Rudyard Kipling’s 150th Birthday

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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.

rikki tikki tavi

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.

cover and elephant

Kipling’s prolific publishing career is well documented in the RBC, where English-language literature has long been a collection strength.

council rock

A Chromolithographic Christmas from the Wordsworth Collection

Wordsworth, William. We Are Seven! London: George C. Whitney, 1887 |PR5869 W43 1887
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.

In chromolithography, multiple stones are used progressively to produce multi-colored prints. Each color must be printed from a separate stone. As the sheet is passed through each successive print, the different colors blend together, resulting in vibrant tones and shades. For more information, and an animated progressive proof showing the process of chromolithography, check out this online exhibition from the New York Public Library (requires shockwave). The American Antiquarian Society also has an informative online exhibition, including a gallery of Christmas cards designed by lithographic artist Louis Prang.

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”:

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“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 several lithograph gift booklets. 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.

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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!

Panel Discusses Early Latin American Novel on Lesbianism

David Foster Wallace, Daniel Balderston, Ariana Vigil, and María de Guzmán
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.

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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.

Ahoy, Savoy!

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The Savoy, April 1896 | AP4 S37 c. 2 no. 2

The eight issues that comprise the full print run of The Savoy magazine are part of the RBC’s William Butler Yeats Collection. Yeats contributed poems, stories, and essays to the short-lived periodical, prompted by his friendship with the magazine’s editor, Arthur Symons. Through his association with The Savoy and with Symons, Yeats developed an interest in the Symbolist poetry of Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, and others—a connection sometimes overlooked in evaluating Yeats’s long career as a poet.

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Proof of cover design for April 1896 issue of The Savoy | AP4 S37p

The Savoy made its debut in 1896, a transitional moment in British letters when the aesthetically driven Decadent movement rebranded itself as the avant-garde Symbolist movement. Symons, a jobbing writer remembered now mostly for his literary criticism, provides an explicit link between decadence and Symbolism: in 1893, before his work on The Savoy, Symons authored a manifesto “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” defining the key features and leading writers of “art for art’s sake”; in 1899, two years after the close of The Savoy, Symons expanded the essay to a book-length work, retitling it The Symbolist Movement in Literature.

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The Savoy | AP4 S37 c. 2 no. 7
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Proof of cover design | AP4 S37p

Symons’s partner in shaping the aesthetic and artistic parameters of The Savoy was illustrator Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley had previously worked as art editor and designer for Elkin Mathews and John Lane’s The Yellow Book—to which Symons also contributed—but he was asked to resign after Oscar Wilde’s conviction for gross indecency colored Beardsley’s past association with Wilde as scandalous. Mathews and Lane’s squeamishness was not shared by the publisher of The Savoy, Leonard Smithers. Smithers, whose publishing ventures included erotic texts as well as literature, encouraged Beardsley and Symons’s artistic productions.

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Proof for Beardsley’s design for advertising matter | AP4 S37p

In addition to the full print run of The Savoy, the RBC holds printing proofs of Beardsley’s designs for The Savoy, annotated with Smithers’s notes on production. These proofs have appeared previously on the RBC blog, following a lecture by collector Mark Samuels Lasner that discussed their status as true proofs—not later reproductions of Beardsley’s artwork.

While Beardsley’s designs for The Yellow Book had featured bold contrasts of white and black, for The Savoy Beardsley developed a style incorporating the use of texture and fine detail. Beardsley’s cover art, in particular, reflects the richer designs of his illustrations for The Rape of the Lock and Lysistrata. Beardsley’s drawings, prized now for their artistic excellence, are often reproduced divorced from their original contexts; the RBC’s proofs of Beardsley’s designs for The Savoy remind us that Beardsley was a working artist, and above all an illustrator of texts.

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Proof of “Pages from the Life of Lucy Newcombe” | AP4 S37 c. 4 no. 8 1-3

In addition to the proofs of Beardsley’s drawings, the RBC also holds three drafts written by Arthur Symons related to the short story “The Childhood of Lucy Newcombe,” which appeared in the final number of The Savoy. Symons wrote three stories about Lucy Newcombe, a fictionalized character drawn from the life of Edith Catherine Robichaud: born Edith Catherine Broadbent; called Ryllis Llewellyn Hacon during her first marriage.

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Typescript draft of the end of the “Life of Lucy Newcombe” | AP4 S37 c. 4 no. 8 proof 1-3

Robichaud, an artist’s model and escort under the names “Amaryllis” and “Muriel,” was Symons’s mistress. Her past, steeped in mystery and intrigue, becomes in Symons’s stories a psychological character study. Symons planned to turn the series into a novel, a project he clung to even after the close of the magazine. Symons wrote to novelist Thomas Hardy for advice on the novel, citing Jude the Obscure as one of his influences, but Hardy discouraged Symons from seeking a publisher. Hardy warned Symons that his risqué choice of a sex worker for a protagonist would ruin his reputation.

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Typescript draft of the end of “The Life of Lucy Newcombe” | AP4 S37 c. 4 no. 8 proof 1-3

 

 

Despite her scandalous past, the real Lucy Newcombe went on to become an incredibly successful society matron: she married William Llewellyn Hacon, became a great patron of the arts, and joined the women’s suffrage movement. Even after ending her career as an artist’s model, Robichaud sat for several prominent painters, including Charles Condor, whose 1896 painting of Robichaud “The Shore at Dornach, Highlands” hangs in the Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museum.

Carolina Kabuki Blue Halloween

Kuge-Bōrei, The Ghost of Abe-no-Nakamaro (a court noble) devised by Sawamura Sōjūrō, the Fourth (1784-1812) , plat no. 34 in Masaru Kobayashi, Kabuki kumadori gaikan (Kyoto: Guroriya Sosaete, 1931).
Kuge-Bōrei, The Ghost of Abe-no-Nakamaro (a court noble) devised by Sawamura Sōjūrō, the Fourth (1784-1812) , plate no. 34 in Masaru Kobayashi, Kabuki kumadori gaikan 歌舞伎隈取概觀 (Kyoto: Guroria Sosaete, 1931)| PN2068 .K6

The RBC has just prioritized the cataloging of the books in Paul Green’s library that relate to Japanese drama. The late Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and former UNC professor spent three weeks in Japan in 1951. There, Kabuki theater made a deep impression on him. An article on his visit in the November 7, 1951, issue of the Nippon Times quotes Green on Kabuki: “Japan’s got the best acting and the best produced plays I have ever seen.”

Green, a lover of books, brought back a number of rare and valuable volumes on Japanese theater. These were eventually gifted to the UNC Library.  The plate reproduced above comes from a beautifully illustrated prewar volume on Kabuki makeup.

The color blue, associated in our part of the world with Carolina, was associated with spirits and demons in Kabuki theater. The frightening spectral face above sets a high standard for terrifying countenances, making it our staff pick for a Halloween post.

Green was reported to have wished to adapt elements of Kabuki staging to his outdoor dramas. He also had a keen interest in the expressive power of Kabuki makeup as demonstrated by his book collecting, including the volume featured above.

The Japanese books from Green’s library promise to be a valuable resource for students of Asian theater at UNC.

Spain and the Americas and Banned Book Week

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Expurgated copy of Lucio Marineo, Opus de Rebus Hispaniae Memorabilibus … (Alcalá de Henares, 1533) | Folio DP64 .M33 1533

Here at the Rare Book Collection, we are fond of noting that one of the surest ways for a book to become rare is for it to be banned. Controversial books and those made scarce by suppression, they often find their final resting places at the RBC and other rare book repositories.

For Banned Book Week this year, we turn to some of the volumes in our new exhibition at Wilson Library, Chronicles of Empire: Spain in the Americas. This evening, October 1, at 5:30 p.m., there will be a special viewing of the show before a public lecture by Dr. David Stuart, the renowned expert on Mayan writing. At that time, the public is invited to tour the exhibition, which documents Spain’s exploration and settlement of the New World.

Just fourteen years before Columbus’s discovery of America, a papal bull had established the Spanish Inquisition to fight heresy. Eventually, the censorship of reading matter became one of the Inquisition’s central activities. The Catholic Church had sought to control the circulation of texts from the early fifteenth century on, and with the advent of printing, efforts were intensified. In the 1540s the universities at Paris and Louvain published indexes of prohibited books, and the Spanish Inquisition issued its own version in the 1550s.

In the 1580s, with so many “objectionable” passages in texts having been identified, the Inquisition embarked on the compilation of a new kind of index, one of books to be expurgated. The inked-through example above is an official history of Spain by the Sicilian-born scholar Lucio Marineo. It is open to a section on the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella and a discussion of those Jews who had converted to Christianity but practiced Judaism secretly. Such Jewish converts were the primary targets of the Inquisition in its early years. A manuscript note on the title page, by Fr. Decio Carrega, tells us that he has expurgated lines of text that were condemned by the Spanish Inquisition. Carrega, active in the early seventeenth century (close to a hundred years after the book’s publication), was a Dominican inquisitor.

The Spanish crown also sought to control directly the writing of Spain’s history, including its exploits in the Americas.  Chronicles required government approval for publication, and they could be banned entirely following publication if, upon further examination, they were judged to promote an unflattering image of Spain. Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia general first appeared in 1551 and went through nine editions before November 17, 1553, when Prince Philip ordered that all copies be collected and set a fine of 200,000 maravedis for anyone who dared to reprint. The chronicle’s account of the civil wars in Peru presented a particularly unfavorable view of Spanish conduct.

Somehow, the RBC’s copy of Gómara’s history survived that royal order (below left), and its title page has been given new life over 450 years later in the design of the Chronicles of Empire exhibition poster and flier (below right).

López de Gomara, Flatow F3051 C69
Francisco López de Gómara, Historia general de las Indias (Medina del Campo, 1553) Flatow Folio F3051 C69
Rare Book Collection poster
Rare Book Collection exhibition poster, design by Anna Morton based on title page woodcut (left)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are numerous other banned books to be seen in Chronicles of Empire, including famous chivalric romances and novels that Spain forbade to be exported to America. The Spanish crown feared that the indigenous population, whom they wished to educate and evangelize, would be unable to distinguish fiction from fact and would be confused by such literary works. Copies of the books found their way to the New World, nonetheless.

The exhibition Chronicles of Empire is part of the commemoration “One Hundred Years of Latin American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.” If you are unable to join us this evening, the exhibition is on view during regular Wilson hours through January 10, 2016.

Jeepers, Creepers, a Peepshow!

One of the Rare Book Collection’s most unusual acquisitions this year has also proved to be one of the more challenging items to view: a perspective peepshow of an eighteenth-century print shop.

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The peepshow cards arranged without a display. Without a structure to separate the cards, the scene is flattened.

Peepshows are two-dimensional, printed or manuscript illustrated cards incorporating cut-outs that, when arranged together, form a three-dimensional scene. Peepshows have a long history as a form of popular entertainment. Examples of peepshows can be found in cultures across the world, but the genre gained widespread popularity in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Peepshows appeared in the streets, peddled by itinerant street showmen, and in the parlor, alongside paper dolls, board games, and other amusements for the evening hours.

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A single card from the peepshow. Each card contains many small details that contribute to the vibrancy of the complete scene.

Peepshows varied a great deal in their complexity. Very simple peepshows might consist only of a series of cards, while more elaborate displays incorporated lighting or special bi-convex lenses to enhance the illusion of three-dimensionality. Some peepshows used a thin, accordion-fold tissue along each side of the card series to connect the scene together—see, for example, this 1846 peepshow held at the Getty Research Institute. Other peepshows were designed to be set up in a custom box made of wood or metal. The box held the cards apart from one another and let in an appropriate level of light, allowing the viewer a peep inside the scene.

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Custom display built by Conservator Andrea Knowlton for viewing the peepshow cards.

Our perspective peepshow was probably intended to be viewed in such a box. The cards can, of course, be examined one at a time, but to see the full scene as intended, a custom display had to be built.

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Cards arranged in the custom display. Each card is supported upright and has enough room to maintain the integrity of the three-dimensional scene.

Conservator Andrea Knowlton rose to the challenge, creating this custom display. Though straightforward in its design, the execution of the stand took careful planning. Andrea first had to calculate how far apart each card should stand—too close and the details of some cards would be obscured, too far apart and the illusion of three-dimensionality would be ruined. Andrea also needed to ensure that the stand did not block out too much light. Finally, the stand needed to properly support each card upright and allow easy access to the cards so that they would not be damaged during set up or removal.

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Arranged properly, the cards in the peepshow give the illusion of a three-dimensional scene.

Our peepshow shows the interior of a print shop with surprising detail. At the front of the shop, a worker dampens paper to prepare it for the press. There are two presses depicted, each in a different stage of the printing process. The first press is being inked using ink balls while a second pressman readies the sheet of paper to be printed. At the second press, a pressman is pulling the bar to make an impression. Behind the press, the copy text is written out in a fair hand and given to the compositors, who can be seen at the back of the shop. Each compositor uses a composing stick to arrange moveable type—stored in the large, tilted cases—into words and sentences.

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Each peepshow card is rich with historical detail, such as the work practices and tools of the printing trade. In this card, the copyist is producing the copy text to give to the compositors; and a worker is hanging a printed sheet up to dry.

If you are interested in learning more about the operation of a common press, there are some wonderful demonstration videos online, like this series from the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp, Belgium. Or, come visit us in Wilson Library to take a peep at the peepshow yourself.

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In addition to building a custom display for the peepshow, Andrea stabilized the delicate cut-outs on several cards, to ensure that they would not be damaged during use.

Books in the Summer Sands

Carl Maria Seyppel, Christoph Columbus Logbuch (Düsseldorf, 189-?)
Carl Maria Seyppel, Christoph Columbus Logbuch (Düsseldorf, 189-?)

Perhaps some of our followers are headed for one last weekend at the Outer Banks, hoping to read a few good paperbacks under their beach umbrellas. But you never know what may wash ashore if you’re dressed in your sailor stripes. Curator Claudia Funke and departing staff member Matt Karkutt reveal here the faces behind the winter 2014 sweater posts and a fanciful artist’s book of the 1890s, created to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage to America. Its cover adorned with sand, seaweed, and shells, the volume is intended to look like it was recovered after having been lost at sea and is subtitled as a “secret writing” by Columbus for his son Diego.

The Rare Book Collection has plunged deep into the Age of Discovery as it prepares for the September 14 opening of the exhibition Chronicles of Empire: Spain in the Americas. Part of the commemoration “One Hundred Years of Latin American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,” the show will display the very real sixteenth- and seventeenth-century volumes in the RBC that tell the story of Spain’s exploration, conquest, and settlement of the Western Hemisphere. Expect more information in future Library and Chapel Hill Rare Book Blog posts.

We end here now by thanking our good colleague Matt Karkutt for his assistance in this post and for his numerous positive contributions to Wilson Library and the Rare Book Collection. We wish him all the best on his next voyage of discovery.

Happy International Day of Yoga

Baḥr al-ḥayāt (Hamd-i mawfūr wa thanā-yi nā-maḥsur haḍrat-i  ṣamadī-ra.) India: 11 Rabi I, 1130 (12 February 1718). PK3791 .A46 1718
Baḥr al-ḥayāt (Hamd-i mawfūr wa thanā-yi nā-maḥsur haḍrat-i
ṣamadī-ra.) India: 11 Rabi I, 1130 (12 February 1718). PK3791 .A46 1718

Today, in honor of the First International Day of Yoga, we look at the dynamic history of the practice of yoga and how it has transformed through time and cultures. A book with some of the earliest illustrated yoga poses—the Baḥr al-ḥayāt—resides in the Rare Book Collection and offers an example of how treatises on yoga spread to the Islamic world through translations written between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries.

Untitled (Persian, sunasana), from the Baḥr al-ḥayāt
Untitled, from the Baḥr al-ḥayāt (1718).

The history of the Baḥr al-ḥayāt shows how yogic teachings moved from east to west as the practice, traditionally passed down orally, was written down and translated. The RBC’s copy of the Baḥr al-ḥayāt comes from a 1563 Persian translation of an Arabic version of the Amritakunda (“The Pool of Nectar”), which was a treatise on hatha yoga written in either Sanskrit or Hindi in the twelfth century. The Baḥr al-ḥayāt in UNC’s Rare Book Collection was written and illuminated in 1718, its illustrations likely copied from earlier Persian translations like this early seventeenth-century version from the Chester Beatty Library.

Through its many loose translations into Persian, Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Urdu, the text of the Baḥr al-ḥayāt morphed in different ways, as one might suspect. Early Arabic translators of the Amritakunda drew parallels between Indic and Arabic spiritual practices in order to make yoga more accessible to Muslims. In fact, in Persian and Arabic translations, the asanas (yoga postures) were referred to as mantra chants or ascetic practices instead of physical poses. Translators also added quotations from the Koran and hadiths to the text. To Muslims studying the translations, the teachings of the Baḥr al-ḥayāt probably would have seemed to mesh well with their own faith.

Uttanakurmasana (Persian, vajra)
Uttanakurmasana, from the Baḥr al-ḥayāt (1718).

Like the text, the illustrations of the RBC’s Baḥr al-ḥayāt were also likely copied from older versions and reflect changes over time. The varying appearance of successive copies was likely due to differences in regional artistic style. The illustration above, from the RBC’s Baḥr al-ḥayāt, is much simpler than the one here, from the earlier Baḥr al-ḥayāt in the Chester Beatty Library.

the Baḥr al-ḥayāt (1718).
A yogi with his pet in the Baḥr al-ḥayāt (1718). Not much has changed!

We wish you an enjoyable June 21st, whether celebrating the fathers in your family, the summer solstice, or now, thanks to a United Nations General Assembly resolution, yoga!

Commemorating Waterloo

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, the battle in which Napoleon was at last decisively defeated. Now remembered primarily as a conflict between England and France, the Battle of Waterloo took place south of Brussels in present-day Belgium and included armies from Prussia, Austria, Hanover, Nassau, the Duchy of Brunswick, and England. This Seventh Coalition formed expressly to defeat Napoleon after his return to power during the Hundred Days following his exile on Elba. The Battle of Waterloo ended Napoleon’s rule and two decades of war across the continent of Europe. A precursor to the World Wars of the twentieth century, the Napoleonic Wars brought issues of imperialism and nationalism to the fore, inaugurating modern warfare as they changed the face of Europe.

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“View from Mont St. Jean at the Battle of Waterloo,” from Thomas Hartwell Horne, An Illustrated Record of Important Events in the Annals of Europe, During the Last Four Years… (London, 1816) | D308 H81 1817

The Battle of Waterloo is also significant in its immediate incorporation into popular imagination. Only days after news of the victory reached British soil, the battle was already being heralded as one of the most important events in history. Commemoration of the battle began within weeks, bolstered by eye-witness accounts from returning soldiers–many more of whom were literate than had ever been the case in previous wars.

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M. De Beauchamp, An Authentic Narrative of the Campaign of 1815… (London, 1815) | Hoyt 235

Accounts of the battle took advantage of modern media. Portraits of the generals and principle agents of the battle appeared frequently, creating a cult of celebrity around the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon in particular. Maps, memorials, charts, and dramatic scenes all sought to deliver to the British reader an authentic experience of the battle and its particulars.

Literary reactions to the battle also abounded. Newspapers and journals of the day printed patriotic poetry affirming Britain’s supremacy in the wake of the victory. Leading writers, regardless of their political affiliations, joined the chorus. Sir Walter Scott was among the first to try his hand. His highly publicized Field of Waterloo figured itself as a philanthropic gesture; the proceeds were to fund relief efforts for returning soldiers.

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John Booth, The Battle of Waterloo… (London, 1815) | Hoyt 237
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Walter Scott, The Field of Waterloo (Edinburgh, 1815) | PR3513 F5 c.2

William Wordsworth, long troubled by the threat to European culture and history represented by the chaotic ruin of Napoleon’s campaign, published an ambitious Pindaric ode titled Thanksgiving Ode, January 18, 1916 to commemorate the battle–an effort that met with mixed reviews due to his reluctance to praise the Duke of Wellington, whom he was known to dislike.

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A sonnet included with the first publication of Thanksgiving Ode | William Wordsworth, Thanksgiving Ode, January 18, 1816 (London, 1816) | PR5869 .T43 1816

Robert Southey’s contribution, The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo, participated in the emerging tourist culture that surrounded Waterloo and other sites of the wars. Southey’s visitation to the scene of the battle provides a template for the literary traveller, who can follow in the poet’s footsteps on a pilgrimage of his own. That Southey’s poem was used as a kind of guide book is apparent in the Rare Book Collection’s copy, which is bound together with an actual travel guide to Belgium, published in the same year.

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Robert Southey, The Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo (London, 1816) | PR5464 P6 1816
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The Battle of Waterloo… (Manchester, 1816) | Hoyt 368

The primacy of the battle did not fade as the nineteenth century wore on. It remained a watershed moment in the British cultural consciousness. Eye-witness accounts of the battle continued to emerge throughout mid-century, including Fanny Burney’s posthumously published narrative in her Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay (1842) and Robert Gleig’s popular Story of the Battle of Waterloo (1848). William Makepeace Thackeray’s fictionalized version of the battle provided emotional crisis for the heroine of his much-read novel Vanity Fair (1847).

Models and panoramas of the battle provided another avenue for commemoration. Panorama paintings first began to appear in the 1780s but gained wide popularity during the nineteenth century as a pre-cinematic immersive experience for those who could not afford to travel to historic sites. Guides, prints, pamphlets, and other ephemeral publications produced in conjunction with panorama displays can help us recreate the space of the panorama, if not the experience.

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Great National Panorama of the Battle of Waterloo, Painted by Chevalier Philip Fleisher (London, 18–) | Hoyt 1147

Patrons interested in learning more about the history of Waterloo may consult the Rare Book Collection’s Hoyt Collection of French History. The collection includes over 5,000 valuable books and documents related to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.