Modern Books and Manuscripts

English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) is best remembered for his work on the evolution of plants and animals, including his theory of natural selection. 2009 marks not only the bicentennial anniversary of Darwin’s birth, but also the sesquicentennial anniversary of the publication of his most famous work, On the Origin of Species. “There is grandeur in this view of life,” a new exhibition at Houghton, celebrates the two anniversaries.

Origin first appeared in 1859 and went through six heavily revised editions in Darwin’s lifetime. Literary in style, it appealed to readers of all types in its simple explanations and conversational tone. Although Darwin had no knowledge of how variations in species occurred, the work is mainly a demonstration that they do occur. The work stresses a natural, as opposed to a divine, presence in this process, and it provoked intense debate in both the public and private circles of a very religious society. It remains a highly-regarded and popular work of scientific research, and Darwin’s theories are debated just as heavily today as when they were first published.

The exhibition, on display in Houghtons’ Amy Lowell Room, includes a page from Darwin’s original manuscript, correspondence with friend and Harvard professor of zoology and geology Louis Agassiz, the first and several early editions of the book itself, and a few contemporary reactions to Darwin’s theories.

The exhibition is free and open to the public.  More information can be found on Houghton’s website.

For information on Darwin-related events at Harvard, visit the Darwin Day 200 at Harvard website.

Image: Darwin photographed around 1874 by Leonard Darwin.  Portrait File.   May not be reproduced without permission.

The Library’s traditionally strong holdings of texts in English dialects, particularly dialect poetry, have been further enhanced with the acquisition of the James Stevens-Cox Collection of William Barnes of Dorset. Barnes (1801-1886) was one of those remarkable self-educated Victorian polymaths: schoolmaster, clergyman, philologist, artist, and (most importantly) poet.

Born into a farming family of seven children, Barnes was educated at the village school. His excellent handwriting won him his first job as an engrossing clerk at a solicitor’s office at the age of 13, which marked the end of his formal education. However, determined to further educate and better himself, he pursued music, engraving, classical and modern languages, science, archaeology, and a host of other subjects on his own. He was further spurred to better himself when he fell in love with Julia Miles, the daughter of a supervisor of the excise. Barnes began teaching in 1823, and he and Julia were married in 1827. Julia’s organizing ability, combined with Barnes’s scholarly and teaching accomplishments, made their school flourish; and Barnes published on a wide range of topics, from mathematics to philology to local history to, most importantly, poetry.

Barnes secured his reputation as a poet with the publication of Poems in the Dorset dialect (1844). His admirers included Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Edmund Gosse, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Alfred Tennyson, his Dorset neighbor Thomas Hardy (who edited his Selected Poems) and, in succeeding generations, W.H. Auden, Siegfried Sassoon, and Christopher Ricks. While Barnes did publish poetry in “standard” English, it is his dialect poems that are most admired. As Hardy put it: “…his ingenious internal rhymes, his subtle juxtaposition of kindred lippings and vowel-sounds, show fastidiousness in word-selection that is surprising in verse which professes to represent the habitual modes of language among the western peasantry” (Preface, Selected Poems). Much of his best poetry was inspired by his wife. The poignant “The Wife a-Lost,” written after her death, gives a flavor of his verse, beginning:

Since I noo mwore do zee your feace,
Up steairs or down below,
I’ll zit me in the lwonesome pleace,
Where flat-bough’d beech do grow;
Below the beeches’ bough, my love,
Where you did never come,
An’ I don’t look to meet ye now,
As I do look at hwome.

The Stevens-Cox collection is a near-complete assemblage of Barnes’s scholarly and poetical works, in multiple editions, issues, and binding variants. In addition to Barnes’s published works, it includes some unpublished poems in manuscript, documents, important family letters, proofs of his wood engravings, and photographs, and well as posthumous publications of his poetry. The collection provides the raw materials for a much-needed bibliography of the work of a major, somewhat neglected, nineteenth-century poet.

Manuscripts and images, MS Eng 1647.  Images may not be reproduced without permission.

Researchers should contact the curator to obtain access. A list of items in the collection may be found here.

By examining a reader’s annotations in the margins of a book, it can be possible to obtain insight into what might have influenced that reader’s own writing.   We recently acquired both a copy of J.W. Mackail’s Latin Literature owned and annotated by T.S. Eliot, as well as Allen Ginsberg’s copy of T.S. Eliot’s Collected Poems, in which Ginsberg extensively annotated “The Waste Land.”

Poet, dramatist, Harvard graduate and Nobel Prize winner T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) began to study Latin while a student at Smith Academy from 1898-1905, and continued to study languages, both modern and ancient, through college.  Eliot probably acquired J.W. Mackail’s Latin Literature while studying at Harvard.  While he made few annotations to the text itself, Eliot also made extensive notes in pencil on several blank pages throughout the book.  Eliot’s bookplate is also pasted inside the front cover (Eliot’s bookplate includes his family’s motto Tace et fac, “be silent and act.”)  Examples of Eliot’s early handwriting are uncommon, and as Eliot made extensive use of his linguistic skills within his poetry, it is always interesting to catch a glimpse into his study of them. (Click on the images to magnify them.)

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was one of the most important figures in the Beat movement of the mid-twentieth century.  Two years after graduation from Columbia University, while working in New York as a market researcher, Ginsberg purchased this 1936 edition of Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909-1935, which he signed “Allen Ginsberg / October 1950” on the front free endpaper.  Ginsberg’s extensive annotations to The Waste Land document his efforts to work through the poem.

Mackail, Latin Literature. New York: Scribners, 1895.*AC9.Eℓ464.Zz907m.

Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1935. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. [1936] *AC95.G4351.Zz936e.

Prince Hall (1738-1807), known as the father of Black Freemasonry in the United States, worked as a minister, abolitionist, civil rights activist, and proponent of education for black children.  Details on Hall’s birth and early life are vague; the first record of Hall reveals he was a servant to William Hall of Boston.  Legally a slave (although not in practice), Hall was freed following the Boston Massacre.  As an adult, Hall became a leader within the African-American community of Boston.  In 1775, Hall and fourteen other black men were initiated into Military Lodge No. 441 in Boston, which was then affiliated with the British Army.  Following the Revolution, facing discrimination, (to be initiated into a Lodge, a Mason needs to gain a unanimous vote, but as votes are contributed anonymously, it would be impossible to identify any one dissenting individual), black Masons began urging Hall to organize a separate lodge.  African Lodge #1 was formed as 1776, and Hall continued as Worshipful Master.  In 1848, African Grand Lodges across the country changed their name to the Prince Hall Grand Lodge.  For more information on Hall, see Prince Hall: Life and Legacy, by Charles H. Wesley (1983).

The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University has recently given Houghton a Masonic initiation certificate signed by Hall (above).  Dated June 23, 1799, the certificate initiates abolitionist Richard P.G. Wright, and is signed by George Medallion (SW), Jube Hill (JW) and William Smith (as secretary), and by Hall.  A detail of the document, showing Hall’s signature, is below.

This important document is the latest in a series of gifts from the Du Bois Institute to Houghton Library designed to strengthen Harvard’s increasingly significant research resources for African and African-American history and literature.  Past gifts to Houghton Library have included the papers of playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (*2005M-10); a beautifully illuminated 17th-century Ethiopian manuscript prayerbook; the unique first issue of Fortune’s Freeman; and numerous other rare books and recordings.  Joint purchases have included the papers of Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka; novelists Chinua Achebe and John Edgar Wideman (*1999M-1(b)); writer Albert Murray (*1998M-1), including his correspondence with Ralph Ellison; and several smaller collections (at Houghton), and the June Jordan papers and the Shirley Graham Du Bois papers (at Schlesinger Library) (Links are provided to the finding aids of processed collections).

f MS Am 2642.  Houghton Library, Harvard University.  Images may not be used or reproduced without permission.

José García Villa (1908-1997) grew up in Manila, and as a teenager began to receive attention – both positive and negative – for his poetry. He moved to the United States in 1930 and enrolled at the University of New Mexico, where he founded the literary magazine, Clay, and began to write short stories. He turned back to poetry by the 1940s, playing with formalism, and developed “reversed consonance” and “comma poems,” poetic techniques that drew both contention and critical praise. He worked briefly at the New Directions Publishing Corporation, and beginning in the 1950s, taught and lectured in New York, where he lived until his death. Villa left a large body of work, and is credited with establishing modern writing in English in the Philippines.

Houghton has recently acquired the papers and a collection of the works of Villa, which can be perused on HOLLIS.  Pictured to the left is Villa’s first collection of stories, Footnote to Youth, published in 1933.

PR9550.9.V48 F66 1933. José García Villa, Footnote to Youth. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933. 

In 1785, Jean Jacques Audubon was born in Haiti, the illigitimate son of a French naval officer and his mistress.  Audubon immigrated to the United States at age 18 (anglicizing his name to John James Audubon), and almost immediately began to study its ornithology, hoping to illustrate the birds he observed in a more realistic manner than was common at the time.  His famous work, Birds of America, was published after years of study, from 1840-44.

116 of Audubon’s early drawings, held at Houghton Library and at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, have been published together for the first time in a new publication, Audubon: Early Drawings, available this month from the Harvard University Press.  The drawings are enhanced by an essay on the sources of Audubon’s art by his biographer, Richard Rhodes; transcription of Audubon’s own annotations to the drawings, including information on when and where the specimens were collected; ornithological commentary by Scott V. Edwards, along with reflections on Audubon as scientist; and an account of the history of the Harris collection by Houghton Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts Leslie A. Morris.   More information on the book can be found on the Modern Books & Manuscripts website, the Harvard College Library website, and a slideshow of images from the book may be found here, on the Harvard University Press website.

In the video below, by David Braun of National Geographic, Scott Edwards talks about the book and shows a few of the images:

Image above:  MS Am 21 (88).  Juglane oliveformia. Carolina Parrot in[?] Willow from imitation of colors [?] Psittacus Carolinensis. N.p., 1811 June 9. 1 drawing: watercolor, pastel, graphite, and ink on paper; 43 x 28 cm.

In 1846, while living at Brook Farm (the Transcendentalist utopian experiment in communal living) in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, artist Marianne Dwight (later Orvis) compiled this album of watercolor flower portraits.  Dwight (1816-1901) made a living creating lampshades and paintings, and her detailed punchwork designs can be seen on the cover of the album (click the images to enlarge them):

The album contains twelve paintings of spring and summer flowers.

Pictured below are Lobelia Cardinalis, or Cardinal Flower, for August:

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We are pleased to announce a new online exhibition, “Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200,” based on the 2007 exhibition curated by Christoph Irmscher.

This exhibition seeks to represent Longfellow as he really was: not as the bogeyman of modernists wanting to exorcize the ghosts of their Victorian past, but as a consummate literary professional who became the most popular poet America has ever had. By foregrounding the “private” Longfellow (the drawings made by and for his children, his journals, and letters written by and to him) alongside the international, multilingual and widely-traveled Longfellow, the exhibition demonstrates how Longfellow re-invented poetry as a public forum for everyone’s private feelings and how he consistently challenged the nationalistic distinction between what is typically and purely “American” and all that is not.

More information on the original exhibition, along with a slideshow of images, may be found here.

We recently acquired two very different manuscript library catalogs: one, a list of books purchased for the Reading Society, Benevolent Society, and Sunday School of Bury, Lancashire from 1806-1826, and the second, the catalogue of the Dundas family’s private library at Melville Castle near Edinburgh, compiled in 1862.  Library catalogs often can be much more accurate gauges of what readers actually read than publishers’ records or advertisments.  Of course, it is still difficult to know exactly how readers engaged with what was available. These two catalogs speak quite specifically to their individual audiences.

The records of the Reading Society indicate that writers such as Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Coleridge, and Maria Edgeworth were popular among these readers.  (Unsurprisingly, there is no Shelley, Keats, or Austen…at least, listed as such).  Aside from fiction, many works on travel were collected, along with works of history, biography, science, and even some nonconformist theology.  Many of the books were purchased from B. Crompton, as on the receipt pictured below (click on the images to enlarge them):

The book itself is a ledger-sized volume, with receipts and lists of books purchased affixed to the pages with straight pins. In this page from 1815, such varied works as Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, The Oxford Sausage, and the three-volume Lewis and Clark’s Travels share company.

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Among our recent new acquisitions is a manuscript collection of Anne McCaffrey’s 1977 novel Dragonsinger, the second book in her Harper Hall trilogy and a part of the Dragonriders of Pern series.

McCaffrey, a Radcliffe alum originally from Cambridge, has authored over 90 works.  This collection follows the creation of the novel, originally titled “The Harper of Pern,” to its publication, and includes multiple typescript drafts with McCaffrey’s handwritten corrections, the final draft of the novel, and correspondence with McCaffrey’s editor and agent relating to the publication of the novel.  The collection also includes a first edition of the book (*2008-47).

b *2008M-6.  Purchased with the Amy Lowell Fund. Images may not be reproduced without permission.

This ballad, titled “The Chapter on Pockets,” focuses on an essential item that many of us probably take for granted – the portable, convenient, and discreet pocket.

Crudely printed, rife with spelling errors, and displaying a woodcut of a young woman walking in the countryside, the ballad references such disparate figures as Eve and Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (who mentions the necessity for a chapter on pockets, but in keeping with much of his story, never actually writes one).

This version of the ballad, attributed to George Colman (the Younger, 1762-1836), was printed in London around 1819. Printed on cheap paper, the ballad has remained in remarkably good condition.

Click on the image to enlarge it, or click here to read a clearer text of the poem on Google Books.   For an illustration of the ballad’s popularity, click here to see an 1819 playbill for a performance of the ballad in Edinburgh, from the National Library of Scotland’s Playbills of the Theatre Royal Edinburgh collection.

*EB8.A100.819c.  Purchased with funds from the Amy Lowell Trust.

This broadside, printed with Jack Kerouac’s poem “A Pun for Al Gelpi,” was printed on a handpress here at Harvard by The Lowell-Adams House Printers in 1966. The poem, addressed to Lowell House resident tutor Al Gelpi, refers to a shared joke between Kerouac and Gelpi, explained in this negative print of the poem’s typescript:

One of the scarcest known Kerouac items, this is copy 17 of 100 printed, and is signed by Kerouac at the bottom. The block print was designed by Nicole Hollander.

The Lowell-Adams House Printers, a group of Harvard College students in the mid-1960s, printed poems by many writers, including Noel Coward, Adrienne Rich, and John Updike. A finding aid of their records, held at Houghton, may be viewed here.

*AB95.K4595.966p. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Images may not be reproduced without permission.

This first edition of Mary Custis Vezey’s first collection of poems contains work in Russian and English, as well as translations of Aleksandr Blok and Nikolai Gumilev into English and of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sarah Teasdale, and George Santayana into Russian.

Bilingual poet Mary Custis Vezey (sometimes spelled Mariia Vizi, 1904-1994) was born in New York to a Russian mother and American father. Vezey grew up in St. Petersburg and Harbin, where Vezey’s father published an English-Russian newspaper. As an adult, Vezey lived in Shanghai, and eventually settled in San Francisco in 1973. Vezey published three books of poetry and left many unpublished works following her death at age 90.

Although Vezey has been called (by Olga Bakich, who edited Vezey’s collected works) “the most skilled poet in the group [of women writers in the Russian literary community in Harbin] in terms of her mastery of poetic form,” she still remains relatively unknown.

Vezey presented this copy of her poems to fellow Russian-American writer Margaret Zarudny Freema.

Pictured below is the book’s simple checkered-cloth cover, along with a translation into Russian of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “I Shall Go Back”:

Pictured below are two of Vezey’s own poems, one in Russian, and one in English.

*RC9.V8395.929s. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Images may not be reproduced without permission.

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 is less well known. As a young monk he had copied Syriac manuscripts, and about five of these survive in the Middle East.

Our new acquisition, MS Syriac 192, is a sixth manuscript from Audo’s hand, and the only one recorded in a western library. It was written out by him in 1848, after he had become patriarch. The manuscript is surprising in several respects. It contains a collection of hymns for the feast of Corpus Christi, a western Catholic feast that must have been quite new among the Chaldeans – a liturgical innovation, indeed, that someone with Audo’s reputation might have been expected to resist. The text of the hymns is in Arabic in Syriac letters (known as Karshuni). We know about a set of hymns for Corpus Christi by the 18th-century Syrian Catholic patriarch Mīkhāʾīl Jarwah, and probably that is what Audo has copied. But if so, he took it from a manuscript in the West Syriac script, and copied it into his own East Syriac script. Karshuni in the East Syriac script is very rare and must have looked strange to local readers, if there were any.

Pictured above is the last page of the manuscript, showing the end of the Arabic text and the colophon in Syriac naming the scribe as Yosip Audo Patriarch of Babel, and giving the date Mosul 21 May 1848. (Click on the image to see it in more detail.)

f MS Syriac 192. Purchased with the Daniel D. Chabris Book Fund and the Stanley Marcus Fund. Image may not be used without permission. This post was kindly contributed by Houghton manuscript cataloger Chip Coakley.

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 of the word to mean a calculating instrument, and not a person who calculates data. It was originally patented by Aaron Palmer in 1843, but was updated and improved by J.E. Fuller in 1847. (This model was printed from Palmer’s original plate, and measures 8.5 inches in diameter). The circular slide rule was meant quickly (thus the invocation of the word “telegraphic,” capitalizing on the popularity of that speedy new technology) to calculate square measures, cubic measures, timber, grain, and liquid measures, and interest rates from three to ten percent on a daily and monthly basis. A “Time Telegraph” on the reverse side can be used to calculate the number of days or weeks between any two dates.

To assist those who were wary of the new technology, the Computer was published with lengthy instructions on its use. It went through several editions, and accompanying manuals were printed in succeeding years. An 1852 English edition included a 45-verse poem with the set, attesting to the Computer‘s popularity:

Progressive men of every nation,
To business in any station,
We bring a true good working scale,
A right good test – it cannot fail. […]

Six copies of this work have been
Ordered by England’s worthy Queen;
Orders for other six were sent
From British Houses of Parliament.

Now if only it could download music…

*AC85.F9588.852f. Purchased with the Will Andrewes Book Fund. Images may not be reproduced without permission.

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 pen to paper as a translator of Faust.” No contemporary translation of the work contains Coleridge’s name, and many scholars have puzzled over the possible existence of this translation.

A recent critical edition of Faustus, reviewed in February in the Times Literary Supplement, claims to have solved the mystery. In 1814, Coleridge was approached by Byron’s publisher, John Murray, to translate Faust. He worked at the translation for a little over a month, and then abandoned the project out of frustration. Following the publication of two very successful editions of the work in 1820, the editors surmise, Coleridge must have been inspired to take up the project again. The 1821 edition matches his poetic style very closely, however, it was published anonymously.

Soon after this review appeared in TLS, various reactions appeared from scholars arguing against the attribution, claiming it to be based too much on conjecture. (For more on the arguments of both sides, the “Friends of Coleridge” website has collected a list of reviews and responses to the new translation.) Dr. James Engell, Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, believes the following: “My opinion is that the verse in it–most of it though not perhaps all of it–is very likely [Coleridge’s], a strong attribution by Burwick and McKusick. The prose summaries of the untranslated parts are probably not by [Coleridge], nor the prose introduction, though he may have directed the prose introduction’s sense of delicate subjects, tastes of the two countries, etc.”

In the midst of this scholarly fervor, we acquired a copy of the contested 1821 translation. The edition includes twenty-six plates engraved by Henry Moses after Friedrich August Moritz Retzsch’s well-known ‘outlines’. (The idea for this edition in the first place came from the successful 1820 publication of the plates by themselves.)

f*EC8.C6795.821f. Purchased with the Norton Perkins Memorial Fund and the Amy Lowell Trust. Images may not be reproduced without permission.

“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 found a home at Houghton.

This new four-page manuscript, most likely written ca. 1873, was probably sent to her friend and future editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whose wife, Mary Thacher Higginson, transcribed it (the transcription is now at the Boston Public Library in the Higginson Papers).Ralph Franklin believed that the original had been sent to Higginson along with a note and three other poems (see Fr 796); but the new autograph is on different paper (watermarked “A. Pirie and Sons 1871”) than the three still in the Higginson Papers (BPL MS Am 1093 (48), (40), and (50)).Higginson also refers to this poem in a letter to his co-editor Mabel Loomis Todd (1891 May 13); this, in combination with the transcript, makes it seem probable that the present manuscript was at one time in his possession.

But how did it leave his possession? The details of the manuscript’s provenance are not yet fully established, but it seems likely that Higginson gave it to Gretchen Osgood (Mrs. Fiske) Warren (1868-1961), whom he would have known through the Museum of Fine Arts.The present manuscript, reputedly from Mrs. Fiske Warren’s estate, appeared for sale at Skinner’s in Boston on 10 November 2001.

Houghton Library holds a variant of this poem, sent by Dickinson to her sister-in-law Susan (Houghton MS Am 1118.3 (356)), which begins “The Wind begun to knead the Grass.”Now possible to view the two side by side, the manuscripts bring home to students and experienced textual scholars alike the physicality of Dickinson’s continual reworking of her poems, and her distribution of them to her friends.

The poem was written on one piece of paper folded in half. The first image below shows pages 4 and 1, and the second image shows pages 2 and 3. (Click on the images to see more detail.)

This version of the poem reads:

The Wind begun to rock the Grass
With threatening Tunes and low –
He flung a Menace at the Earth –
A Menace at the Sky –

The Leaves unhooked themselves from Trees
And started all abroad –
The Dust did scoop itself like Hands
And throw away the Road –

The Wagons quickened on the streets –
The Thunder hurried slow –
The Lightning showed a yellow Beak –
And then a livid Claw –

The Birds put up the Bars to Nests –
The Cattle fled to Barns –
There came one drop of Giant Rain
And then as if the Hands

That held the Dams – had parted hold
The Waters Wrecked the Sky –
But overlooked My Father’s House –
Just quartering a Tree –

MS Am 1118.7 (2007M-74). © The President and Fellows of Harvard College. Purchased with the Dickinson Collection Fund. Images may not be reproduced without permission.

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 la Guerra, La Novela Proletaria, Teatro Político, and Panorama Literario Español e Hispano-Americano. Cenit published translations of works by authors such as Sherwood Anderson, Hermann Hesse, Karl Marx, and Leon Trotsky, as well as original works by Spanish authors. Close attention was paid to the typography, format, and cover design of the books as well, to create a complete, artistic reading experience.

We recently acquired a collection of 68 Cenit publications, four of which are pictured below. All four covers were designed by Julio Puyol. Clockwise from left:

*SC9.C3327.930r. C.F. Ramuz, Cumbres Espanto. 1930.
*SC9.C3327.930h2. Hermann Hesse, Demian. 1930.
*SC9.C3327.930c2. Ferreira de Castro, Emigrantes. 1930.
*SC9.C3327.931f. Lion Feuchtwanger, La Duquesa Fea. 1931.

Cenit’s logo, printed in colors corresponding to the cover design on the back of each book, can be seen here:

*2007C-1 — *2007C-68. Purchased with the Bennett Hubbard Nash Fund, the Harmand Teplow Class of 1920 Fund, and the Andrew Preston Peabody Fund. Images may not be reproduced without permission.

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 collection came all of Cozzens’s published works, in multiple editions. The collection was formed by Cozzens’s bibliographers, Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli, who have additionally given Houghton Cozzens’s library.

Cozzens, who attended Harvard from 1922-1924, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1949 for Guard of Honor, inspired by his experiences during World War II. Cozzens wrote thirteen additional novels and numerous short stories.

The collection includes numerous editions of all of Cozzens’s works, including Guard of Honor and By Love Possessed. Pictured below are four different editions of Guard of Honor. Starting in the upper right corner, and going clockwise, these include: the 1998 Modern Library edition; an advance copy of the 1948 first American edition; a 1952 Permabooks paperback (priced at 35 cents!); and the 1949 first British edition of the novel. (Click on the image twice to enlarge it.)

Cozzens Papers, *2007M-69. Individual books will be in HOLLIS shortly. Purchased with funds from the Amy Lowell Trust. Image may not be reproduced without permission.

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 with his seductive model, and ultimately is destroyed by her. Partly based on his own experiences, Daudet wrote it as a cautionary tale for his sons. He was already suffering from the effects of a syphilitic paralysis that would eventually kill him.

This edition, a beautiful example of late 19th-century English publishing, contains thirty wood engravings from designs by Louis Montegut.

*FC8.D2646.Eg886s. Purchased with the Roger Stoddard Book Fund. Images may not be reproduced without permission.