Our new catalog is here!

Posted on September 14, 2011 by Jeffrey Makala

 

We’ve just received the first copies of our latest exhibition catalog, Beyond Domesticity, U.S. Women Writers, 1770-1915. The exhibition, mounted earlier this year, was curated by English faculty members Katherine Adams and Cynthia Davis, with assistance from Sarah Conlon from McKissick Museum and me. Here are couple of teaser images from it. We’re going to mount the entire catalog as a downloadable .pdf file shortly, and also bring up a website for the exhibition with the complete exhibit text and a greater number of images that couldn’t fit into the catalog proper. If you’d like a paper copy, please get in touch with me.


-jm

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Rediscovering Audubon’s Birds of America Prospectus

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Jeffrey Makala

The Birds of America Prospectus

After recently reading about a prospectus for Audubon’s Birds of America that was discovered bound into a copy of his Ornithological Biography, I looked into our holdings to see if we had a copy.

The Ornithological Biography is a 5-volume text that was meant to accompany the double elephant folio plates of the Birds of America. It contains complete descriptions of the characteristics, markings, diet, and habits of each species, along with Audubon’s notes and narrative descriptions of how and where he observed and obtained his specimens. The Ornithological Biography was published in 5 volumes in Edinburgh between 1831 and 1839, and a Philadelphia edition also appeared at this time. We have both editions of the work, along with a manuscript of Audubon’s description of the California Partridge. And bound into the back of the first volume of both editions is a 16-page prospectus for the Birds of America proper!

The Prospectus is dated 1831 and outlines the scope of the project, its progress to date, including excerpts from favorable reviews, and also includes the current list of subscribers. This was printed just before the University of South Carolina became a subscriber to the project later that year. Ultimately, about 180 complete sets of the Birds of America were produced, and most are now in institutional collections.

List of plates, in order, from the first volume

The Prospectus itself exists in two editions: Edinburgh and Philadelphia, in different settings of type, and fortunately we have copies of each bound into our respective copies of the Ornithological Biography. It seems to be quite rare; there is only one holding library for each edition of the Prospectus listed on WorldCat, though I would suspect that numerous other copies of the Ornithological Biography in institutional collections will also have copies of the Prospectus bound into them.

The Philadelphia (left) and Edinburgh editions of the Prospectus, as bound into the Ornithological Biography

For more information on Audubon and our copy of the Birds of America, see our “Audubon and Others” online exhibit here. There is also a short essay on the acquisition of our set here.

-jm

 

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Cold Mountain screenplay archive

Posted on July 5, 2011 by Jeffrey Makala

We’ve just purchased this small collection of scripts and film production memos relating to the 2002 filming of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain.

Frazier received his Ph.D. in English here at USC before his writing career took off, and Cold Mountain, as a sleeper best-seller, has an interesting publication history. This collection both supplements our existing Frazier collections and might also have some research value to Film and Media Studies students.

Shooting schedule in South Carolina

At least four drafts of the shooting screenplay, with revisions, are present, along with production notes, shooting schedules, and some production email printouts that document how the project evolved at its final, shooting, stage.

List of late changes to one version of the script

 

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Two (not unrelated) anniversaries this month

Posted on June 13, 2011 by Jeffrey Makala

It’s certainly worth noting that June 14 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best selling novel of the 19th century and remains critical to anyone interested in 19th century America.

Our copy of the first edition, in two volumes

June is also the 75th anniversary of the publication of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, a different, but also unavoidable cultural reference point. We own two copies of the first edition of the work, along with a 1939 film tie-in large format paperback and the program to the 1939 Atlanta Film Festival where it had its premiere.

A fine copy, in jacket

Our second copy belonged to John Shaw Billings, the editor of Life and our first major benefactor. He notes inside his copy that his wife, Frederica, went to school with Margaret Mitchell, and has also pasted two clippings inside.

-jm

 

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L’Annee Hippique; Or, A Host of Sporting Books

Posted on April 20, 2011 by Jeffrey Makala

Fores's Sporting Notes, "a quarterly magazine descriptive of British, Indian, Colonial and foreign sport," volume 10, 1893.

We’ve just received the second of two large gifts of books on horses, equestrianism, and field sports from a good friend of our library, Mrs. Janet Harkins of Aiken, SC. Her late husband, William D. “Billy” Haggard III, was an accomplished equestrian and a book collector, and this gift constitutes the bulk of his sporting book collection, comprising British and American works from the 19th and 20th centuries. Mr. Haggard was also a master player of court tennis, or “real tennis”, and his tennis book collection, one of the finest in the country, came to our library in 2004. More information on it, including an online exhibit of highlights from the collection, can be found here.

We will highlight additional books from the Haggard Sporting Books Collection in future posts, but for today I want to focus on the International Equestrian Annual, or L’Annee Hippique (or Das internationale Pferdesportjahr). This multilingual yearbook of the FEI, the Federation Equestre Internationale, is a record of the World Equestrian Games, national competitions, and interviews with major figures in the sport, in all its forms, is hardly representated in American libraries. There are less than 10 runs of it in America. Many of our copies from the 1940s and 50s are still in their original shipping boxes, and are in “as new” condition.

A copy from the late 1940s

"petits ennuis" from the mid-1950s

 

-jm

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A Burns gift book, in a Mauchline Ware binding

Posted on April 7, 2011 by Jeffrey Makala

We’ve recently been given a small, handsome,  Scottish gift book by G. Ross Roy to add to his collection of Robert Burns, Burnsiana, and Scottish Literature. It’s a collection of Burns’s songs printed in Mauchline, Ayrshire (not far from the Burns birthplace at Alloway) in about 1854. The binding is an example of the cottage industry of wooden transferware, most often with a Burns connection, that developed in Mauchine, and known, appropriately enough, as Mauchline Ware.

Mauchline Ware flourished in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, though much earlier examples also exist. Book bindings were one use, though they were generally less common than keepsakes such as small desk accessories or vases. This binding has a full tartan pattern transferred onto it, with an inset Scottish landscape scene. Other binding examples in our collection have transfer portraits of Burns in the center of their wooden boards.

Common to many gift books, this copy has an engraved page with an oval center space for a gift inscription, in this case as a likely birthday gift: “Isabella Anne Ramsden from her affectionate Papa, Sept. 8, 1854 Edinburgh.”

Tom Keith, a friend of our Department and a great collector of Mauchine Ware, recently gave us some of his collection that especially relates to Burns. Here are two examples which show the range of Mauchline Ware items: a small lidded box and a vase. Each has an impression of the Burns cottage birthplace in Alloway and Alloway kirk, featured in Burns’s “Tam O’ Shanter.”

-jm

 

 

 

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“Can we explain the appearance of life upon this planet in terms of science, or only, as in the past, in terms of theology?”

Posted on March 2, 2011 by Jeffrey Makala

A John Burroughs Manuscript

Burroughs late in life, looking very Whitman-like.

John Burroughs (1837-1921), the naturalist, environmental writer, and first biographer of Walt Whitman, continues to play an important role in American writing on nature. Over the course of his long life, he wrote intimately and expansively about the natural world, publishing in numerous American periodicals and collecting his essays into several volumes, gaining him a wide readership. He knew and traveled with Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and John Muir, among others, in the early 20th century.

This newly-acquired manuscript essay of Burroughs’s, “The New Materialism,” is signed and dated by him on October 1913. The essay is in pencil and 18 pages long, and has been bound up as a pamphlet with a fairly-early 20th century  typed transcription of the text interleaved inside.

Burroughs, his companion Clara Barrus, and John Muir (bringing up the rear) in the Grand Canyon, ca. 1909.

As the above quote of the essay’s first sentence attests, this essay is a meditation on the boundaries and limits of theology and natural history, or science. One may have suspected it to have come from his 1915 collection of science and nature essays The Breath of Life, but the text does not match, so perhaps this is an essay from the same time period that was not included in the collection. To date, we have not found a printed source where it appeared.

Burroughs at Muir Glacier, Alaska

This manuscript was purchased from the Irvin endowment, which supports our Darwin and Darwiniana collections, and fits nicely into both the Irvin collection and as a bridge to our 19th century American literature collections, which are especially strong in Whitman and Emerson’s works, and very good in Thoreau and other examples of 19th century American writing on the natural world.

The Ormiston Roy Papers, which are currently being processed, also contain some John Burroughs materials, including letters and manuscripts, and from which these photos of Burroughs are taken. In the future, we will mount a larger John Burroughs exhibition to share his life and works with a larger audience.

-JM

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A New Exhibition, with Audio

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Jeffrey Makala

We’ve just installed “Beyond Domesticity: U.S. Women Writers, 1770-1915,” our first major show in our new gallery. It was curated by Katherine Adams and Cynthia Davis, two English department faculty members, and is a broad – and deep – survey of American womens’ lives and writings during the “long” nineteenth century.

And, there is an audio guide. You can download 5 mp3 files and take the tour anytime our library is open (M-F, 8:30-5:00), or sign out a pre-loaded iPod at our registration desk and take the tour, which is narrated by Professors Adams and Davis.

For more information, and to download, go here and here. Or, scan this QR code into your phone and follow the links to download. Enjoy!

-JM

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A New Acquisition: William Blake’s Illustrations to Robert Blair’s The Grave

Posted on December 9, 2010 by Jeffrey Makala

William Blake, 1757-1827. William Blake’s Watercolour Inventions in Illustration of The Grave by Robert Blair. Edited with Essays and Commentary by Martin Butlin and an Essay on the Poem by Morton D. Paley. Lavenham, Suffolk: The William Blake Trust, 2009. Copy 32 of 186.

The William Blake Trust has been publishing facsimile editions of Blake’s books and illustrations, often in conjunction with the Trianon Press, for over 4 decades. We own most of these limited editions (e.g. Blake’s Book of Job, Book of Los, Jerusalem, his illustrations of Milton, Thomas Gray, and Laocoön, and more) which were either purchased at publication or were acquired as part of other collections like the Wickenheiser Milton collection.

We also own a first edition of The Grave (1743), shown here, and about a dozen eighteenth century editions of the work, along with many later impressions.

The history of Blake’s watercolor illustrations, or “inventions,” is a fascinating one. Blake was paid for 20 illustrations by Robert Cromek, the publisher who was bringing out, in 1808, the first illustrated edition of Blair’s religious poem. They had an understanding that he would also engrave the plates for an additional fee. After completing the watercolors, Blake’s first engraving was rejected, and Cromek brought in the more fashionable engraver Louis Schiavonetti to make the engravings from Blake’s watercolor “inventions.”

Blake's illustrated title page

"Death's Door" in watercolor

Blake's rejected engraving of "Death's Door," reproduced from one of the few surviving copies in a private collection

Schiavonetti's engraving based on Blake's watercolor

The original watercolors were then lost for almost 200 years. They were purchased in a Glasgow bookshop in 2001, and after much legal wrangling, and the failure of their owners to find an institutional purchaser for the group, they were broken up and sold individually at Sotheby’s in 2006. Fortunately, the Blake Trust was able to make high-resolution digital images of them before the sale. Now that the watercolors are dispersed in the market, this edition has now become the authoritative collection and reference to them.

Our copy of Cromek’s 1808 edition is shown below.

-JM

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A Collection of E.D.E.N. Southworth

Posted on December 1, 2010 by Jeffrey Makala

We’ve recently acquired a collection of the works of American author E.D.E.N. Southworth (1819-1899). Active in the latter half of the nineteenth century, “Mrs. Southworth” was the author of some 60 popular novels that were as widely read as the works of Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, or Susan Warner in their time.

Her works were often first serialized, primarily in the New York Ledger, but also in The National Era (the same paper that first serialized Uncle Tom’s Cabin). This group of over 40 novels, some of them first editions, covers the scope of her writing career from the 1850s through some early 20th century reprints. A few are in their original pictorial dust jackets from the ‘teens, which adds to their interest. Recently, there is increased scholarly interest in Southworth’s works, and some of her novels such as Ishmael and The Hidden Hand are still taught in colleges and universities.

Here are some good examples of early 20th century book covers and an early jacket.

-JM

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