Category Archives: Acquisitions

new acquisitions

A Complete Stranger’s Guide through London

 

Thanks to a deposit by Bruce C. Willsie ’86, the Graphic Arts Collection now holds 51 of the 88 separate engravings covering 74 London streets published by John Tallis (1818-1876) from 1838 to 1840. Exceptionally rare, these unbound prints were originally published in parts and only later as a bound set. Tallis promised that his directory to the buildings and businesses on each street would be corrected and updated every month. The elaborate title explains it all:

Tallis’s London Street Views, Upwards of One Hundred Buildings in Each Number, Elegantly Engraved on Steel; with a Commercial Directory Corrected Every Month, The Whole Forming a Complete Stranger’s Guide Through London, and by Reference, from the Directory to the Engraving, Will Be Seen All The Public Buildings, Places of Amusement, Tradesmen’s Shops, Name and Trade of Every Occupant, &c. &c. To Which Is Added an Index Map of the Streets, From a New Actual Survey, Now Making, At a Cost of Upwards of One Thousand Pounds; and a Faithful History and Description of Every Object Worthy of Notice, Intended To Assist Strangers Visiting the Metropolis, Through All the Mazes Without a Guide. London: published by John Tallis, 15, St. John’s Lane, St. John’s Gate; and regularity kept by al booksellers and toy shops, in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. Each street may be had separately.

The narrow format made each sheet easy to fold and carry in your pocket for onsite reference, but may also explain their scarcity today. The guides were used so frequently, they eventually fell apart and were discarded.

Each view on two attached sheets, offers both sides of a street, along with one fully engraved and aquatinted building and a map of the area at either end. One typically sold for 1½d. Owners paid extra to have the name of their business engraved over the building or featured at the end of the sheet.

 

Read more: Alison O’Byrne & Jon Stobart (2017) “Introduction: Roundtable on John Tallis’s London Street Views (1838–1840),” Journal of Victorian Culture, 22:3, 287-296, DOI: 10.1080/13555502.2017.1327196

For a digital view of Tallis’s Streets, see: https://www.romanticlondon.org/tallis-street-views/#14/51.5151/-0.1169. The map here shows the locations of the Street Views depicted; each marker is placed at the center of the appropriate plate. For more on the Street Views, see the Museum of London’s project or the London Topographical Society’s publications on the subject.

 

Remarks on the Jacobiniad, 1795

“Say who for Larning, ever equalled I?” Slightly photoshopped

Remarks on the Jacobiniad was a ten-part series published in the Boston Federal Orrery between Dec. 8, 1794 and Jan. 22, 1795, satirizing the Democratic-Republican societies in Boston. Disguised as a serious literary review of a fictitious poem, “The Jacobiniad,” the parts were later published in pamphlet form and attributed to John Sylvester John Gardiner (1765–1830), an Episcopal priest and rector at Trinity Church, Boston (DAB).

While not the earliest American political caricatures, the six engraved plates in Remarks on the Jacobiniad are rare examples of 18th-century colonial American satire. Various almanacs of the period also contain plates making fun of political figures, such as “Washington with Federal Constitution and Benjamin Franklin in chariot pulled by thirteen freemen, representing the original thirteen states,” from Bickerstaff’s Boston Almanack, or Federal calendar for 1788. Graphic Arts Collection Oversize Hamilton 44.

John Sylvester John Gardiner (1765-1830).] Remarks on the Jacobiniad: Revised and corrected by the author; and embellished with Carricatures [sic]. Part First. Boston: E. W. Weld and W. Greenough, 1795. 6 engraved plates. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2021- in process

“Inspired by the political clubs of revolutionary France (the Jacobins being the most famous), American Democratic clubs formed in the early 1790s in most major cities, often boasting among their members some of the most prominent political names of the period (Sam Adams in Boston, the Livingston family in New York). Their increasingly vocal reaction to the Federalist administration prompted a series of mock-epic responses in 1794 and 1795, including Lemuel Hopkins’s The Democratiad, Boston poet John Sylvester John Gardiner’s Remarks on the Jacobiniad, and Democracy: An Epic Poem (Franklin 1970, vi).

In each case, the object of satire is not merely the political views of the Democrats but their preferred mode of discourse, the open “town-meeting”-style forum. Recasting such debates as travesties of the grand debates found in serious epics like The Iliad and Paradise Lost, the Federalist Wits portrayed their Democratic opponents as disorderly buffoons, wholly incapable of governing even their own meetings, much less the nation as a whole.”

–Colin Wells, “Revolutionary Verse,” The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature Edited by Kevin J. Hayes Mar 2008. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195187274.013.0023

“[George] Washington, disturbed by the strong political disagreements of his era and eager to retire to his home, Mount Vernon, eliminated himself as a candidate in 1796. A vigorous campaign between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson ensued, resulting in the election of Adams. These cartoons are caricatures of Democratic-Republicans from a pamphlet containing the satirical poem Remarks on the Jacobiniad. The Republicans were nicknamed Jacobins after the Parisian radicals, reflecting the Republicans’ general support of the French Revolution. Federalists, on the other hand, upheld Washington’s strict course of neutrality and feared the spread of Jacobinism in the country.”

— Laurel Grunat, Mitchel Grunat, and Robert Goehlert, Presidential Campaigns, a Cartoon history, Indiana University Libraries Bloomington, 1976

Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828), John Sylvester John Gardiner (1765-1830), c. 1810-1820. Oil on panel. Boston Athenaeum.

John Gardiner was born in Wales but spent much of his youth in the West Indies, where his father served for the British government as attorney-general. He was sent to Boston for his education, returning to Britain only at the outbreak of the American Revolution. In 1783, however, he moved permanently to Boston and was eventually named rector of Trinity Church. He was a published author and a founder of the Boston Athenaeum.

 

 

 

 

 

His lean left hand he stretched, as if to smite / And, mansir l, groped his breeches with his right.

 

 

 

8 Souls in One Bomb, an Explosive Novel


Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944), 8 Anime in Una Bomba. Romanzo esplosivo [=8 Souls in One Bomb. An Explosive Novel] (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di “Poesia,” 1919). Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2021- in process

 

Beginning with F.T. Marinetti’s manifesto in 1909, the male artists and writers of the Italian Futurist movement are the ones who made it into the history books. Often forgotten is an important figure within Futurism in general, and Marinetti’s work in particular, the author Rosa Rosà (born Edyth von Haynau; 1884–1978). The two were introduced during World War I, at which time she changed her name “to express this dual identity and to play with Futurist ideas of movement, while simultaneously punning on the traditional female name, “Rose/Rosa.” During the war, Rosa began to write in Italian for the Futurist journal L’Italia Futurista, where she published a myriad of articles, black and white drawings, short poems, and poetry.” –Lucia Re, “Introduction to A Woman with Three Souls,” California Italian Studies.

In 1917, while recovering in a military hospital, Marinetti wrote an enormously popular and presumably humorous book Come si seducono le donne (How to Seduce Women). The assertive Rosa Rosà responded with a number of articles and then, a short novel, Una donna con tre anime (A Woman with Three Souls, 1918), which critics called a visionary “futurist-fantastic narrative with elements of both realism and science fiction” (re-publishd in 1981 by Edizioni delle donne). Within a matter of months, Marinetti published his own visual and textual presentation of souls entitled: 8 Anime in Una Bomba. Romanzo esplosivo (8 Souls in One Bomb. An Explosive Novel).

 

1st soul: The war piano
2nd soul: Letter from Bianca, plump virgin and professor of botany, to a futurist
Response of the futurist
3rd soul: The sick cow and the young heroes
4th soul: First quality of rubber: Elasticity-contradiction, Caporetto-Vittorio factory Veneto
Letter from the retreating 3rd Army
5th soul: Lust; Formulas; 4 floors of sensuality in an establishment of bathrooms
Nocturnal dialogue in the Observatory of 8th Bombarde Battery in Zagora
6th soul: The frightening tenderness
7th soul: Genius-revolution ; In prison for interventionism
8th soul: Purity
Mixture of 8 explosive souls
Chorus of the 8 explosive souls
Parable and explosion of the bomb

Each chapter of 8 Souls has different typography and layout, some with the visual poetry reminiscent of Zang Tumb Tumb and earlier futurist narratives. Other chapters are psychological, fictional descriptions of one of the eight identities. Over the years, various names have been given to each section–Heroism, seduction, creativity, aggression, and so on–although Marinetti keeps the titles ambiguous.

In the end, all eight souls unite in an explosive mixture of a 92 kg bomb, directed at “cholera lice moralistic priests spies professors and policemen…”. Although there is no correspondence to link them, at this same time James Joyce was publishing Ulysses in parts from March 1918 to December 1920. Joyce wrote 18 episodes, each chapter with a different literary structure or narrative format.

 

 

 

 

Another Outlaw Saga


Thanks to a new gift from Bruce Willsie ’86, Princeton now holds four editions of the popular outlaw saga, The History of Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough, and William of Cloudeslie. Note the slight difference in the two lines of verse under each title.

Here’s a good summary of the story: https://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/2018/04/robin-hood-vs-bell-clim-and-cloudesley.html, which is similar to the better known tale of Robin Hood.

Thomas Hahn writes:

“As a lively, self-contained and substantive tale of outlawry, Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough and William of Cloudesley is the only work that rivals stories of Robin Hood in popularity and antiquity. No outlaw ballad, except the pivotal A Gest of Robyn Hod, was printed earlier than Adam Bell; the earliest fragments of the ballad survive form an edition of 1536, and the poem was then reprinted another half-dozen times or more within the next seventy-five years.

Adam Bell is only one-third as long as A Gest of Robyn Hode, but it is twice the length of the earliest unprinted Robin Hood ballads, . . . and six times the length of the many seventeenth-century broadside ballads that celebrate the deeds of Robin Hood. …The narrative was reprinted, presumably in its entirety, perhaps twice, in the 1540s, and again in 1557-8, 1582, 1586, 1594 and several more times in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Its remarkable popularity and commercial success inspired an anaemic sequel, added in 1586 and to most later editions…

…Though allusions to William, Adams, and Clim would no doubt be lost on most modern audiences, the outlaws remained formidable rivals to Robin Hood and his band, in both oral and print culture, through to the end of the seventeenth century.”—Medieval Outlaws: Ten Tales in Modern English, edited by Thomas H. Ohlgren (1998).

What does the name Clim of the Clough mean? “This surname is derived from a geographical locality. ‘at the dough,’ from residence thereby. A clough is a breach in the hillside, a ravine between hills. ‘Boggart Hole Clough’ is well known to Manchester people; v. Clow.” https://forebears.io/surnames/clough#meaning


Mery it was in grene forest,
Amonge the leves grene,
Where that men walke both east and west,
Wyth bowes and arrowes kene,

To ryse the dere out of theyr denne;
Suche sightes as hath ofte bene sene,
As by the yemen of the north countrey,
By them it is as I meane.

The one of them hight Adam Bel,
The other Clym of the Clough,
The thyrd was William of Cloudesly,
An archer good ynough.

They were outlawed for venyson,
These thre yemen everechone;
They swore them brethen upon a day,
To Englysshe wood for to gone.

 

 

Thus ends the Lives of these good Men / Send them eternal Bliss; / And all that with Hand-bow shooteth, / Of Heaven may never miss.

 

 

 

What did W. C. Handy and ‘The New Cow of Greenwich Village’ have in common? Robert Clairmont

‘Father of the Blues’ William C. Handy (1873-1958) was introduced to a scruffy Greenwich Village poet named Robert Clairmont (1902-1971) in the spring of 1828. Handy had given a mutual friend, Abraham Brown, a tour of Harlem nightlife and Clairmont was hoping for a similar adventure. A few nights later, Clairmont returned the favor by taking Handy to see some of his favorite downtown spots and the two quickly became good friends.

One day Clairmont suggested Handy and his orchestra play a concert at Carnegie Hall, asking what he thought it might cost. Handy said an event like that might cost $3,000 and to his surprise, Clairmont returned the following day with a certified check for $5,000 to fund the concert. On April 27, 1928, the Handy Orchestra became the first Black band to perform at Carnegie Hall.

Many friends and colleagues were asked to play, including Fats Waller who performed “Beale Street Blues” on a pipe organ with a thirty-piece orchestra, directed by Handy himself. The high point came when Katherine Handy, his daughter, sang his best-known composition “St. Louis Blues.” The evening was a tremendous success, but while it cost around $3,800 to stage, they only grossed around $3,000. Clairmont never asked for anything in return.

[Program for the 1938 concert to celebrate Handy’s birthday]


[Above] Dan Morgenstern remembers Robert Clairmont, his friendship with Handy, and the parties he gave each month. (recorded April 20, 2017). [Below] The apartment where Clairmont’s parties were held on West 4th Street, just off Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village.

Their friendship continued over the next year, until the fall of 1929 when the stock market crashed. Clairmont lost $986,000 in a single day. This time it was Handy’s turn to help his friend, who he tracked down in a lower east side boarding house. Clairmont was taken home with Handy for a warm meal and they remained close until the composer’s death in 1958.

 

 

Only a millionaire for a brief time in the 1920s, Clairmont spent the money as quickly as it came. While working as a lifeguard one summer, he saved a wealthy businessman from drowning and was rewarded with $350,000 from the man’s will. This was soon doubled and then tripled in the stock market, leaving Clairmont the ‘millionaire playboy’ of Greenwich Village. He ran with a small group who called themselves the Greta Garbo Fan Club, publishing poetry journals during the day and discovering the latest speakeasy each night.

Clairmont was one of several writers published in the single issue of The New Cow of Greenwich Village, which he also funded, along with the poetry journal Pegasus, and several later compilations. The book Millionaire Playboy by Tom Boggs is a fictionalized account of his life.

 

William Christopher Handy (1873-1958), Father of the Blues: an Autobiography; edited by Arna Bontemps; with a foreword by Abbe Niles (New York : Macmillan Co., 1941). Ex ML410.H18 A3. Presentation copy to Miriam Holden with inscription by James H. Hubert.

Clairmont also published regularly with his friend Lew Ney (Luther E. Widen), the ‘Mayor of Greenwich Village’.


Cara a Cara. Visiones de lo cotidiano.


Cara a Cara: Visiones de lo cotidiano = Face to Face: Views of the Everyday (Oaxaca, Mexico: Irving Herrera/Bautistaivan, 2013). Edition of 35. Graphic Arts Collection GA2021- in process

The artists “facing off” between the DF and OAX printshops include Edgar Allan, Javier Arjona, Ivan Bautista, Raul Cadena, Gilberto Delgado, Maria Luisa Estrada, Oscar de las Flores, Irving Herrera, Vicente Jurado Manuel Solis, Baltazar Melo, Jorge Noguez, Pavel Scarubi, Sergio Vargas, Albert Vargas, and Yescka.

Oaxaca is one of the 31 states which make up the 32 federative entities of Mexico. Located in the southwest of the country, Oaxaca is celebrated for its indigenous artists working in dozens of printshops and collectives, specializing in stencil and relief printing. Their voices are as diverse as the 16 spoken languages in Oaxaca.

https://oaxacaculture.com/ The Oaxaca cultural navigator is one of several sites that help to identify these many cultural resources.

Takahashi Hakusen 高橋白扇

Takahashi Hakusen 高橋白扇, Chikusa ちくさ, Showa era, 1927 (Showa 2). 5 v. with 20 pochoir plates. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2021- in process

We recently acquired this complete set of textile designs in pochoir from the Japanese artist Takahashi Hakusen 高橋白扇. While it has not yet been fully translated, here are a few of the wonderful patterns merging East and West in 1920s art deco.

The saint of all flower growers

José de Nava (1735-1815), [Vida de Santa Rosa de Viterbo] ([Puebla de Zaragoza: s.n., 1763-1807?]). 33 engraved plates (one facsimile). Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2021- in process

 

According to the Catholic calendar, September 4 is the feast day of Saint Rose of Viterbo (1235-1252), who was canonized by Pope Innocent IV. She is the patron saint of florists and all flower growers.

Born in Viterbo (present day Italy), Rose joined the Third Order of St. Francis (T.O.S.F.) at the age of 10 but never officially joined a convent (lacking the dowry). According to the legend, “on December 5, 1250, she foretold the death of the emperor which was fulfilled 8 days later on December 13. Rose went to the city of Vitorchiano, which was possessed by a sorceress and secured the conversion of all, even of the sorceress, reportedly by standing unscathed for three hours in the flames of a burning pyre.”


The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired a rare volume of engravings based on Rose’s life story, drawn and printed by the Mexican artist José de Nava (1743-1807). Although there isn’t much information on Nava, Dorothy Tanck de Estrada’s article “Imágenes infantiles en los años de la insurgencia. El grabado popular, la educación y la cultura política de los niños,” from: Historia Mexicana 59, no. 1 (July/September 2009) https://www.jstor.org/stable/40285231 is a good source. This is a poor translation of a section:

“José de Nava, active since 1748, is considered “the best known and most famous of the Puebla engravers.” He was possibly born around 1728 and died in 1817 at 89 years of age. Both he and [Miguel Jerónimo] Zendejas made works of art in the same year of his death. However, some of Nava’s creations were printed until after his death. According to Manuel Romero de Terreros, [Nava] devoted his entire life to his art and produced excellent prints, most of them dealing with religious matters. He worked with such rapidity that after the viceroy Marqués de las Amarillas entered Mexico on November 10, 1755, the following December Nava had already recorded and dedicated his excellent plan of New Spain to the viceroy.”

Francisco Perez Salazar noted that “Nava had the custom of signing almost all of his engravings and of stating the date of his work on many plates, in such a way that we can know with certainty when they were made. It was extremely fruitful.”

Nava lived in a two-story house on Calle de Chito Cohetero (now Calle 6 norte 400) in the city of Puebla. He produced almost all of his engravings in that city … at the printers of the College of San Ignacio de los Jesuitas and, after the expulsion of the Comparila de Jesus, in the same printing house then called the Palafoxian Seminary and in the printing house of Pedro de la Rosa. It should be noted that the most outstanding work of Nava was a set of 33 plates of the life of Santa Rosa de Viterbo.”

 


Taller Movimiento Gráfiko Mayahuel

Gráfica Palabra Zapatista (México: Movimiento Gráfico Mayahuel y Libertad Bajo Palabra, 2019). Book divided into 2 parts, text and plates, bound dos à dos. A second copy of each print is loose in the chipboard box 34 x 53 x 10 cm along with a handkerchief and 1 corked glass bottle. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2021- in process

 

Prints: Libertad by Agüita Gómez del Payán; linografía — La lucha inconclusa by Amarildo Olmedo; xilografía — Zapata 100 años by Ana Lilia Viveros Cázares; grabado en pvc espumado — La tierra es quien la trabaja by Ana Rojas; linografía — ¿Por qué la lucha sigue? by Brigada Cultural Subversiva; linografía — Somos el mañana by Eduardo Palma Santiago; xilografía — Tierra, corazón e historia by Eduardo Robledo Romero; relieve en pvc espumado — A cien años by Eric Pozos Vázquez; linografía — La luz de la flama by Gabino Morales; xilografía — La autonomía by Gera Cristobal; linografía — El Atila del Sur by Iván Míchel Franco; xilografía — [untitled] by Mario Martínez; serigrafía — Sólo la muerte nos hará libres by Nahual Grafico; litografía y linografía — Cien años by Orquidea 5 Vocales; linografía y relieve en pvc espumado — Zapatero, la lucha sigue! by Zamer Zamer; linografía — Tenemos la fierza de un volcán by Zum; linograbado y stencil — Nuestra lucha es por la vida by Movimiento Gráfiko Mayahuel; linografía

Read more from the Taller Movimiento Gráfiko Mayahuel, https://www.picuki.com/tag/movimientograficomayahuel

 

 

La Création. Bound by Marie-Jose Guian-Milliaud for her personal library.

La Création. Les trois premiers livres de la Genèse suivis de la généalogie adamique. Traduction littérale des textes sémitiques par M. le docteur J.-C. Mardrus (Paris: Schmied, 1928). Designed and illustrated by François-Louis Schmied. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2021- in process

 


It is, perhaps, not surprising that French master binder Marie-Jose Guian-Milliaud chose this edition of Genesis, illustrated by François-Louis Schmied (1873-1941), to bind for her personal library. Her full brown calf binding with ivory-toned calf complements the artist by reproducing his plate XII of the biblical family tree on her cover [see plate below].

Schmied’s 42 beautiful color wood engravings are printed on Arches wove paper, many highlighted with gold and/or silver. The copy now at Princeton includes an additional suite of plates in black, bound at the back of the volume.

 

 

Born in Cairo, the translator Joseph Charles Mardrus (1848–1949) was also responsible for an important French translation of Les Mille et Une Nuits (Thousand and One Nights, 1899–1904) based primarily on the 1835 Egyptian edition of The Arabian Nights by Boulak. Writing for the Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, Anne Duggan notes:

“Mardrus studied classics and Arabic literature in Beirut, and went on to receive a doctorate in medicine at the Sorbonne in 1895. While working as a doctor on shipping lines, which took him from the Middle East to South-East Asia, he began to translate and publish Les Mille et Une Nuits, the revenues from which allowed him to settle permanently in Paris by 1899. Within Parisian literary circles, Mardrus frequented Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, Maurice Maeterlinck, André Gide, and Marcel Schwob, and dedicated to each of them a volume of his 16-volume work. Mardrus’s translation became the object of critical debate, which opposed the partisans of Antoine Galland, who claimed the superiority of the latter’s classical style, to those who favoured Mardrus’s more sensual, unexpurgated version. Unlike Galland, Mardrus did not Frenchify the Arabian tales but retained much of their cultural specificity.”

 

 
When the California book collector Ward Ritchie gave up the study of law to become a printer, he traveled to Paris hoping for an apprenticeship with Schmied. This led to his establishment of the Ward Ritchie Press in 1932. Later, Ward wrote the following description of his personal copy of Création:

“[This book is] a daring and innovative design with the copy of the first two books set in capital letters in narrow columns with decorative bars to fill out the lines where necessary. The small illustrations in the columns are brilliant in color. Dominating full-page illustrations break the continuity of the text. The format is completely changed in Book Three with a wider measure of type and the illustrations integrated with the text.”