Category Archives: Acquisitions

new acquisitions

Vote: No License

“No License. A Question to be Settled in the State of New York, 19th of May, 1846… Citizens of the State of Nfw [sic] York, Look at the Following. Will You Vote License?”

On May 19, 1846, an important vote was to be held throughout New York State, as to whether or not merchants could obtain licenses to sell hard liquor. This “Extra,” printed on cloth and issued by The Journal of the American Temperance Union, urges citizens to vote “No License.”

To make their case, the broadside has four vignettes showing the ill effects caused by drinking. At top it reads:

Benjamin F. Butler, Esq., placed the yearly loss to the United States from the use of ardent spirits at, – – – – $150,000,000. Making a loss to the State of New York of, $18,000,000. What has the income from 20,000 licenses done to compensate for this? Now the rumsellers ask to do the evil to the State, and pay, – NOTHING.

Above and below cropped and photoshopped

An adjacent cartoon [above] shows a farmer carrying his “pauper” and “criminal” taxes while a licensed tavern owner and his clients look on. The farmer says “O these Rum Taxes! Rum Taxes! I can’t stand it. I’ll vote No License. 3d Tuesday in May I’ll go to the polls & vote No License.”

The tavern owner jeers: “At him boys. Ha! …You vote License and maintain my rights and your liberties.”

Other printed vignettes include “The Drunkard’s Home,” “The Liquor Dealer Shown His Victim,” and “The Town Meeting.” This final illustration depicts a dying alcoholic woman who dared to speak out at a town meeting against licenses to sell rum: “I shall soon stand before the Judgment Seat of God—I shall meet you there, you false guides, and be a witness against you all.”

The textile broadside is printed in three columns, with three poems in the center: “Who Will Vote License?” “The Ballot Muster for the 19th of May” (by Rev. P. Clark), and “Song of the Revellers. Old Song—Go Get Your License.”

The concluding words of the broadside extra are a call to action: “As goes New York on the third Tuesday of May, so goes the rest of the Nation. Remember that, temperance men. On the third Tuesday of May, be at your posts.”

Journal of The American Temperance Union, No License. A Question to be Settled in the State of New York, 19th of May, 1846… (New York: Journal of The American Temperance Union, March 25, 1846). [1]p. Illustrated “Extra” textile broadside. 23 x 18½ inches. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2019- in process

If x³−6x²+11x−6=2x−2, then x=1 or x=4.


At a recent book launch and signing for Philip Ording’s 99 Variations on a Proof (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2019. QA8.4 .O73 2019), mathematician Ording kindly left a note in our copy for Princeton students. The event was hosted in the Ludlow Street basement studio of David Reinfurt, Princeton Lecturer in Visual Arts, graciously overseen by several former students.

 

“This book offers a multifaceted perspective on mathematics by demonstrating 99 different proofs of the same theorem. Each chapter solves an otherwise unremarkable equation in distinct historical, formal, and imaginative styles that range from Medieval, Topological, and Doggerel to Chromatic, Electrostatic, and Psychedelic [note the reference to Princeton in this chapter].

“…Inspired by the experiments of the Paris-based writing group known as the Oulipo – whose members included Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino, and Marcel Duchamp – Ording explores new ways to examine the aesthetic possibilities of mathematical activity. 99 Variations on a Proof is a mathematical take on Queneau’s Exercises in Style, a collection of 99 retellings of the same story, and it draws unexpected connections to everything from mysticism and technology to architecture and sign language.”–Back cover.

The cubic equation in question and claim is: If x³−6x²+11x−6=2x−2, then x=1 or x=4.


“Fun, funny, and unexpectedly deep, Philip Ording’s Oulipian expedition through the far reaches of mathematical style shows there’s more than one way to skin a cubic equation.”—Jordan Ellenberg, author of How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking https://press.princeton.edu/titles/13308.html

Philip Ording is a professor of mathematics at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the coeditor of Simplicity: Ideals of Practice in Mathematics and the Arts.

Ye olde London streete

Ye olde London streete ([London], 1884). Peepshow [also called a tunnel book] with 6 watercolored panels. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2019 in process

Between the Cotsen Children’s Library and the Graphic Arts Collection, Princeton holds a large collection of European and American tunnel books. Here is one of our newest acquisitions.

 


In this example, the panels are attached to each other with cloth sides, making the whole easily foldable, like an accordion book. It offers a view of an imaginary old London street that was reconstructed at the International Health Exhibition of 1884. The street was made out of real houses, some four or five stories high and was built to give a contrast to the modern sanitary advancements. It proved to be the most visited exhibition.

The artist’s initials “G.C.S.” are struck through in pencil, followed by what we presume to be the owner’s name: Mary Dorothea. The piece is also signed at the back with the initials G.C.S. and manuscript note on the scenery, “Taken from the street in old London shown at the Health Exhibition 1884”.

In 1884 London hosted an International Health Exhibition under the patronage of Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales, and directed by an Executive Council. The Exhibition was held in South Kensington, on a site between the Royal Albert Hall and the newly-opened Natural History Museum, on land which is now occupied by Imperial College of Science and Technology. Four million people visited the Exhibition between 8 May and 30 October 1884 (http://blogs.lshtm.ac.uk/library/2016/07/07/international-health-exhibition-1884/)

Here are a few more of our peepshows:
1. [Milan Cathedral peepshow]
[S.l. : s.n., 18–]. Graphic Arts Collection » 2007-0615N
2. Optique no. 12 : les Boulevards.
[Paris? : s.n., 18–]. Graphic Arts Collection » 2007-0609N
3. Optique no. 8 : le Parc de Versailles.
[Paris? : s.n., 18–]. Graphic Arts Collection » 2013-0443N
4. [Reims Cathedral peepshow]
[S.l. : s.n., 18–]. Graphic Arts Collection » 2007-1260N
5. Teleorama.
[S.l. : s.n., 18–]. Graphic Arts Collection » 2007-0688N
6. A View of the tunnel under the Thames, as it will appear when completed: the carriage ways will be circular : foot passengers will descent the shafts by stairs : dimensions of the tunnel, length fr…
[London] : Pubd. … by M. Gouyn, August. 1, 1829. Rare Books » 2010-0864N
7. Thames tunnel.
[London? : s.n., 184-?]. Rare Books » Oversize 2007-0169Q
8. A Brief account of the Thames Tunnel.
[London] : Azulay, Thames Tunnel, [1851?]. Rare Books » 2011-0054N
9. Ye Olde London streete.
[London : s.n., 1884?]. Graphic Arts Collection » N-001924
10. Grand théâtre en actions.
Paris : A. Capendu, éditeur, [189-?]. Cotsen Children’s Library » Moveables 19Q 44369
11. [Noah’s Ark] / devised by Jack S. Chambers.
[London : Werner Laurie, (not after 1950)]. Cotsen Children’s Library » Moveables 14964
12. Fünfhundert Jahre Buchdruckerkunst, 1440-1940 : über hundert Jahre Bauersche Giesserei, Frankfurt a.M., gegründet 1837.
[Frankfurt am Main : Bauersche Giesserei, 1940]. Cotsen Children’s Library » Moveables 30196 and Graphic Arts Collection » 2007-0617N
13. Tony Sarg’s treasure book : Rip Van Winkle, Alice in Wonderland, and Treasure Island.
[New York : B.F. Jay], c 1942. South East (CTSN) » Toys 11990

Mocha Dick

Randall Enos, The Life & Death of Mocha Dick (Brooklyn, NY: Strike Three Press, 2009). Copy 15 of 32. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2019- in process

Abstract: “In 1841, Herman Melville sailed out to the whaling grounds of the South Pacific where he heard the legend of Mocha Dick. This huge bull sperm whale was known to attack whaling ships and battle his pursuers as they tried to harpoon him. Melville turned the whaler’s quest of Mocha Dick into the story of Captain Ahab and Moby Dick. Randall Enos tells the story of Mocha Dick, the hero of whales, and depicts the whale’s great battles and legendary encounters in a suite of eleven linoleum cuts.”–Strike Three Press.

 

J. N. Reynolds. “Mocha Dick: or the White Whale of the Pacific,” in The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine 13, no. 5 (May 1839): 377–92.

J.N. Reynolds, Mocha Dick, or The White Whale of the Pacific (London; Glasgow: Cameron & Ferguson, [1870?]). Rare Books 3906.39.364.1900

Manganelli’s ouroboric mini novel

Paul Malutzki, Irrläufe: Hundert = Centuria: One Hundred by Giorgio Manganelli (Flörscheim, Germany: Malutzki, 2019). Copy 4 of 25. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2019- in process


“A writer is writing a book about a writer who is writing 2 books about 2 writers, one of whom writes because he loves the truth, and the other because it makes no difference to him. These 2 writers write a total of 22 books that talk about 22 writers, some of whom lie without knowing they are lying, others lie and know so, others seek the truth while knowing they won’t be able to find it, others believe themselves to have found it, still others believed themselves to have found it but have started to have doubts…” –Paul Malutzki

Manganelli’s ouroboric mini novel (No. 100 of a collection of 100) is used bilingual in German and English translations. The two texts run through the accordion book as unbroken lines. The binding structure of the book (printed on both sides) allows to reconnect the text ends to the text beginnings, thus associating an endless (ouroboric) reading.

After setting the texts on computer with 30 point “Polymorph South” they were printed letter press, using polymer plates. On their meandering path through the book they circumscribe glued-in text fragments from novels by Paul Auster, Simone de Beauvoir, Michail Bulgakov, Italo Calvino… and Virginia Woolf.

Since the novel fragments are taken from real books, each copy of the edition contains its own little extracts from the respective novels. Each copy is, in terms of the novel fragments, one-of-a-king. – Paul Malutzki


Giorgio Manganelli (1922-1990) was an Italian journalist, avant-garde writer, translator and literary critic. Centuria, which won the Viareggio Prize, is probably his most approachable [book]; translated into English in 2005 by Henry Martin. Italo Calvino called him “a writer unlike any other, an inexhaustible and irresistible inventor in the game of language and ideas.”


Calvino also once remarked that in Manganelli:

“Italian literature has a writer who resembles no one else, unmistakable in each of his phrases, an inventor who is irresistible and inexhaustible in his games with language and ideas.” Nowhere is this more true than in this Decameron of fictions, each composed on a single folio sheet of typing paper.

Yet, what are they? Miniature psychodramas, prose poems, tall tales, sudden illuminations, malevolent sophistries, fabliaux, paranoiac excursions, existential oxymorons, or wondrous, baleful absurdities?

Always provocative, insolent, sinister, and quite often funny, these 100 comic novels are populated by decidedly ordinary lovers, martyrs, killers, thieves, maniacs, emperors, bandits, sleepers, architects, hunters, prisoners, writers, hallucinations, ghosts, spheres, dragons, Doppelgängers, knights, fairies, angels, animal incarnations, and Dreamstuff. Each ‘novel’ construes itself into a kind of Möbius strip, in which, as one critic has noted, ”time turns in a circle and bites its tail” like the Ouroborous.

In any event, Centuria provides 100 uncategorizable reasons to experience and celebrate an immeasurably wonderful writer. Brilliantly translated from the Italian by Henry Martin.”

Leonard Trask, the Wonderful Invalid


As a healthy young man, the Maine farmer Leonard Trask (1805-1861) stood 6 feet, 1 inch tall. He was married in 1830 to Eunice V. Knight and together they had 7 children between 1831 and 1846.

While out riding in 1833, Trask’s horse bolted and he was thrown to the ground, injuring his neck and shoulders. Over the next few months he gradually recovered but his symptoms returned with a stiffening of his back and neck, and his head curving forward. In 1840, he fell again and in 1853, he was thrown from his wagon, breaking his collar bone. Each accident aggravated his symptoms and the curve of his spine grew worse. Eventually, his height was measured at 4 feet, 10 1/2 inches.

Trask was now severely disabled. He published this account of his condition to raise money for the family; worked briefly for a local circus as a curiosity; and according to The Maine Register for the year 1855, was given a pension of $12 per month because of his condition (known today as ankylosing spondylitis).

 

Leonard Trask (1805-1861), A Brief Historical Sketch of the Life and Sufferings of Leonard Trask, the Wonderful Invalid (Portland [Maine]: Printed by David Tucker, 1857). Graphic Arts Collection 2019- in process

 

The first eight Surgeons-General of the United States Navy

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, The Maltine Company of Brooklyn published a series of pamphlets advertising the company to the general public through interesting facts and medical history. This was the first, ca. 1898, listing the Surgeons-General of the U.S. Navy.

William P.C. Barton (1786-1856), Princeton Class of 1805, studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania before entering the Navy at the age of 23 as a surgeon. The portrait below left is by Thomas Sully (1783-1872), depicting Barton in his first uniform [Philadelphia Museum of Art]. The artist of the portrait used by the Maltine Company is not identified.

Besides teaching and practicing medicine, Barton was a talented botanical illustrator, publishing: Vegetable Materia Medica of the United States or, Medical botany: containing a botanical, general, and medical history, of medicinal plants indigenous to the United States (Philadelphia: M. Carey & Son, 1817-1818). Graphic Arts Collection 2015-0057Q

and

A Flora of North America. Illustrated by coloured figures, drawn from nature by William P.C. Barton (Philadelphia: M. Carey & sons, 1821-23). Graphic Arts Collection 2015-0055Q

According to Appletons’ Cyclopaedia, the U. S. Naval Bureau of Medicine and Surgery was organized by Barton and he was the first chief clerk of that Bureau, appointed in 1842 by President John Tyler. Although the post of Surgeon General of the Navy wasn’t created until 1871, Barton is considered the first to hold the Navy’s senior position.

Surgeon-Generals of the Navy
William P. C. Barton 1842–1844
Thomas Harris 1844–1853
William Whelan 1853–1865
Phineas J. Horwitz 1865–1869
William Maxwell Wood 1869–1871
Jonathan M. Foltz 1871–1872
James C. Palmer 1872–1873
Joseph Beale 1873–1877

Extinction Aria

Anne Waldman, Extinction Aria: Its Exegesis, the Realms, How Ink is Blood (Hopewell, New Jersey: Pied Oxen Printers, [2017]). 60 x 25 cm. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2019- in process

 

Poet’s note for Extinction Aria:

“Extinction Aria” was composed responding to what is known as the cycle–within the Wheel of Life–of the six realms in Buddhist philosophy: hell realm, hungry ghost or preta realm, animal, human, warring god, and pleasure-seeking god realm. The text seemed to emanate from a vibrating larynx and dance in the air. The words here are meant to project the tangibility of the psychological state of each realm. Thus the poem is proclamation of a specific insight into “samsara,” Sanskrit for a wandering through the endless cycle of existence, transmigrating lifetime after lifetime. “Extinction” may be interpreted here in both a negative and positive sense. Extinction as in the “sixth extinction” comes to mind; the planet is threatened from many directions by global warming, nuclear war and other ominous threats of the Anthropocene, where humankind is constantly running interference. From the spiritual perspective one aspires to the exhaustion of “ego” and its grasping. “We are here to disappear” is a tenet of Buddhism. I felt a vatic assertive voice on both sides of this inhabiting the poem … the voice of a harpy, a hag, a seer, conjuring images of gloom and doom to wake the world up to itself, and also a consciousness or impulse seeking to disappear. The title may also be read as “extinction air” as in our atmosphere so threatened by unmitigated pollution. The image and insistent repetition of “ink” during the piece was important to the sense of the poem needing to be scribed, physically embodied as spell or charm or transmission. This originally came from a dream that inflected the power of ink as a kind of lifeblood for poetry. These spiritual aspirations can’t merely exist in air. They needed to be written in “blood” and in the minerals of an earthy ink and project a strong visual presence, as they do in David Sellers’ inspired design and rendering. The mantra “E Ma Ho!” weaves in, which is an exclamation of amazement and wonder, and when repeated, carry the blessing of purifying body, speech and mind. The writing of this piece was extremely visceral, performative, in that a pulse of kinetic energy kept pushing the momentum of the language and its images forward. The poem comes off the center of the page; its lines settle down the middle axis as if it is a core of wind, or air, a channel of breath. This centering gives spine and location for the textures and language of the aria.

Additional notes: https://www.piedoxen.com/aria-notes-and-commentary

 

 

Additional images: https://www.piedoxen.com/books#/extinctionaria/

Brother Jonathan: Stop the Presses

William Henry Harrison (1773-1841), the ninth President of the United States, died on his 32nd day in office, April 4, 1841. Only six days later, the spectacular mammoth double sheet pictorial newspaper Brother Jonathan published a special spring issue with a commemorative note on their masthead [see above], replacing the usual logo [seen below].

 

“For the first time in its history, the nation is called to lament the death of a chief magistrate,” wrote the editor Benjamin Henry Day (1810-1889), “…we thought it our duty, in the recess of Congress, and in the absence of the Vice President from the seat of Government, to make this afflicting bereavement known to the country, by this declaration, under our hands.”

Nine years later, July 9, 2850, the second president to die in office, Zachary Taylor, was similarly honored by Brother Jonathan. Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth in 1865, after Brother Jonathan had ceased publication.

According to their own advertisements, these enormous newspapers (called bedsheet size) began in 1840:

“The Pictorial Double Brother Jonathan for Christmas and New Years was first issued in the year 1840-—just twenty years ago. It was at that time such a novelty that the demand for it continued three or four months, and even then the circulation reached eighty thousand copies. Since that period it has been issued regularly each year, with the avearage [sic] sale of over one hundred thousand copies for every number. Among the Newsvenders, the Brother Jonathan is extremely popular, as they never have a copy of it leftover unsold.

The immense size of the Mammoth Double Brother Jonathan enables us to give in it a profuse amount of reading and still leave room for the great number of Elegant Large Pictures. Altogether, you will find it to be a paper unsurpassed in interest, in point of handsome embellishment and agreeable reading. We give away this elegant Pictorial Paper to every yearly and half-yearly subscriber to the Weekly Brother Jonathan. The Christmas and New Years Pictorial Brother Jonathan will be sent, post-paid, to purchasers at 12 cents per single copy, or ten copies for One Dollar; but if you [subscribe] to the weekly paper, you will get a copy of the pictorial for nothing. Be sure to mention that you want the Pictorial Brother Jonathan, to prevent any mistake. Send cash to B. H. Day, 48 Beekman-Street, New York.”

Princeton University Library now owns 24 mammother issues and and 2 prospectuses of the Pictorial Double Brother Jonathan. Many have been cleaned, flattened, repaired, catalogued, digitized, and posted online for the public to read and enjoy. This one will also soon be cleaned and repaired. See more: http://pudl.princeton.edu/objects/9z903261b

It took a great deal of text to fill the mammoth newspaper. Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty was the fifth of his novels to be published, first appearing in serial form in Master Humphrey’s Clock from February to November 1841. At approximately the same time, Day published it in the United States serially in Brother Jonathan. This is only one of many novels to appear in the paper.

Brother Jonathan, special memorial edition, vol.2, no. 41 whole number 92 (April 10, 1841). Gift of Ivan J. Jurin, 2019. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2019- in process

A Potentiality…

Susan Silton, A Potentiality Long after its Actuality Has Become a Things of the Past: 1/5 (Los Angeles: Susan Silton, 2018). Gift of James Welling, Lecturer with the rank of Professor in Visual Arts. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2019- in process

https://www.susansilton.com/a-potentiality

Full Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) quote: “It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.”

In early 2018 Silton acquired a collection of old newspapers from the 1930s and early 1940s. In stark fashion all share an article about Hitler’s Germany. The artist is particularly struck by how the archive reflects an unfolding of events in a “daily” context—a harbinger of the imminent Holocaust. Returning to that era’s quotidian from the vantage point of our own is especially potent and unsettling.

For this project, ten to twenty original newspaper pages are framed; placed between each is a black and white photographic image culled from Silton’s own previously unprinted proofsheets from the 1980s and early 1990s—observational in nature, documenting moments from everyday life—a dead possum, the shadow of a swing on sand, a group of people gazing upward at a subject off-frame, a church marquee with the words “DISTANT FROM GOD.”

While in Quartet for the End of Time she holds a space for viewers to musically feel the work’s original historical context, in A potentiality… the artist inserts her own body and histories to insist on the importance of remembering the mundane across multiple generations, as well as on the vital role of a free press in disseminating truth. Silton conceived this project following her presentation of Quartet for the End of Time in 2017, and considers this, and The stain of________. A stain on________. to comprise a trilogy that reflects on the ways we absorb and document history and bear witness to trauma.

The artist’s website notes: A potentiality… exists in various forms: the exhibited form as described above, and a mailed version, which consists of digital reprints of five New York Times front pages from the early 1930s. In January, 2019, Silton will be mailing the set of prints, one at a time over several weeks, to a list that includes political journalists and leaders at the forefront of civil rights advocacy in the US.

Thanks to our generous donor, the Graphic Arts Collection now has the complete set of 5 papers.