoc est præcipua eiusdem templa … Romæ, 1612; pt. 2: Antiquitatum urbis liber secundus … Romæ, 1613; pt. 3: … Antiquæ urbis splendoris complementv̄, … Romæ, 1615; pt. 4: Antiquæ urbis uestigia quæ nunc extant … Romæ, 1628. Marquand Library (SAX) Oversize N6920.L37q

See also: Giacomo Lauro (active 1583-ca. 1645), [Engraved views of Italian gardens, showing the Quirinal, Monte Celio, Vatican, Tivoli, Pincio and Barco di Barnaia (Rome?: 1616?]). Marquand Library (SAX) NA9500 .L37

Giovanni Battista de Rossi (active 1630-1660), Palazzi diversi nel’alma cita di Roma et alter ([Rome]: Ad instanza di Giombattista de Rossi, 1638). Prints by Giacomo Lauro. Marquand Library (SAX) in process

The Anti-Masonic Movement


The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired this early almanac focused on the anti-masonic movement in the United States. So much was written and published, this poem appeared in 1829:

O books! books! books! it makes me sick
To think how ye are multiplied,
Like Egypt’s frogs, ye poke up thick
Your ugly heads on every side.

If a new thought but shake its ear
Or way its tail, tho’ starved it look,
The world the precious news must hear,
The presses groan, and lo! a book.

The American anti-masonic movement was officially formed in 1828 following the disappearance and presumed murder of William Morgan (1774–1826?). Morgan was about to publish a book exposing Freemasonry’s secrets and so, the fraternal society was thought to have killed him to keep their information secret.

A congressional convention took place in Philadelphia in 1930. Eli Bruce, Loton Lawon, Nicholas Chesebro and Edward Sawyer were each convicted of taking part in the kidnapping and served time in prison.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We have dozens of other publications in our collections. Of particular interest are those in the Sinclair Hamilton collection with early American wood engravings and gritholaphic plates. Here are a few others.

Edward Giddins, Anti-Masonic Almanac for the year 1832, no. 4. (Utica, [N.Y.]: William Williams [et al], (1831]). Illustrated by D. C. Johnston. 1st ed. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2017- in process

Timothy Tickle, The doleful tragedy of the raising of Jo. Burnham; or the “cat let out of the bag”: in five acts, illustrated with engravings  (Woodstock, Vt.: Printed by W.W. Prescott, 1832). Illustartions attributed to Benjamin Tuel by Hamilton and others. Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) Hamilton 1958

Morganiana, or, The wonderful life and terrible death of Morgan / written by himself. Illustrated with gritholaphic [i.e. lithographic] plates, by Hassan Straightshanks, Turkey. First American ed., tr. from the original Arabic manuscript. By Baron Munchausen, jr. … (Boston: Printed and published by the proprietors, 1828). “Johnston was fond of using pseudonyms and, as the name Straightshanks is an obvious play on Cruikshank, and as the plates are in the style of Johnston, it seems plausible to attribute them to him.”–Cf. Hamilton. Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) Hamilton 937

Henry Brown (1789-1849). A narrative of the anti-masonick excitement, in the western part of the state of New York, during the years 1826, ’7, ’8, and a part of 1829 (Batavia, N.Y.,: Printed by Adams & M’Cleary, 1829). Rare Books (Ex) HS525 .B7

 

Pre-emoji

In honor of the 56 new emojis recently finalized from Unicode 10.0, here are some cloth badges from an uncatalogued collection in Graphic Arts. Although you could photograph and email them, these are really meant to be hand-sewn onto your uniform or sash. Unlike Unicode, they are all gender neutral.

If anyone can identify one or more of the symbols, please let us know.

http://blog.emojipedia.org/final-2017-emoji-list/

John Brown, 1800-1859

Attributed to John Adams Whipple (1822–1891), John Brown, 1800-1859, ca. December 1856. Oval salt paper print portrait. 3 1/2 x 2 3/4 inches. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2017- in process.

The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired a rare salt print portrait of the abolitionist John Brown (1800-1859). There are two other known prints from the paper negative: one at the Library of Virginia and the other at the Kansas Historical Foundation. There are four known daguerreotype portraits of John Brown (with a very similar pose): one at the National Portrait Gallery, one at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and two at the Boston Athenæum.

Brown had his portrait made at a Boston studio, either that of Josiah J. Hawes (1808-1901) or John Adams Whipple (1822-1891), in December 1856 or January 1857. Most sources attribute this pose to Whipple. Here is an attempt at a chronology of life portraits: http://www.alliesforfreedom.org/files/exhibit_legends_for_SUPPL.pdf

This clipping is attached to the portrait photograph:

Sally Pierce, formerly of the Boston Athenaeum, quotes a letter from donor James Redpath, “The daguerreotype of John Brown which I gave you some time since was taken in January 1857 or in December of the year before. I think that this was his first visit to Boston after he had become a man of note in connection with Kansas affairs. At least, he was personally known to very few of the friends of Kansas in Boston; and as I happened at the time to be brought into daily intercourse with numbers of them, I availed myself of the opportunity to testify my admiration of the old man by introducing him, whenever I could, to this class of people. …In January he [Brown] had three daguerreotypes of himself taken – one, he gave to Dr. Webb, one to Amos A. Lawrence, one to me. I had asked him for one; he expressed a reluctance to sit; but on leaving, he handed it to me, saying that he gave it because I had ‘been very kind’ to him.” https://www.bostonathenaeum.org/about/publications/selections-acquired-tastes/john-brown-two-daguerreotypes

Brown spent the years 1856-1857 in Boston to promote his cause and raise funds for what would become his famous raid on Harper’s Ferry. Early in 1859, he rented a farm near Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) and on October 16, 1859, together with 21 followers attacked and occupied the federal arsenal in Harper’s Ferry. Brown was captured and executed on December 2, 1859.

See also: Boston Courier report of the union meeting in Faneuil hall, Thursday, Dec. 8th, 1859. Speeches … Resolutions adopted by the meeting. Letters … Names of signers to the call. [Phonographic report] (Boston: Clark, Fellows & company [1859]). Firestone E451 .B74 1859

New York. Citizens. Official report of the great Union meeting, held at the Academy of Music, New York, December 19th, 1859 (New York; Davies & Kent, printers, 1859). Rare Books: John Shaw Pierson Civil War Collection (W) Oversize W26.673q in rehoused pamphlets, box 22

Self-Portrait by Guy Davenport, age 19

Guy Davenport (1927-2005), Self-Portrait, 1946. Oil on board. Graphic Arts Collection. Gift of Jacqueline Brown, given in honor of Clarence Brown. Reproduced with permission from the Davenport estate.

Thanks to the generous donation of Jacqueline Brown, we have acquired of a wonderful 1946 self-portrait by the American essayist, fiction writer, poet, translator, and painter Guy Davenport (1927-2005). The painting had been a gift by the artist to Clarence Brown (1929-2015), professor of comparative literature at Princeton University, who was a classmate of Davenport’s at the Anderson Boys’ High School in South Carolina and his life-long friend.

The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius award,” also named a Distinguished Professor at the University of Kentucky, Davenport is remembered more for than his fifty published books than his visual art. Happily, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt titled his obituary for the New York Times, “Prolific Author and Illustrator.”

In his remembrance, Roy Behrens, University of Iowa, wrote, “Guy had drawn and painted since childhood (at age eleven, he had started an amateur newspaper in his hometown of Anderson, South Carolina, for which he wrote and also drew the pictures for all of the stories). As an adult, he used a crow quill pen to create the accompanying images for his own and the writings of others (I think the first of these I saw were in Hugh Kenner’s The Counterfeiters), in which he nearly always used a tedious method called “stippling” (still used today in scientific illustration), which is the “line art” equivalent of Georges Seurat’s pointillism.”

Davenport drew illustrations for Hugh Kenner’s The Stoic Comedians (1962) and The Counterfeiters (1968), as well as his own publications, Tatlin!: Six Stories (1974); Da Vinci’s Bicycle: Ten Stories (1979); Apples and Pears and Other Stories (1984); The Lark (1993); and Flowers and Leaves (1961). A prolific author, if we have missed some, please let us know.

For more, see Erik Anderson Reece, A Balance of Quinces (1996), Rare Books: Leonard Milberg Coll. of American Poetry (ExRML) PS3554.A86 B34 1996; the only book so far about Guy as a visual artist.

Also The Guy Davenport reader; edited and with an afterword by Erik Reece (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, [2013]). Firestone Library (F) PS3554.A86 A6 2013

 

For more author’s portraits in the Graphic Arts Collection, see https://blogs.princeton.edu/graphicarts/2009/12/the_authors_portrait.html

 

Let Us All Be Unhappy Together


 

“Let Us All Be Unhappy Together,” part 9, p.96 in The Universal Songster, or, Museum of Mirth: forming the most complete, extensive, and valuable collection of ancient and modern songs in the English language… embellished with a humorous characteristic frontispiece and twenty-nine wood-cuts [per vol.] designed by George and Robert Cruikshank, and engraved by J.R. Marshall (London: Printed for John Fairburn …, 1825-1826). Graphic Arts Collection (GA) Cruik 1825.5

In 1790, Charles Dibdin (1745-1814) composed and performed a musical entertainment called The Wags, or, The Camp of Pleasure at the Lyceum Theatre in London. One of its hit tunes titled “Sound Argument” became better known for the chorus, “Let us all be unhappy together.”

This may well have been the primary inspiration to James Beresford, who later wrote The Miseries of Human Life, which in turn inspired the one act farce by Dibdin’s son Thomas, “The Miseries of Human Life; or, Let Us All Be Unhappy Together,” performed at the Covent Garden Theatre in 1807.

The Miseries of Human Life and Other Entertainments: Drawings by Thomas Rowlandson is on view at the Princeton University Art Museum: http://artmuseum.princeton.edu/object-package/miseries-human-life-and-other-amusements-drawings-thomas-rowlandson/112600

There were a number of caricatures, broadsides, and illustrated scores inspired by “Unhappy Together.” Here are a few more:




Above:

Let us all be unhappy together, 1794. Mezzotint on wove paper. Published by Laurie & Whittle. (c) British Museum.

Isaac Cruikshank, Let us all be unhappy together. London, April 30, 1791. Etching on laid paper. Illustration to ballad Let Us All Be Unhappy Together, written and composed by Dibdin for his entertainment called The Wags. (c) Lewis Walpole Library

Unidentified artist, Let us all be unhappy together, 1812-17. Hand colored etching. Published by William Davison of Alnwick. (c) British Museum

On Princeton computers only, listen to a performance from The Jane Austen Songbooks: http://princeton.naxosmusiclibrary.com/catalogue/item.asp?cid=VOX-7537

LET US ALL BE UNHAPPY TOGETHER.

E bipeds, made up of frail clay,
Alas! are the children of sorrow;
And, though brisk and merry to-day,
We may all be unhappy to-morrow.
For sunshine’s succeeded by rain;
Then, fearful of life’s stormy weather,
Lest pleasure should only bring pain,
Let us all be unhappy together.

I grant the best blessing we know
Is a friend, for true friendship’s a treasure;
And yet, lest your friend prove a foe,
Oh! taste not the dangerous pleasure.
Thus friendship’s a flimsy affair, .
Thus riches and health are a bubble;
Thus there’s nothing delightful but care,
Nor anything pleasing but trouble.

If a mortal could point out that life
Which on earth could be nearest to heaven,
Let him, thanking his stars, choose a wife
To whom truth and honor are given.
But honor and truth are so rare,
And horns, when they’re cutting, so tingle,
That, with all my respect to the fair,
I’d advise him to sigh, and live single.

It appears from these premises plain,
That wisdom is nothing but folly;
That pleasure’s a term that means pain,
And that joy is your true melancholy;
That all those who laugh ought to cry,
That’t is fine frisk and fun to be grieving;
And that, since we must all of us die,
We should taste no enjoyment while living.

The Beach of Trouville

Princeton University Library’s collection of 1920s French silence movies for Pathé home movie projectors are primarily black and white. A select few have been hand colored using stencils, also called pochoir coloring. A good example is this documentary about the beach at Trouville. https://rbsc.princeton.edu/pathebaby/node/2472


Here is a translation of the film titles:

Trouville, the queen of beaches. The beach of Trouville, with fine and uniform sand, is overlooked by a large terrace on which stands a casino. In the mirror-like puddles left by the tide, fisherwomen find an abundance of shrimp and sadeels. The bathers who go in at all hours offer a lively and joyful spectacle. “The Planks” are the summer boulevards of Paris. On the coast are pretty Norman chalets with braced windows surrounded by greenery. Romantic villas half buried in ivy. Flower beds are acclaimed by the residents to laugh. Mossy, dilapidated, century-old trees dominated by the heavy foliage at their summits. The little church of Criqueboeuf, buried under ivy, stands next to a flowery pond of water lilies. The calvary which stands against the beach uncovers an immense horizon. The Port of Trouville is situated at the mouth of the Touques and the Seine. Sometimes the delightful scenery is transformed and the furious ocean mounts and attacks the works of men that curb its flow. The end. Composition by Melle. G. Jousset.

The Princeton University Art Museum owns a beautiful oil painting of the beach at Trouville painted eighty years earlier by Eugène Boudin (1824–1898). Here is their description:

Eugène Boudin (1824–1898), The Beach at Trouville, 1865. Oil on canvas. Gift of the Estate of Laurence Hutton. y1950-65. Boudin took Claude Monet under his wing in the 1850s, when the aspiring artist was still in his teens. Monet came to embrace the older painter’s primary artistic concerns, which included a fascination with the transience of visual sensation and the effects of light and weather on the landscape. He also taught the young man to value everyday scenes of French life and leisure. Boudin was among the first artists to capture in oils that novel, yet prosaic, nineteenth-century pastime, the beach vacation. Such excursions were made possible by the new railway lines, which first reached the northern coast of France, where this scene was painted, in the late 1840s.

A (new) Modest Proposal


Jonathan Swift, Gerald Scarfe, and Fintan O’Toole, A Modest Proposal, 2017. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2017- in process


To celebrate the 350th anniversary of the birth of Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Stoney Road Press has published a limited, boxed edition of the satirical essay A Modest Proposal, illustrated with three etchings by satirical cartoonist Gerald Scarfe and an introduction by Fintan O’Toole, The Irish Times literary editor and Princeton University Visiting Lecturer in Theater; Acting Chair, Fund for Irish Studies (Spring 2018).

A launch party was held June 17 at the Dalkey Book Festival, hosted by O’Toole, His remarks were followed by a reading of Swift’s essay by actor Nick Dunning.

It was noted that  Dunning got further than Peter O’Toole did in 1984. As Fintan O’Toole wrote, “When the Gaiety Theatre held a gala performance to mark its reopening after refurbishment, Peter O’Toole was invited to do the opening turn. Presumably, the expectation was that he would do a bit of Shakespeare, perhaps, or a Yeats poem. He decided to read, slowly and deliberately, Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, with its suggestion that the children of the Irish poor be sold as food for their landlords, ‘who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.’ Some members of the dress-suited audience began to heckle; others walked out. RTÉ, which was broadcasting the show live, cut O’Toole off in the middle of the reading and went to an ad break.“ –Fintan O’Toole, “The Genius of Creative Destruction,” New York Review of Books, December 19, 2013

 

 

 

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from being a Burthen to Their Parents or the Country: and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick ([London]: Dublin, printed, and reprinted at London, for Weaver Bickerton, in Devereux-Court near the Middle-Temple, 1730). Rare Books (RB) RHT 18th-587

 

 

 

“In the large body of stories about him in the collections of the Irish Folklore Commission,” O’Toole continued, “Swift is almost always ‘the Dean’ or, in popular pronunciation, ‘the Dane’. The name shows immediate awareness that he was a high functionary of the established, Protestant, Church of Ireland—an institution unpopular with the oppressed Catholic majority. Yet he transcends these sectarian divisions. He was revered by middle-class Protestants, who named inns and ships after him and built bonfires to celebrate his birthday. Catholics, meanwhile, attached to ‘the Dean’ many of the common trickster stories that circulated around Europe. Swift and his servant, usually called Jack, form a comic double act.”