31 Thursday Oct 2013
Posted in Events
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28 Monday Oct 2013
Posted in Book of the Week
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The Raven
Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849)
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1884
Commentary by Edmund C. Stedman (1833-1908). Title vignette by Elihu Vedder (1836-1923), depicting Poe and Doré. The cover illustration is by Dora Wheeler. Illustrated by Gustave Doré (1832-1883).
Paul Gustave Doré was born in Strasbourg. He became a book illustrator in Paris. His commissions included work for editions of Rabelais, Balzac and Dante. In 1853, he was asked to illustrate the works of Lord Byron. The success of this edition led to other work for British publishers, including an edition of the English Bible.
In 1882, Doré took his only commission from the United States, for this edition of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven. This is the first edition of Dore’s final illustrated book, his only commissioned work by an American publisher. The book contains twenty-four full page folio wood-engravings and two vignettes. His illustrations were based on what he imagined as “the enigma of death and the hallucination of an inconsolable soul.”
Doré died in 1883, just as he was finishing his Raven engravings, at the early age of 51. This edition was published simultaneously in England and in America in December 1883. The British edition lists the date as 1883 on its title page and the American edition lists 1884, but they came out at the same time. The work was commissioned by the American publisher Harper & Brothers.
22 Tuesday Oct 2013
Posted in Recommended Reading
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Otto Ege’s Manuscripts: A Study of Ege’s Manuscript Collections, Portfolios, and Retail Trade with a Comprehensive Handlist of Manuscripts Collected or Sold
Scott Gwara
Cayce, SC: De Brailes Publishing, 2013
Otto F. Ege (1888-1951) created an American middle class market for medieval manuscript pages through a method offensive to present-day librarians and curators: the dismemberment and dispersal of two hundred manuscripts through the sale of their leaves to libraries and museums across the nation. Otto Ege’s Manuscripts is a comprehensive bibliography of Ege’s manuscript leaves held in more than one hundred North American collections, enabling the reconstruction of those dismembered manuscripts. The Rare Books Division, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library holds some of these leaves.
21 Monday Oct 2013
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PROPHET
Anne Okon
Lake City, Colo: Ravenpress, 1998
Poem printed on scroll mounted in wooden frame with hinged cover. Edition of 12 copies, signed by poet and bookmaker.
14 Monday Oct 2013
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An Imperfect Solution
D’Ambrosio
Phoenix, AZ: Studio D’Ambrosio, c1997
N7433,4 D34 I46 1997
Poem printed on nine mounted pages. A miniature book presented in five boxes bound in a series between two covers with linking text. The boxes contain objects such as sea shells, pearls, turquoise, silver, dried flowers, silk flowers, exotic papers, cast paper back lit with a light bulb and replaceable battery and red coral. Edition of fifty copies. University of Utah copy is no. 47.
11 Friday Oct 2013
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The Obert C. & Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center presents:
Voicing Cultural Change: A Renaissance Songwriter’s Move from Performance to the Printed Book
by Professor Maria Dobozy, Dept. of Languages and Literature
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Noon-1:30
The Jewel Box, Room 143
Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building
University of Utah
This lecture forms a chapter in a book-length project evaluating the Hungarian poet Sebastian Tinodi (c. 1510-1556). Tinodi is unique in Hungarian literary history because his are the earliest extant secular songs composed with melodies. He chronicled the war between Ottoman, Hungarian, and Hapsburg forces. Dr. Dobozy examines artistic production in Tinodi’s multi-ethnic, multi-lingual setting; discerning typical traditional elements in Hungarian songs of the period; and finding evidence of the cultural exchange between Germany and Hungary in print and book production, poetic and musical composition, and musical performance.
For more information, please contact:
The Tanner Humanities Center
801-585-7989
10 Thursday Oct 2013
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The Jewish Studies Program at the University of Utah proudly presents
PROFESSOR VIVIAN MANN
Director of the Master’s Program in Jewish Art at the Graduate School of
the Jewish Theological Seminary and Curator of the Jewish Museum in New York
A SHARED TRADITION: THE ISLAMIC ART OF MUSLIMS AND JEWS
Thursday, October 24, 2013
4:00pm
Spencer F. Eccles Business Building
Room 1180
University of Utah
Until recently, Islamic lands were multicultural societies that included large Jewish and Christian minorities, so that works made by and for non-Muslims can appropriately be studied together with art made for followers of Islam. In various periods, for example, Qur’ans and Hebrew Bibles shared the same system of decoration, and Jews were the primary silver and goldsmiths of Muslim countries. The cross-cultural nature of Islamic art resulted in a rich flowering during the medieval and early modern periods.
Dr. Vivian Mann served as the Morris and Eva Feld Chair of Judaica at The Jewish Museum, where she curated numerous exhibitions and accompanying catalogs, among them Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy; Convivencia: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Medieval Spain; and Morocco: Jews and Art in a Muslim Land. In 2010, Dr. Mann curated Uneasy Communion: Jews, Christians, and Altarpieces in Medieval Spain for the Museum of Biblical Art (MOBIA). She is the author of Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts, Cambridge University Press, 2000; and Art and Ceremony in Jewish Life: Essays in the History of Jewish Art, Pindar Press, 2005.
Free and open to the public.
07 Monday Oct 2013
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Andreas Cellarius, astronomers, astronomy, atlas, burins, cartography, cherubs, compasses, Copernicus, Dutch, engraving, Europe, Galileo, Gerald Valk, gravers, illustrations, Jan Jansson, Pieter Schenck, Pope Paul V, printing press, Ptolemy, transits, Tycho Brahe
Harmonia Macrocosmica
Andreas Cellarius
Amsterdam: Jansson, 1661
Second edition
QB41 C39
The Celestial Atlas of Harmony was published in varying formats in 1660, 1661, 1666, and 1708. Very few copies of the first edition of 1660 survive. (One known copy is held by the British Museum). The Harmonia Macrocosmica, a summary of pre-Newtonian astronomy, compares the various cosmological theories up to and of that time, including those of Ptolemy, Tycho Brahe, and Copernicus.
The geocentric theories of Ptolemy, suggesting that the earth is the center of the universe, are contrasted with those of Copernicus, who put the sun at the center of our solar system. Tycho Brahe’s theory attempted to unify the two. Brahe’s version shows the sun revolving around the earth and the rest of the planets revolving around the sun.
The book also has sections on the Earth’s climate zones, the sizes of the sun, moon, and planets, and the constellations of the zodiac. It is this broad overview of astronomical thought that kept the book from being banned under strictures put in place by Pope Paul V in 1616. These same strictures put Galileo under house arrest for the rest of his life after the printing of his Dialogo (1632), which was based on Copernican theory.
Andreas Cellarius was the rector of a college in the northern Netherlands. The printer, Jan Jansson, was one of the preeminent publishers of his time. Both art and science were applied to this production, with discoveries heralded by imaginative images as well as observed fact. Cheerful cherubs, floating over head earnest astronomers hold transits and compasses. The first edition was extremely popular, prompting the second edition.
The second edition of the atlas contains twenty-nine lavishly designed and hand-colored engraved plates, some of the finest examples of seventeenth-century Dutch cartography in existence. The technique of engraving began in ancient times as a way to decorate objects, particularly of metal. After the development of the printing press in Europe in 1450, engraving became a way to create high quality illustrations which retained precise detail, even after multiple impressions. Specialized tools, known as “burins” and “gravers” of various sizes and shapes were used to cut away the surface of a metal plate. The 1708 reissue bears the engraved names of Gerald Valk and Pieter Schenck on each plate, although not one line had been changed.
View more images at the J. Willard Marriott Library Digital Library
03 Thursday Oct 2013
Posted in Newspaper Articles
≈ Comments Off on Salt Lake Tribune – University of Utah class studies the Book of Mormon as literature
University of Utah students visit Rare Books to view and study early Mormon literature and contemporary material.
University of Utah class studies the Book of Mormon as literature
“‘The idea is, in a book way, to set the scene,’ said Luise Poulton, managing curator of the library’s rare books.”
03 Thursday Oct 2013
Posted in Recommended Reading
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The Pulpit and the Press in Reformation Italy
Emily Michelson
Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press, 2013
BR390 M53 2013
For more information, go to:
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674072978&content=book
“Italian preachers during the Reformation era found themselves in the trenches of a more desperate war than anything they had ever imagined. This war—the splintering of western Christendom into conflicting sects—was physically but also spiritually violent. In an era of tremendous religious convolution, fluidity, and danger, preachers of all kinds spoke from the pulpit daily, weekly, or seasonally to confront the hottest controversies of their time. Preachers also turned to the printing press in unprecedented numbers to spread their messages.
Emily Michelson challenges the stereotype that Protestants succeeded in converting Catholics through superior preaching and printing. Catholic preachers were not simply reactionary and uncreative mouthpieces of a monolithic church. Rather, they deftly and imaginatively grappled with the question of how to preserve the orthodoxy of their flock and maintain the authority of the Roman church while also confronting new, undeniable lay demands for inclusion and participation.
These sermons—almost unknown in English until now—tell a new story of the Reformation that credits preachers with keeping Italy Catholic when the region’s religious future seemed uncertain, and with fashioning the post-Reformation Catholicism that thrived into the modern era. By deploying the pulpit, pen, and printing press, preachers in Italy created a new religious culture that would survive in an unprecedented atmosphere of competition and religious choice.”
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