Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (London, 1894) | PR4854 .J7 1894
Today, December 30th, marks the 150th birth anniversary of renowned author Rudyard Kipling. Kipling was born in British colonial India and spent the first five years of his life and much of his young adulthood there. As such, a great number of his works are inspired by his childhood in India, including his arguably most well-known work, The Jungle Book (1894). The first edition of this work is particularly notable for its design.
In The Jungle Book, readers are introduced to a cast of colorful characters, some human, and some animal. Many of them have endured in the public consciousness to this day, such as the boy Mowgli, raised by jungle creatures, and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, a clever, cobra-slaying mongoose. All these characters are brought to life through Kipling’s imaginative poetry and prose.
Additionally, they are immortalized by the memorable illustrations from the first edition of the book, designed by illustrators W. H. Drake, P. Frenzeny, and John Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard Kipling’s own father, who collaborated with his son on many works. These illustrators also designed the images on the original publisher’s binding of the book, which features three elephants with riders and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi encountering a cobra. Though the RBC’s copy was rebound sometime after the 1930s, the original cover and its spine were preserved in the new binding.
Kipling’s prolific publishing career is well documented in the RBC, where English-language literature has long been a collection strength.
Wordsworth, William. We Are Seven! (London: George C. Whitney, 1887) | PR5869 W43 1887
As 2015 draws to a close, you may be preparing to send a round of greeting cards to friends and loved ones. In the present time, nearly 6.5 billion greeting cards are bought and exchanged annually in the United States—about 1.6 billion of those, during the Winter holiday season. The practice of exchanging holiday cards near Christmas began in the nineteenth century, when technologies in printing, primarily chromolithography, reduced the price of producing color-printed cards.
The history of Christmas greeting cards is inextricable from the history of lithography, in general, and chromolithography in particular. What is considered to be the first true Christmas card was printed in 1843 by Jobbins of Warwick Court, Holborn, London, using lithography, based on a design by John Calcott Horsley. Horsley was inspired by the commercial success already enjoyed by Valentine Day cards—and by a desire to reduce the time spent writing Christmas letters (George Buday, The History of the Christmas Card. London: Rockliff Publishing Corporation, 1954: 6). The idea was quickly adopted and printers used a variety of printing, embossing, die-cutting, and other decorative techniques to produce cards during the 1840s and 1850s. However, widespread production of Christmas cards did not occur until the 1860s-70s, when the use of chromolithography in commercial printing enabled cheap mass production of cards.
Lithography is a planographic printing process, meaning that the printing surface is flat—not raised, as in relief printing, or recessed, as in intaglio printing. Lithography works on the basic principle of the separation of oil and water: a hydrophilic surface, such as limestone, is drawn upon using a waxy substance; the surface of the stone is then wetted with a solution of gum arabic, then inked using an oil-based ink. The oily ink clings to the waxy portions of the stone and avoids the areas damp with water. A sheet of paper is then pressed to the surface of the stone, yielding a print.
Because of its flat printing surface and the ability of the artist to draw directly on the stone, lithography offered artists a freedom of design on par with drawing on paper. Numerous artistic effects—including pen-and-ink, chalk, and watercolor—could be achieved using a lithographic stone. Moreover, the mechanism of the lithographic press was faster to operate than, for example, the rolling presses used to produce engravings; it also exerted less pressure on the printing surface, reducing plate wear. The combination of these factors meant that lithography could produce larger edition sizes in less time than engraving.
The example above, printed around 1887, is a typical example of a Victorian greeting card: the central image shows a colorful, chromolithograph scene printed on a heavy card depicting two young children dressed in Christmas finery. A four-line poem functions as a seasonal greeting. The card is mounted with maroon ties on an embossed gold and silver card with decorative maroon and gold thread sewing.
The inside of the card holds a bit of a surprise: instead of the Christmas greeting we might expect to see, the card instead reveals a monochrome lithographic booklet of the text of William Wordsworth’s poem “We Are Seven”:
“We Are Seven” first appeared in Lyrical Ballads (1798). It would prove to be one of Wordsworth’s most enduringly popular lyrics. The Rare Book Collection contains multiple examples of the poem printed separately in cheap formats for popular consumption, including two chapbook editions, a broadside, and severallithographgiftbooklets. The example above closely resembles the other gift booklets in its format and design: alongside Wordsworth’s poem are sentimental scenes of rural life that echo the setting of the poem but were probably not produced specifically to illustrate its narrative.
Though there are no overt holiday references in “We Are Seven,” it’s thematic message of remembering absent loved ones is perhaps appropriate, if somewhat morbid, for the season of Auld Lang Syne.
Wordsworth is much remembered in the RBC these days as we make our preparations for the Spring exhibition Lyric Impressions: Wordsworth in the Long Nineteenth Century. The exhibition will be mounted from January 20-April 15, 2016, with an opening keynote lecture on February 22 by Duncan Wu, Professor of English at Georgetown University, titled “Wordsworthian Carnage.” Stayed tuned for more information on the exhibition opening, and keep reading the RBC blog for more highlights from the William Wordsworth Collection!
Thomas Browne, A True and Full Coppy of that which Was Most Imperfectly and Surreptitiously Printed Before under the Name of Religio Medici (London: For Andrew Crooke, 1643) | William A. Whitaker Fund
The rare book world is filled with talk about the recent sale of the library of late collector Robert S. Pirie. UNC Professor Emeritus Mark L. Reed, III, recalls Pirie as a classmate at Harvard many decades ago, in William Jackson’s bibliography course. Reed was a graduate student in English literature, and Pirie was the only undergraduate in the class. Mark Reed went on to teach at UNC and become a leading Wordsworth scholar, bibliographer, and collector. (His Wordsworth collection, the basis for his 2013 bibliography, now resides at UNC.) And Pirie went on to a career as an attorney and investment banker and to form “what will always be considered one of the finest libraries of English literature of not just our time, but of all time,” as the Sotheby’s sale catalog states.
Pirie’s collection was mostly sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, and the RBC acquired three books from it that fit nicely with faculty research and existing holdings. Serendipitously, Mark Reed is among the members of the Whitaker Fund Committee, which approved these purchases.
First among the three works is the rare first authorized edition of Religio Medici, which supports the scholarship of UNC Professor Reid Barbour. Professor Barbour writes about its significance:
“When it was first published in the 1640s, Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici made an immediate and a powerful impact on readers throughout Europe. Readers of a wide spectrum of confessional identities celebrated it for its peaceful form of Christianity but others roundly condemned it as atheistic. Over the course of nearly a decade, Browne had transformed the work on several occasions, in keeping with his conviction that his authorial self was subject to change. But the first authorized edition, published in 1643, was Browne’s final attempt to reshape those prose meditations on God, nature, and humanity that were causing such a stir after the work’s extensive manuscript circulation and unauthorized publication in 1642.
“The 1643 edition plays a central part in the new Oxford University Press edition of Religio Medici, edited by Brooke Conti of Cleveland State University and me,” Barbour continues. “UNC’s acquisition of a copy of this edition will enable me to conduct careful and extensive analysis of the book’s physical properties, from its famous frontispiece image of a man tumbling from a steep cliff only to be rescued by the hand of God, to its paper stock, watermarks, and textual variants.”
Other works acquired at the sale are The Crowne of All Homers Worckes Batrachomyomachia or the Battaile of Froges and Mise. His Hymn’s—and—Epigrams Translated According to the Originall. By George Chapman. (London, 1624?) and Elkanah Settle’s The Empress of Morocco. A Tragedy with Sculptures. As It Is Acted at the Duke’s Theatre (London, 1673).
Elkanah Settle, The Empress of Morocco (London, 1673) | William A. Whitaker Fund
The Crowne of All Homers Worckes completes The Whole Works of Homer, . . . Translated According to the Greeke by Geo. Chapman (London, 1616), already in the RBC (PA4025.A1 C45). This acquisition sustains the interests of UNC Professor Jessica Wolfe, who has recently published Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes (Toronto, 2015).
The Settle will surely be a valuable resource for UNC’s dramatic programs. The RBC has six other works by Settle, an important playwright of his period. The Empress of Morocco distinguishes itself by being the first English drama to be so extensively illustrated.
David William Foster, Regents Professor, Arizona State University; Daniel Balderston, Mellon Professor, University of Pittsburgh; Ariana Vigil, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill; and María DeGuzmán, Director of Latina/o Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill
On November 18, Wilson Library and the Rare Book Collection hosted a panel discussion sponsored by the Department of Romance Studies. The topic was the recently published novel En los jardines de Lesbos, written by José María Vargas Vila in the late 1920s. In 2010, the RBC acquired the original manuscript of the heretofore unpublished work about a lesbian artist, along with other papers of the controversial Colombian-born writer.
Manuscript of En los jardines de Lesbos from the José María Vargas Vila Papers, Collection 12019, Rare Book Literary and Historical Papers
UNC-Chapel Hill’s own Juan Carlos González Espitia, associate professor of Romance Studies, edited La cosecha del sembrador, which includes En los jardines de Lesbos. The volume from the Colombian publisher Panamericana also contains Vargas Vila’s little-known work Ítalo Fontana, a novel about incest.
Vargas Vila died before he was able to publish En los jardines de Lesbos. The evening’s panelists debated the work’s relationship to earlier, contemporaneous, and later Latin American writing and conjectured on what its publication would have meant in its own era. Professor DeGuzmán drew comparisons with English literature, including Radcliffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness (1928) and the earlier poetry of Swinburne.
About seventy members of the University community listened to the panel discussion. The Vargas Vila papers, part of Rare Book Literary and Historical Papers, are available to researchers in Wilson’s 4th floor manuscript reading room. The Rare Book Collection’s extensive holdings of his published works are accessible in the originals at Wilson’s 2nd floor reading room and online at the José María Vargas Vila Digital Library.
