RBC Books Go to the Museum 

The North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) in Raleigh has borrowed six volumes from the Rare Book Collection for their current exhibition, Glory of Venice: Renaissance Paintings 1470-1520. Four of the books date from the Incunabula period, the first fifty years of printing with moveable type, 1450-1501. This group of volumes included a copy of Summa theologicae pars quarta by Antoninus (1480), La Commedia by Dante (1491), Aristophanis Comoediae novem by Aristophanes (1498), and Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499). Two slightly later Renaissance volumes, also printed in Venice, include Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturale di Caio Plinio Secondo (1510) and Hamishah humshe Torah (1533), also known as The Five Books of Moses, with Prophets and Hagiography. These books, printed in Venice and illustrated with woodcuts or painted miniatures, reflect the publishing and printing innovations happening in the city during the period represented by the exhibition’s paintings.

Loaning materials from the Rare Book Collection (or any of the Library’s special collections) is part of our outreach and research mission, and this arrangement with the NCMA is a particularly good example of how this kind of collaboration is beneficial. The choice of these six books was made after extensive research in Wilson Library’s reading room by the exhibition’s co-curator, Lyle Humphrey, and the page openings to be shown in the exhibition were also selected. The next step in a loan of this type was for the Library’s conservators to evaluate the condition of the volumes, carry out any minor repairs that might be necessary for safe display on the bindings or leaves, and to construct custom-fit supports for each of the volumes to remain open to the selected pages for the duration of the exhibition.

The books and the custom supports, referred to as cradles, were picked up by the NCMA art handlers and taken to the museum in advance of the day for installation of the books in the gallery. On Monday, February 27, 2017, the Library’s conservators and our colleague from Duke’s Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which was also lending books, went to the Museum to install the collection materials.

 

 

 

After associating each book with the specific cradle made for it, we stabilized the placement of the pages with narrow strips of polyethylene plastic to be certain that the pages remained open at the correct place.

Rebecca Smyrl, Assistant Conservator for Special Collections, placing a book in its custom-fit cradle
Henry Hébert, Conservator at Duke’s Rubenstein Library, strapping a volume from Duke in its cradle
Jan Paris, Head of Conservation for Special Collections, securing one of the UNC volumes in its cradle
Digital image of two pages of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, considered by many to be the most beautiful book of the Venetian Renaissance, was produced by the printer Aldus Manutius and includes 120 woodcuts. Because only two pages of a book can be seen in the static display of an exhibit case, the curator has included a digital surrogate of the entire volume on an iPad nearby, so visitors can see all of the visually arresting illustrations in this book.

Installation complete!

Once all of the books were placed correctly and strapped for stability on their cradles, the vitrines that protect the volumes on display were installed. The books will return to the Rare Book Collection in a few months. Until then, Glory of Venice will be open at the North Carolina Museum of Art’s Meymandi Exhibition Gallery from March 4, 2017 – June 18, 2017.

 

This post was written by Jan Paris, Head of Conservation for Special Collections, Wilson Library

Recent Acquisitions feature: The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque: A Game

This is the first in a series of posts featuring items that will be on display during the Rare Book Collection’s Recent Acquisitions Evening on March 22.

The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque: A Game is a parlor game based on William Combe’s satirical poem The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque.

Combe’s poem skewered the aesthetic ideal of the picturesque, which was ascendant at the time of the poem’s publication in 1809. Lovers of the picturesque prized rustic, natural, and asymmetrical scenes that reconciled the tension between the beautiful and the sublime. English writer, artist, and educator William Gilpin articulated the notion of the picturesque in a 1768 essay and depicted it in sketches that often featured ruins in the English countryside.

The picturesque ideal caught on like wildfire among England’s educated and moneyed classes, who had increasing access to the countryside with the expansion of railroads. Soon England’s Lake District filled with tourists observing and sketching rustic scenes.

Penrith Castle in 1772 from William Gilpin’s book on Cumberland and Westmoreland.

As with any cultural movement that captures the public imagination so completely, the picturesque and its devotees became ripe for satire at the height of its popularity. With his poem The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque, writer William Combes seemed to relish the opportunity.

Originally published with humorous caricatures by artist Thomas Rowlandson, the poem depicted a Don Quixote-style “hero,” probably modeled on Gilpin. The character Dr. Syntax undertakes a series of adventures in which he’s so blinded by his quest for picturesque scenery that he falls victim to all manners of peril.

The poem itself became wildly popular, becoming the subject of a variety of cultural adaptations. One of them is this parlor game.

With a complicated set of instructions (“The lines refer to the picture whose number is next in rotation. Namely No 1 card refers to No 2 picture…”) and a colorful teetotum to spin, the game is a fantastic example of literature adapted as a board game.


This and many other intriguing items will be on display at the Rare Book Collection’s Recent Acquisitions Evening, a not-under-glass display of some of the Collection’s notable acquisitions. We hope you’ll join us on March 22 for the unique opportunity to see these incredible items up close.

Recent Acquisitions Evening 2017

We’re excited to announce that the Rare Book Collection will host its biannual Recent Acquisitions Evening on March 22. The event, a not-under-glass display, is a unique opportunity to closely examine some of the notable items we’ve acquired in the past two years.

William Webb, A Record of my Journey from London Bridge to Berlin Thence to Persia via The Baltic Volga & Caspian Sea. Printing Office of the Royal College of Teheran, Persia. [1870].

This year’s event features important works on the history of printing, books that invite interaction between viewer and object, and a number of items that challenge the traditional meaning of the word book. The Rare Book Collection’s global focus will also be emphasized, with books printed in London, Mexico City, Cameroon, Paris, Augsberg, Tehran, Saigon, Rome, Mexico, Nigeria, and more.

One item of particular note that will be on display is the Library’s eight-millionth volume, presented by the Hanes Family Foundation.

In the weeks leading up to the event, we’ll feature a selection of these items on the blog — but nothing compares to seeing them in three dimensions, so we hope you’ll join us!

The Rare Book Collection Recent Acquisitions Evening takes place Wednesday, March 22, 2017 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the Fearrington Reading Room. The event is free and open to the public.

Visitors will also have the opportunity to visit the exhibition World on Fire in Flames of Blood: Narratives of the Russian Revolution, which features materials from the RBC’s André Savine Collection.


Recent Acquisitions 2017 blog features

Mansfield Park: Texts and Contexts

IMG_1877June 16–19, 2016, marked the fourth annual Jane Austen Summer Program (JASP) at UNC, a yearly event that brings students, scholars, and fans of Austen from across the country for a weekend-long immersion in one of Austen’s novels. JASP’s sophomore rare book exhibition, along with new events at the Ackland Art Museum and the Chapel of the Cross, drew guests to the University of North Carolina’s main campus. The program’s opening thus became an exciting opportunity for patrons to experience many of UNC’s impressive historical repositories.

Mansfield Park: Texts and Contexts,” a one-day exhibition of rare materials drawn from Wilson Library’s Rare Book Collection, was curated by graduate students Rachael Isom and Taras Mikhailiuk, both of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, and featured a special guest label contributed by UNC undergraduate Jacqueline Leibman. With the generous help of Wilson Library staff, we collected 22 items that not only featured selected editions of Austen’s Mansfield Park but also drew on the literary, political, and aesthetic contexts in which Austen composed one of her most culturally conscious, if not always universally admired, novels.

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Visitors view the display the Grand Reading Room of Wilson Library

The more capacious nature of Mansfield Park inspired a decided shift in the structure of this year’s exhibition. Whereas our first exhibition, Emma at 200,” relied on direct textual allusions to recreate the insular world of Emma Woodhouse’s Highbury, “Mansfield Park: Texts and Contexts” sought to present just what its title denotes: a view of Austen’s third novel that remains conscious of, indeed expressive of, the cultural contexts that inform her novel. By dividing the exhibition into five thematic groupings, we were able to touch on several of the cultural conversations of which Austen partakes in Mansfield Park.

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Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866) | Ticknor PR4034 .M3 1866

In keeping with JASP’s focus on Mansfield Park and its afterlives, the first section presented the novel itself, from Austen’s inspiration for Fanny Price in the poetry of George Crabbe to a first edition of the text and through 150 years of Mansfield Park publications. One of my favorite items appeared in this grouping: the owner of an 1866 Ticknor and Fields edition of Mansfield Park used Austen’s text to refute one of her critics. A well-positioned newspaper clipping proves that Austen does not, as the critic suggests, lack descriptions of natural scenery in her novels. Finding objects like this, where we can see readers’ continued engagement with Austen’s work, made curating this group of texts a fascinating and rewarding experience.

The exhibition’s second section drew literary allusions from Mansfield Park to reconstruct Fanny Price’s reading habits and the formation of her mind. Fanny, like Austen, adores Cowper’s Task and admires Wordsworth’s verses on Tintern Abbey. Patrons were excited to see writings beloved of both the novelist and her heroine.

Another significant literary allusion, though one decidedly not admired by Fanny, is Elizabeth Inchbald’s translation of Lover’s Vows, a text that launched our third section on Regency-era drama and theatrical production. From the Anhalt-Amelia exchange famously rehearsed by Edmund Bertram and Mary Crawford to a copy of Henry VIII that could have been read aloud by Henry Crawford in the Mansfield Park drawing room, this group displayed printed dramatic texts alongside contemporaneous advertisements to demonstrate the importance of performance during this period and within Austen’s text.

The exhibition’s fourth section also displayed several literary texts, but it addressed a more serious subject underlying Austen’s novel and its extant scholarship. Poetry by Hannah More, illustrations by William Blake, essays by William Wilberforce, and the Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano represent multiple genres employed to fight the British slave trade.

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Thomas Hunt, Half a dozen hints on picturesque domestic architecture… (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825) | NA8302 .H9 1825

The final section, primarily comprised of illustrated texts, demonstrated the rage for picturesque touring and architecture during the Regency era. Humphry Repton’s Fragments (1816), an impressive folio with folding hand-colored landscape images, headlined this section, and our undergraduate contributor, Jacqueline Leibman, wrote an outstanding label description for Thomas Hunt’s Designs (1825), placing it in conversation with Repton and other more famous architects. This section also held an item much noted by guests: William Gilpin’s Observations on the Coasts of Hampshire, Sussex, and Kent (1804), a text that describes Fanny Price’s Portsmouth. Unexpected items like these, along with the first editions and famous titles, provided for our guests a well–rounded introduction to the texts and contexts of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.

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Student Jacqueline Leibman (center) and Professor Jeanne Moskal (right) discuss the display

As we reflect on this year’s exhibition, we look forward to again welcoming program participants and members of the UNC-Chapel Hill community to our third annual Wilson Library event next year. The rare book exhibition will join a full weekend of events celebrating the 200th anniversary of Austen’s Persuasion. The fifth annual Jane Austen Summer Program, “Persuasion at 200,” will take place on June 15–18, 2017. For more information, please visit www.janeaustensummer.org.

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The curators offer special thanks to Elizabeth Ott, Anna Morton, and Claudia Funke for their tireless assistance in the development and display of this exhibition, and to Inger Brodey and James Thompson for their support of this year’s Jane Austen Summer Program event.


Rachael Isom is a Ph.D. student at UNC working in 19th-century British literature. Her research examines intersections of spirituality and poetics in women’s texts of the Romantic and Victorian periods. She also serves as assistant editor of the Keats-Shelley Journal and works as a project assistant for the William Blake Archive.

Taras V. Mikhailiuk is a Ph.D. student and Teaching Fellow in English at UNC. His research focuses on the negative poetics of Percy Bysshe Shelley and his fellow Romantic poets. He also serves as the editorial intern for the Keats-Shelley Journal. Taras, his wife, and their four young children live in Durham, NC.

Jacqueline Leibman is an undergraduate student in anthropology and pre-medicine at UNC. She is from Fayetteville, NC, where she graduated first in her class at Reid Ross Classical High School. She also has a strong passion for British literature and history.

Zine Machine Fest

Two Saturdays ago, I had a chance to visit the second annual Zine Machine Fest at the Durham Armory in Durham, NC. I spent the afternoon perusing several aisles of booths arranged with a variety of printed matter including zines, comics, original illustrations, screen prints, buttons, stickers, and more. The Triangle was well-represented by many local artists and artist collectives. Several out-of-state guests attended as well.

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Triangle Printed Matter Club’s booth at Zine Machine Fest
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Zines and stickers by Barefoot Press, Tristan Miller, Brianna Gribben,
and Thomas Sara

Zines are typically small, printed pamphlets centered around a particular topic. (The word “zine” is short for “magazine”—just as zines are shorter versions of magazines.) Zines can trace their beginnings to science fiction “fanzines” of the 1930s. Fanzines were a type of printed media that could be cheaply and quickly produced by amateurs, particularly in subcultural scenes. Zines gained popularity in the mid-twentieth century, coinciding with the Beat Generation and, later, DIY and punk culture. In the 1990s, the Riot Grrrl movement popularized zines as a method of spreading political messages, ideas, and stories, while circumventing mainstream media outlets.

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“Beatitude,” one of the first major poetry magazines produced by Beat poets, included poetry by Allen Ginsberg (“Ellen Ginsboig”), Jack Kerouac (“St. Jacques Kanook”), Lawrence Ferlinghetti (“L. Foolingheppi”), and many others whose work mainstream publishers considered too provocative.
Beats PS536 .B37

Today we can find zines on almost any topic imaginable, and in many different formats. At Zine Machine Fest, I encountered poetry, art, and photography zines, as well as those that told personal stories. Many comic artists attended the fair, bringing with them mini comics, which overlap with zines in the DIY publishing realm.

A zine printed by Barefoot Press (Raleigh, NC) using fluorescent ink, viewed here under a blacklight
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“Jetty,” a mini comic by Rio Aubry Taylor (image source)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Below are several examples of zines and mini comics from the RBC’s collection of Latino comic books. These items show how it can be difficult to draw a line between different types of printed media, be it a personal zine, comic book, or even coloring book, but the media chosen by these artists allow for playful and open discussions of sensitive topics.

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“A Caxcan Guerrilla Takes Over the Awkward Girl,” by Liz Mayorga-Amaya (Spunky Cat Comix, 2011)
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Malchio
“Un chorrito: libro para colorear,” by Malchico (Bogotá: Muestra Rellena, 2009)
PN6790.C7 M373 2009

Remembering Easter 1916

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Yeats PR5904 .E3 1916

One hundred years ago on Easter Monday (April 24, 1916), members of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army occupied the General Post Office in Dublin. Upwards of 2,000 Irish men and women participated in the Rising.

On the first day of the insurrection, Pádraic Pearse read aloud the Proclamation of the Republic, which stated, “We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible.”

After six days of fighting against the British Army, the leaders of the Rising surrendered. The seven signatories of the Proclamation, along with nine others who participated in leading the rebellion, were executed.

W. B. Yeats began writing “Easter, 1916” during the last of the executions. According to George Mayhew, the final drafts were completed while Yeats stayed in France with his long-time muse, Maud Gonne, and her daughter Iseult. Gonne’s estranged husband, John MacBride, was one of the executed leaders of the Rising. His death prompted Yeats to propose marriage for the second time to Gonne and then to her daughter; both women rejected him.

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Yeats PR5904 .E3 1916

Easter, 1916 was privately printed by Clement Shorter in a run of 25 copies for distribution among Yeats’s friends, likely in October or November of 1916. The copy above, held at the University of North Carolina, is numbered 19.

In the poem Yeats struggles with the personal and political complexities of the Rising, and the difficulties of grappling with these within a memorial poem. Gonne wrote to Yeats: “No, I don’t like your poem, it isn’t worthy of you & above all isn’t worthy of the subject.” Today it is the most remembered and read poem of the Easter Rising, particularly for Yeats’s refrain, “A terrible beauty is born.”

“Easter 1916” wasn’t distributed widely until it was printed in The New Statesman October 23, 1920, and then in Yeats’s 1921 volume of poetry, Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The 1916 version reveals its differences upon comparison to the 1921 version.

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Yeats PR5904 .E3 1916, Yeats PR5904 .M52 1920

“Old and New Humanism(s)” at Wilson

Rare book display at Wilson Library
Rare book display at Wilson Library: Conference co-organizers Michael Clark, second from left, and Mary Learner, second from right; UNC’s hand-colored Vesalius in the foreground (HSL Historical Collection).

This past weekend, the UNC-King’s College London collaboration on medieval and early modern studies had its fifth annual meeting with the theme “Old and New Humanism(s).” Dr. David Baker and Dr. Marsha Collins of UNC’s Department of English and Comparative Literature provided faculty guidance for the two-day graduate-student conference, which included keynote speeches by Dr. Whitney Trettien (UNC-Chapel Hill) and Dr. Lucy Munro (King’s College London).

Following the first panels, participants gathered at Wilson Library on Friday afternoon to view an exhibition of materials from the Rare Book Collection and the Health Sciences Library. Mary Learner and Michael Clark, UNC graduate students and co-organizers of the conference, curated a display that complemented the weekend’s theme, which considered medieval and early modern humanism as a movement to recover the classical past and as an exploration of what it means to be human, with reference to humanist inquiry and the role of the humanities today. The selection of texts was designed to showcase the library’s strong holdings of early printing, including the RBC’s Estienne Imprint Collection, as well as to provide exempla of humanism in manuscript and print.

Thirteen items were on view, organized around three essential components of humanism: classical literature, language learning, and scientific inquiry, particularly anatomy. The first focus, classical and literary texts, included books that use scholarly commentary to facilitate readers’ encounters with literature. For instance, a manuscript of Donatus’ commentary on the Aeneid (1465) was near a printed text of the epic from 1492, which included verses surrounded by the commentary of four writers (including Donatus). Guests could compare how a classical literary text and its scholarly apparatus were presented in manuscript and in print, and this promoted discussion about reading literature in the period.

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Wycliffite bible under glass [ca. 1425] | Ms. 529 supervised
The second focus of the exhibition was the significance of translation and the use of both Latin and the vernacular in humanistic discourse. The display included printed grammars, alphabets, and dictionaries, in a variety of languages such as Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and French. A Wycliffite Bible (1425), one of about 235 that survive today, was on display as an example of the manuscript translation of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate into Middle English.

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Alphabetum Graecum bound with Alphabetum Hebraicu[m] (Paris, 1550) | Estienne P213 A.48 supervised
The majority of sixteenth-century language texts in the exhibition were printed by the Estienne family, scholar-printers who edited multilingual texts and dictionaries for specific professions, such as law or medicine.

Finally, the third section included medical texts that emphasized the role of illustration and innovation in the early modern investigation of the human body. Among the anatomy books was a first edition of De humani corporis fabrica libri septem by Andreas Vesalius (1543) that has a number of illustrations colored by hand. These can be viewed online in a new electronic resource: [http://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/vesalius/id/147]

The side-by-side comparison of woodcut illustrations in Vesalius’s and Charles Estienne’s anatomies with engravings in Bartolomeo Eustachi’s editions allowed viewers to see variations in details as rendered by different print technologies. Eustachi’s Opuscula anatomica also contrasted in its use of grids around illustrations, to provide coordinates for locating specific anatomical features.

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Second edition of Eustachi’s landmark work with a printed ruler (attached by string), for use in locating anatomical parts identified in text by their grid coordinates. Eustachi Opuscula Anatomica (Leiden, 1707) / Gottschalk WZ240 E91o 1707

Of course, the lines between the three categories are by no means absolute in humanist study, which emerged from conversations about the materials. Classical poetry and grammars were integral to language learning, and print increasingly made medical and literary knowledge available in the vernacular. And both dictionaries and anatomies relied upon classical authorities. The overlap between these categories served as a reminder of the variety within humanist interests and of the multiple interpretations of humanism, and the selection facilitated an energetic discussion about these topics.  The rare books on display are just a few of the many medieval and early modern texts that scholars may consult at UNC to understand better the explorations of being human in the period.

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Entry for “Homme” in Robert Estienne, Dictionaire francoislatin (Paris, 1549) | Estienne Folio PA2365.F71 E8 1549

Mary Learner is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC. Her research focuses on early modern literature, book history, and digital humanities. She also serves as a Project Assistant for the William Blake Archive.

Hemingway Delivers First Rand Lecture at Wilson Library

Paintings at the British Institution as discussed in Professor's Hemingway's illustrated lecture.
The British Institution (exterior and interior shown)  discussed in Professor Hemingway’s illustrated lecture.

Wilson Library is pleased to be the venue this week for the UNC Art Department’s 2016 Bettie Allison Rand Lectures, “British Landscape Painting in the Age of Revolution.” On Monday evening, Andrew Hemingway, Professor Emeritus, University College London, delivered the first lecture—”Naturalistic Landscape Painting and the Decline of Deference”—to an audience of eighty. Hemingway discussed naturalistic landscape painting in Britain as it contrasted with the concept of the picturesque and as a product that reflected a scientific approach and changes in the larger economy, social relations, and patronage.

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Professor Hemingway and lecture series organizer Professor Daniel Sherman

It was a nuanced beginning to the topic and challenged simplistic ideas of Romantic expression as well as naturalism. Tonight the series continues with the second of the four lectures, “The Artisanal Worldview in the Painting of John Crome.”

Before the lecture, there was an opening reception, and attendees had the opportunity to see the complementary exhibition in the Saltarelli Exhibit Room, Lyric Impressions: Wordsworth in the Long Nineteenth Century. The catalog for the exhibition, just printed, was available for purchase at the event. It is on sale locally at the Bull’s Head Bookshop and will be distributed far and wide by UNC Press.

Lyric Impressions catalog is now available
The catalog for Lyric Impressions is now available

 

Salute to St. Patrick’s Day

"St. Patrick's Flag Day ..." London: Johnson, Riddle & Co. | Gray A-99
“St. Patrick’s Flag Day…” London: Johnson, Riddle & Co. | Gray A-99

This World War I-era poster by the Irish Women’s Association calls for the recognition of Irish regiments and their prisoners of war during St. Patrick’s Flag Day (an alternate name for the holiday) on March 17th, 1917. An Irish soldier stands in front of a large shamrock emblem, flanked on each side by the names of the four historical provinces of Ireland: Ulster, Leinster, Munster, and Connaught.

The year 2016 marks the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising, a major uprising against British rule that took place in various locations throughout Ireland. The event heightened tensions between Britain and Ireland, which would only worsen until the Irish War of Independence erupted just three years later, in January 1919. The poster above was created in the period between the uprising and the beginning of the war.

In the early 20th century, Ireland was governed by home rule, meaning that it was self-governed, but still under the ultimate authority of British rule. The arrangement is clearly demonstrated by RBC’s poster, which was presented by the Irish Women’s Association, an organization based at Kensington Palace in London. This poster represents a short-lived transitional period for Ireland, while also commemorating an important Irish holiday and calling to attention the plight of Irish soldiers.

This poster is part of the Rare Book Collection’s Bowman Gray Collection of World War I and II Graphic Materials, of particular interest as we pass through the centenary of World War I (1914-1918).

The Deserted Cottage

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Wiliam Wordsworth, The Deserted Cottage (London and New York: George Routledge & Co., 1859) | PR5858 .A1 1859 c.3

The textual history of Wordsworth’s Excursion, intended as a first installment of his planned magnum opus The Recluse, is astonishingly complicated. The texts that became The Excursion were composed over many years, with portions drafted as early as 1797. These poetic fragments would continue to grow as Wordsworth’s conception of the poem changed over the course of almost twenty years. Furthermore, portions of what would eventually become books 1 and 2, “The Wanderer” and “The Solitary,” had been sometimes referred to under the varying titles “The Ruined Cottage” and “The Pedlar.”

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Routledge’s edition contains illustrations by several well-known Victorian book illustrators, including Birket Foster and John Gilbert. | PR5858 .A1 1859 c. 3

The Excursion first appeared to the public eye in 1814 in a handsome quarto edition, and went through several more editions during his lifetime. Wordsworth continued to revise the poem even after publication, as was his habit throughout his career. “The Wanderer” and “The Solitary” received substantial revisions in 1845, and the newly revised text would see publication, first in a posthumous collected edition by his authorized publisher, Moxon, in 1849 and then in a stand-alone edition in 1857.

 

 

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Routledge issued The Deserted Cottage in several binding styles and colors. The RBC holds seven copies of the work, each in a distinct binding. | PR5858 .A1 1859 c. 6

 

This already complicated history of revision, before and after publication, is further confused by the appearance in 1859 of a volume titled The Deserted Cottage, produced under the imprint of George Routledge and Company. This curious book represented itself in the preface as the fulfillment of a wish by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to see “the first two books of The Excursion … published separately,” though Wordsworth himself seems never to have used the title The Deserted Cottage in reference to the first two books of The Excursion nor did he ever conceive of bringing them into publication separately from the whole.

 

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This dark but vibrant blue was a popular cloth color for Victorian publisher’s bindings. | PR5858 .A1 1859 c. 4

Routledge reproduces the text of the 1814 Excursion, which had come out of copyright in 1858. However, that text was issued before the extensive revisions incorporated in Moxon’s 1857 edition of The Excursion. Whether readers noticed or minded the missing revisions in the text is unknown. Packaged in an array of attractive colors of decorative cloth, and additionally offered in leather with gauffered edges and marbled endpapers, The Deserted Cottage was marketed by Routledge like a gift or prize book. The copies in the RBC’s Wordsworth Collection speak to this history: several contain contemporary gift inscriptions.

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This inscription indicates the book was given as a school prize during the Christmas season. | PR5858 .A1 1859 c. 3