Modern Books and Manuscripts

Yosip Audo (1790-1878), ‘Patriarch of Babylon’ 1847-78, was primate of the Eastern-rite Catholic church known as the Chaldean Church, in what is now Iraq. Audo is remembered in church history for his repeated attempts – always frustrated by Rome – to assert his jurisdiction over the ‘Syro-Malabar’ church in India. As a literary figure, Audo [...]

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If your gadgets are on the fritz, or you just feel like technology is taking over your life, let Fuller’s Computing Telegraph take you back to a simpler time of slide rules and mental arithmetic (and don’t worry, the irony of blogging about this isn’t lost on me):

This “computer” is one of the earliest uses [...]

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In an 1820 letter to his son, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe stated that English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was hard at work translating Goethe’s closet drama Faust. Coleridge and his friends, however, openly expressed dislike for the German poet, and in 1834, Coleridge wrote, “I need not tell you that I never put [...]

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“The Wind begun to rock the Grass,” by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is one of the most textually interesting in her corpus. She revised it over a period of nearly twenty years, and five versions survive: four in autograph, and one transcript of a lost autograph original. That “lost” original has now been recovered, and has [...]

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Casa Editorial Cenit was a leading independent radical publishing house that operated in Madrid from 1928-1936, a turbulent period in Spanish history. It was founded in an effort to educate the impoverished, disenfranchised masses, and bring democratic values to a new republic.
Cenit published works in thematic groups, such as Crítica Social, La Novela de [...]

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We recently acquired a comprehensive collection of material by and relating to American novelist and almost-Harvard-graduate James Gould Cozzens (1903-1978). The collection includes a selection of Cozzens’s correspondence, manuscript drafts, photographs, and diaries, including the diary he kept while a Harvard student, and while he was working on his first novel, Confusion. With this [...]

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Popular French novelist Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897) first published his realist novel Sapho: moeurs parisiennes in 1884. Two years later, Henry Vizetelly published this first English translation of the work in London. (Vizetelly would later gain notoriety for his nearly-unexpurgated English translations of Emile Zola’s novels.)
In the novel, a young artist falls in love [...]

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Alfred Tennyson first published his poem “Sea Dreams. An Idyll” in Macmillan’s Magazine in its January 1860 issue (for which he was paid between £250 and £300, an enormous sum for a single poem). We recently acquired the page proofs for this printing of the poem, with numerous manuscript annotations by Tennyson. [...]

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