A recent discovery of facsimile leaves, printed on vellum in the 1560s to supply a lack in an incunable, nicely illustrates the benefits of collaborative research in the internet era. The copy in question is Coriolanus Cepio, Petri Mocenici imperatoris gesta (Venice: Bernhard Maler, Erhard Ratdolt, and Peter Löslein, 1477), Inc 4369 (Walsh 1730; Goff C-378).

Renzo, who is working on Erhart Ratdolt, a 15th-century printer in Venice (and later in Augsburg), noticed an anomalous initial in a work printed by Ratdolt and his partners – an initial not like any other he had seen in Ratdolt’s work – as well as other curious features. The initial appears on leaf e4v of Cepio’s work; the Houghton copy is a handsome one, printed on vellum. (Only one other vellum copy is known, that from the library of King George III, in the British Library.) Comparison of the Houghton copy with the one digitized by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich and linked from ISTC substantiated the first impression, which was then verified by the images of the two copies preserved at the Library of Congress promptly supplied by Daniel DeSimone, the Curator of the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection. Since Renzo’s current focus is on Ratdolt’s edition of Euclid and its illustrations, he did not pursue the matter, but handed a note about his discovery to the Houghton reading room staff, who passed it on expeditiously.

The note soon made its way to John, who was thought to be the appropriate person to follow up. He is working with James Walsh’s monumental catalogue of Harvard’s fifteenth-century books, supplemented by his own observations, to add information about each copy to a union data base, Material Evidence in Incunabula (MEI), sponsored by the Consortium of European Research Libraries. That resource brings together records of a variety of evidence for the history of individual copies – provenance, rubrication, illumination, annotation, binding, and the like.

The edition of Cepio’s work is a quarto gathered in eights. The leaves in quesition, e4 and e5, are a conjugate bifolium at the center of a gathering. John noted (as Renzo had, though without having mentioned it in his note) that the type with which leaves e4 and e5 were printed was different from that used in the rest of the volume, though it was close enough that it would not have been apparent to the casual reader.

The following week, John and Renzo happened to be in the Houghton reading room at the same time, viewed the volume again, and agreed that the type appeared to be somewhat later than that used by Ratdolt, based on the forms of certain characters. Also, Renzo pointed out that there was a blind impression of the type of the outer forme (e4r-e5v), slightly out of register with the inked text, and John noticed that there are two faint appearances of the text on the inner forme (e4v-e5r), also out of register, but apparently without an impression into the vellum.

At this point, it seemed clear that the leaves had been added at a later date, replacing the original leaves, which may have been lost or damaged (there is some damage to a couple of other leaves in the volume). But we couldn’t go any further.

Thanks to Houghton’s enlightened photography policy, John was immediately able to take a few photographs (with his trusty pocket-size Canon camera, which has macro capability and high resolution), and send them off to Oliver at the headquarters of the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, a central node for all things incunabular. In the past, Oliver had worked wonders in type identification, and he came through again.

Within a few days, Oliver replied:

The initial was used in Venetian books of the 1560s. According to the brilliant catalogue of the Inconaboli & Cinquecentine … della Bibliotheca Capitolare d’Ivera, ed. by Bruno Giglio and Ilo Vignono (Bologna, 1989), No. 220, it was used in: Javelli, Giovanni Crisostomo. Diuinae et christianae moralis philosophiae institutiones. Venice: Andrea Arrivabene, 1566, fol. 25v.

Following this hint, I found the initial in an unsigned Venetian imprint of 1561, cf. http://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/…

The larger type, used in the prologue of this work, seems to be the type of your bifolium. But the type was—and the initial may have been—used by more than one printer. So, my guess is, that the bifolium was printed in Venice c. 1565, but it would be very daring to identify the printer.

As there seems to be no Latin edition of the Cepio in the 1560s, I suppose, that the bifolium was indeed a 16th century attempt to fix the imperfect copy, rather than part of a lost page-by-page reprint of the older Ratdolt edition.

So although we still can only conjecture why there is a blind impression on one side of the leaves, and an (offset?) appearance of the text on the other, it seems pretty clear that a Venetian owner of the volume – which, as a copy printed on vellum, would have even then been something of a collector’s item, the more so because Ratdolt’s partnership very rarely printed on vellum – had the means and access to a printer that allowed him to fill a gap in this copy. Surely this early owner valued highly this volume despite its modest size, and perhaps would have shared the judgment of Alpheus Hyatt Mayor, who deemed Ratdolt “the most inventive printer after Gutenberg.”

This appears to be a rare survival – there are many instances of lacunae in copies of incunabula being filled by manuscript insertions, and a few instances of much later typeset leaves being provided for the purpose, when incunabula (even copies on paper) had become almost completely collectibles rather than books to be read, but casual inquiry among a few knowledgeable friends has not elicited any other instances of 16th-century type-facsimile completion of an imperfect volume. If any readers of this account know of one, please let us know!

Unfortunately, there are no clues to the early ownership. The volume was rebound in the 19th century (albeit quite handsomely) in full green morocco, edges gilt, with yellow silk doublures, probably for Sir John H. Thorold, whose Syston Park bookplate is in the volume. In the sale of his library in 1884, the volume sold for £5/10/-; it was purchased by Harvard in 1918.

Postscript: John mentioned the find to Eric White, Curator of Special Collections at Southern Methodist University, a leading scholar of incunabula. Eric responded shortly thereafter with a citation to what seems almost certainly a reference to this copy in 1824, mentioning the reprinted leaves.

The citation is to J. B. Van Praet’s Catalogue des livres imprimés sur vélin… Bibliothèque du Roi, vol. 4 Supplément (Paris, 1828), which on pp. 118-19 mentions what seems likely to be our copy:

80. Coriolani Cepionis de rebus gestis Petri Mocenici libri III. Venetiis, Bernardus Pictor et Erhardus Ratdolt, 1477, petit in-4. Un autre exemplaire, avec deux feuillets réimprimés, se trouve indiqué dans la Catalogue des Livres de MM. Payne et Foss, 1824, in-8. p. 131, no. 2819.

Eric thought the reference was most likely to Payne and Foss, Catalogue of Books in Foreign Languages. Now on Sale…, 1824. The only copy located by WorldCat or any other on-line source is at the National Library of Scotland, and Robert Betteridge, Rare Books Curator there, has confirmed that the entry in that catalogue reads:

2819 CEPIONIS (Coriolani), de gestis Petri Mocenici Imperatoris,
Libri III. a rare book printed upon vellum, two leaves in the
middle are reprinted.
4to. Venetiis, per Bernhardum Pictorem et Erhardum Ratdolt, 1477

So it would seem that what was known to a careful observer almost two hundred years ago was lost in the meantime, only to be rediscovered in the 21st century.

Post-postscript: Shortly thereafter, John discovered a record for a bound collection of Payne and Foss catalogues in the Harvard (Houghton) Depository, which includes the relevant 1824 catalogue – but the catalogues were not given individual records, simply a collective one: “[Catalogues of books for sale, London, Eng.]”

Mr. Fletcher designed the costumes for four Star Trek films. The first installment’s director, Robert Wise, tasked him with overhauling the garish, improbable wardrobe of the original series, shot back when color broadcasts were a novelty and networks were eager to make their expensive equipment seem to pay for itself. Wise feared that the old bright uniforms would crowd out everything else on the big screen. Besides, he wanted the 1979 motion picture to look more “science fact” than science fiction. Fletcher answered with streamlined costumes in muted hues—and more of them—to add variety when a set change on the Enterprise was not possible. He militarized the Starfleet, outfitting the crew in dress attire, Class A and B uniforms, fatigues, and lounge suits; altered the familiar breast insignias; and created an elaborate system of shoulder tabs, emblems, and armbands (complete with “pips” and “squeaks” ) to denote rank, commendations, and years of service.

These he set down in an 18-page guide intended to prevent chaos in Paramount’s wardrobe department. Later it was released to “Trekkies” whose appetite for minutiae proved insatiable. Judging from the fan letters among Mr. Fletcher’s papers, he was all too happy to oblige. A companion jumpsuit construction manual by Jim Brooks—also part of the Fletcher collection—gives costumers the information necessary to make a suit which will be “for all intents and purposes    . . . almost indistinguishable” from those on-screen. Fans went wild. They invited Fletcher to speak at sci-fi gatherings and costume-cons and inducted him into their clubs’ local chapters. One politely complained to Fletcher that his explanation of the Vuclan symbols on Spock’s costume was “not logical” and took him to task for giving Chekov four pips and Kirk only three. (This letter was not stardated or typed on franchise stationery like many of the others.)

Beyond the crew, Fletcher was responsible for peopling the Star Trek universe. He made over the Klingons at creator Gene Roddenberry’s urging, giving them their distinctive spiny forehead and feudal armor. In addition to finished designs in the collection, there are dozens of pencil sketches, costume patches, a draft script for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a story concept for the third feature titled “Return to Genesis,” wardrobe budgets, production schedules, office memos, correspondence, fan magazines, and newsletters.

For three decades before his association with Star Trek up to the present day, Robert Fletcher has lent his prodigious energies to stage, opera, film, and television productions too numerous to list here. The Star Trek materials (call number *2004MT-81) represent a fraction of his generous gifts, and we would be amiss to neglect mention of his other credits—work which, though it circulates in narrower circles, has won wider acclaim. In 2008, at age 87, Fletcher was honored with the Theatre Development Fund Irene Sharaff Lifetime Achievement Award. He has also received three Tony and one Emmy Award nominations for his work in Little Me (1963), High Spirits (1964), Hadrian VII (1969), and “North and South II” (1986).

[Thanks to Dale Stinchcomb, Curatorial Assistant in the Harvard Theatre Collection, for contributing this post.]

The first is a card game (call number pFB7.L5633.G800g) based on the classic picaresque novel L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane by Alain Rene Le Sage, first published in 1715. Houghton already holds a set of cards from the same publisher for a parallel game based on Don Quixote, but this item is especially exciting in that the cards are still uncut on their original sheet, and beautifully hand-colored.

The second is a 1790 Hamburg edition of the work best known today as The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, here published as Gulliver Revived: or, the Vice of Lying Properly Exposed (call number EC75.R1847M.1789). The stories, which bear little connection to the historical Baron Münchhausen, have made his name synonymous with wildly improbably tall tales. All the early editions of Baron Munchausen are rare, and this one is significant for being the first English-language edition published in Germany. It has a number of charming illustrations, some of which have been colored in this copy.

[John Overholt, Curator of the Donald and Mary Hyde Collection of Samuel Johnson and Early Modern Books and Manuscripts, contributed this post.]

Boston’s Crusade Against Slavery features objects from the extraordinary collection at Houghton Library to highlight the city’s role in the international fight for freedom. Each case focuses on a theme connecting Boston to the larger crusade against slavery: Haiti and Toussaint Louverture; An Age of Compromise and Crises, 1820-60; Militant Boston; Music as Memory; Female Emancipators; Concord’s Response to John Brown; the Saturday Club; and an introductory case that spotlights Boston’s abolitionist leaders. Each object constitutes an important marker in the crusade. Many are on display for the first time, such as this 1862 Cambridge recruitment broadside, and have rarely, if ever, been analyzed by scholars.

The exhibition has been co-curated by Harvard students under the direction of John Stauffer, Professor of English, African and African American Studies, and History of American Civilization; and in conjunction with the public symposium, Freedom Rising, a three-day event commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and African American military service. The exhibition will remain on view in the Edison and Newman Room, Houghton Library, through August 23rd, 2013; an online version is forthcoming.

For details contact Peter X. Accardo at  accardo at fas.harvard.edu.

Image (click to enlarge): “Cambridge to the rescue” (Boston, Mass., 1862): broadside. US 13207.4.20*F – No source, no date.

Founded in 1885 in Baltimore, this innovative circulating library was intended for the employees of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Books were delivered to users wherever they were located on the Baltimore and Ohio lines within a day of their request.*

At some point, the present copy was deaccessioned (surely when the library was closed in 1931) and was acquired by Samuel Green (1910-1995), art professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Perhaps it was Green, a water colorist and painter in his own right, who upon reading Jewett’s book, illustrated his copy with pen and ink drawings of the Maine scenery. Drawings have been pasted at the head of each chapter while others have been inserted within the book.

Finally, the original front and end papers have been entirely covered with drawings.

None of them are signed but they clearly were made by a fine draughtsman and a lover of Maine. Later Samuel Green gave his extra-illustrated copy of Country By-Ways to his friend Philip Hofer “because he loves Maine”, as Green explained in his dedicatory note. This book came to the Houghton Library in 1984 as a part of the Hofer bequest.

*My thanks to John Buchtel for having shared with me his work on the “Baltimore and Ohio Employes’ [sic] Free Circulating Library”.

[Thanks to Caroline Duroselle-Melish, Assistant Curator of Printing & Graphic Arts, for contributing this post.]

The proof score has two separate first pages of music. The page whose paper matches the body of the score (above) while bound second in the score, is clearly the first iteration of the proof. The corrections indicated in the 2nd clarinet part, and the “s” to be added to “2 Trompettes à piston…” as well as the manuscript note at the head of the page are all realized in the proof (below) which is bound first in the score.

On this iteration of the proof we see many other corrections apparently in the hand of Meyerbeer himself, which are then realized in the first edition (below). But most interestingly, we find a note from that rarest of beings, a music proof-reader! Monsieur Lard worked for the publisher Maurice Schlesinger, and in Meyerbeer’s case some documentation of their collaboration exists in the form of correspondence, as well as in Meyerbeer’s diaries. This extraordinary score provides us with the opportunity to see some of the details which go into the creation of a published score (see below). As well as copious annotations throughout the score, bound-in at the beginning of the score are also four pages of Meyerbeer’s manuscript additions, mostly concerning a table of contents.

This is the first page of music in the first edition of Les Huguenots, from a score donated to Houghton by John M. Ward. The corrections raised in the image above have been made, even the change in the middle of the page from the French word “parole” to the word “mot,” which had stuck particularly in Professor Cuthbert’s mind from his discovery of the score. In comparing it to the two above, we can see the progress through the course of proof-reading, as well as a glimpse into the business world of music publishing. I’m grateful to the professor for having pointed this wonderful score out to me!

[Thanks to Andrea Cawelti, Ward Music Cataloger, for contributing this post.]

M. F. Force Papers, 1875-1892 (MS AmW 77)

Marian Hannah Winter and Rose Winter Memorial Collection of Prints, ca. 1637-1975 (MS Thr 949)

George Richard Blinn Toy Theater Collection, Undated (MS Thr 953)

Ralph McGoun Toy Theater Collection, 1946-1949 (MS Thr 954)

E. Raymond Ellis Toy Theater and Puppetry Collection, 1823-1949 (MS Thr 957)

 
Processed by Christina Linklater and Melanie Wisner:
Songster Collection, ca. 1780-1910 (TCS 89)

In his Times Literary Supplement review (February 1, 2013) of the latest edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the rival Yale Book of Quotations (2006), provides some general background information on the history of the BFQ publishing phenomenon, now in its 18th edition. Long thought “to have been drawn from his extensive reading, prodigious memory and a commonplace book,” John Bartlett’s original self-published collection (Cambridge, 1855) in fact relied substantially in form and content (and title) on an immediate predecessor.

Another source was revealed in an article in the Harvard Library Bulletin in 2003, in which Michael Hancher demonstrated that Bartlett’s compilation was heavily derivative of a book published in 1853 in London by John Murray, Handbook of Familiar Quotations Chiefly from English Authors. Bartlett, Hancher shows, borrowed many of the quotations in the Handbook, similarly favoured short verse passages, included the term “familiar quotations” in his title, expressed ambitions in his preface echoing those in the earlier book’s preface, used the same chronological organization, and had a comparable index. “Even the running heads look the same. Probably Bartlett had his printer, Metcalf and Company, model his book on Murray’s.” Hancher determined that the editor of Handbook of Familiar Quotations was Isabella Rushton Preston, an Englishwoman about whom almost nothing else is known.

Shapiro’s adroit summary captures the argument of the HLB article, but leaves for further investigation the richness of the documentation and detail in the piece. Michael Hancher, Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, published his handsomely illustrated article, “Familiar Quotations,” in HLB, n.s. vol. 14, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 13-53. That issue included an additional study of BFQ by Michael David Cohen, then a doctoral candidate in the Department of History, Harvard University: “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations: ‘A Glancing Bird’s Eye View’ by a ‘Morbid Scholiast,’” (pp. 55-74).

These little books, cheaply produced and modestly priced, mixed traditional pieces of music with popular favorites in a handy pocket-sized format, throwing in recipes, magic tricks and jokes for good measure.

Owing to the ephemeral nature of the genre there are few large collections of songsters; Harvard’s collection was amassed over time, from different sources. These songsters are cataloged in a single finding aid, not item by item like, for instance, the comparable collection of songsters at Brown University’s John Hay Library. The presentation of the Harvard songsters on a single page allows an unusually comprehensive view of the genre. Some observations yielded by this synthesis:
• The absence of musical notation is generally considered to be a hallmark of the nineteenth-century songbook, yet nearly 200 of the 1137 items in this collection do contain musical notation.
• Group singing appears to have played an important part of mid-nineteenth-century political campaigns; several dozen of these songsters were issued by supporters of Abraham Lincoln, for instance.
• Despite an abundance of titles implying a bucolic Southern origin (Bryant’s Essence of Old Virginny, White’s New Book of Plantation Melodies, Rose of Alabama), all but four of the United States publishers identified were located in northern cities such as Boston, New York and Philadelphia.

The collection is not limited to Americana. There are examples of the genre’s eighteenth-century British forerunner, the ballad chapbook. These two tiny copies of The Cheerful Warbler, published in Kent, are small enough to fit comfortably into a child’s hand.

French and German songbooks are also represented in the collection. These lack the colorful paper covers of their American counterparts, and they are much shorter, usually just 4 or 8 rather than 32 or 64 pages. Their content is also noticeably more retrospective. A series of Alte Lieder fürs Landvolk is undated but identified as collected by “Adam Konturner,” a pseudonym for Konrad Mautner (1880-1924), an Austrian scholar of Alpine vocal forms. The first song in the series, “Das Gambslanschiassn is mein Freid,” features a yodeling chorus and old-fashioned Fraktur typography. Its two-part harmony, while printed from movable type, is so elegantly rendered as to appear engraved.

[Thanks to Christina Linklater, Project Music Cataloger, for contributing this post.]

Houghton Library has mounted an exhibition curated by Proulx, “Private Proust: Letters and Drawings to Reynaldo Hahn” (at the Library’s Amy Lowell Room through April 28th). Other exhibitions include turn-of-the-century photographs from the Harvard Art Museums at the Mather House SNLHTC Gallery, and selections from the Harvard Art Museums’ remarkably Proustian collection of paintings and drawings at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum and in an online exhibition.

There is also a concert, and films. Proust is in the curriculum as well, with French 165, Marcel Proust. For a full description of events, and the conference program, visit http://www.proust-arts.com/

Photo caption: Marcel Proust, [A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs]. Corrected proofs (detail), [Paris, 1918?] Houghton p FC9 P9478 918aab. Included in the exhibition Private Proust: Letters and Drawings to Reynaldo Hahn, in the Amy Lowell Room, Houghton Library, through April 28th.

This post is part of a series called “What’s New.” Throughout the year, Houghton staff members will be blogging about new acquisitions and newly digitized materials. All posts associated with this series may be viewed by clicking on the What’sNew tag.

[Thanks to Leslie Morris, Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, for contributing this post.]