Rare Books on Access Utah

05 Wednesday Mar 2014

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The Legacy of Ed Abbey on Access Utah

Luise Poulton, Managing Curator of Rare Books at the J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, joined Bob Lippman, (retired) environmental lawyer, activist and educator; Ken Sanders from Ken Sanders Rare Books in Salt Lake City; and filmmaker ML Lincoln on Utah Public Radio’s Access Utah.

The group discussed Edward Abbey’s political philosophies, rooted in traditions of anarchism and civil disobedience; the rise of Earth First! out of Abbey’s writings; and “monkeywrenching” today, including Abbey’s influence on activists like Tim DeChristopher. A screening of ML Lincoln’s new film about Abbey and his legacy,“Wrenched,” shows in Salt Lake City on March 6th and an Abbey retrospective takes place in Moab on March 14th and 15th.

Listen on Utah Public Radio’s Access Utah

View the Rare Books’ online exhibition, “Brave Cowboy: An Edward Abbey Retrospective” 

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Book of the Week – Das Backerbuch

03 Monday Mar 2014

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Das Backerbuch
Frank Pusch
Stuttgart: F. Krais, 1901

This German cookbook is a practical handbook of baking for all countries, with twenty-five plates printed in color and 445 illustrations within the text.

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Book of the Week – Zuschrift an Seine Zuhoerer Worinnen…

24 Monday Feb 2014

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Zuschrift an Seine Zuhoerer Worinnen…
Johann Gottlob Krueger (1715-1759)
Halle: C.H. Hemmerde, 1744
First edition
QC516 K7

Johann Krueger was Professor of Medicine at Halle, and later at Branschweig. He was fairly well-known in his day as an electrical experimenter. He was one of the few persons to whom E.G. von Kleist communicated his invention of the Leyden jar (the electrical condensor). Krueger’s interest in electricity was largely in possible medical applications, as suggested in this lecture. This printing of his lecture is unrecorded. The first recorded printing is dated 1745.

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Rare Books in Outside Online

19 Wednesday Feb 2014

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An image from our first edition copy of Washington Irving’s Astoria (1836) was used for an Outside Online post: An excerpt from a new book about the legendary Overland Party attempts to establish America’s first commercial colony on the wild and unclaimed Northwest coast. The book, Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire, a Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival  by Peter Stark was released this month from HarperCollins. The image was also used in the book.

http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/exploration/Astoria-John-Jacob-Astor-and-Thomas-Jefferson.html

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Book of the Week – The Life of George Washington, Commander in…

17 Monday Feb 2014

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Marshall, The Life of George Washington, 1804

Marshall, The Life of George Washington, 1804

The Life of George Washington, Commander in…
John Marshall (1755-1835)
Philadelphia: Printed and published by C.P. Wayne, 1804-07
First edition
E312 M33 1-5

Shortly after John Marshall became Chief Justice he was asked by George Washington’s nephew to write the first President’s official biography. As a personal friend of Washington, it was Marshall who announced the death of the President in 1799, offered the eulogy, chaired the committee that arranged the funeral rites, and led the commission to plan a monument in the capital city. Marshall wrote this biography using records and papers provided him by the President’s family. The seminal work was written as the Chief Justice was beginning the enormous task of constructing the judicial review and the American system of constitutional law. Gilbert Stuart’s famous portrait of Washington, introduced to the public through the engraved frontispiece of this work, was produced by Philadelphia stipple-engraver David Edwin. The second edition of this five volume work was issued within one year of the first.

 

Rare Books Online Exhibition

14 Friday Feb 2014

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New Online Exhibition – Fighting Words: American Revolutionary War Pamphlets

Fighting Words

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Book of the Week – Valentines to the Wide World

10 Monday Feb 2014

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Valentines to the Wide World
Mona Van Duyn (1921- 2004)
Iowa City: Cummington Press, 1958
First edition
PS3543 A563 V3 1958

Born in Waterloo, Iowa, Mona Van Duyn grew up in the small town of Eldora, Iowa (pop. 3,200) where she read voraciously and secretly wrote poems in her school notebooks from grade school to high school. In a 1991 interview she recalled a typical punishment in small town Iowa grade school: “One was made to stay after school and learn a poem.”

Ouch! Van Duyn earned a B.A. from Northern Iowa University in 1942, and an M.A. from the University of Iowa in 1943, the year she married Jarvis Thurston. In 1946 she was hired as an instructor at the University of Louisville when her husband became an assistant professor there. Together they began Perspective: A Quarterly of Literature in 1947 and continued it at Washington University in St. Louis when they moved there in 1950. Van Duyn lectured in the University College adult education program until her retirement in 1990. In 1983, a year after she had published her fifth book of poems, she was named an adjunct Professor in the English Department and became the “Visiting Hurst Professor” in 1987, the year she was invited to be a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She was awarded numerous national prizes, awards, and fellowships.  She served as the first female Poet Laureate of the United States.

Printed by Raeburn Miller, K. Kimer Merker, and Harry Duncan with Romanee and Lutetia Italic typefaces on Curtis Rag paper. Edition of one hundred and eighty copies. University of Utah copy is no. 18.

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Book of the Week – Abrege Chronologique des Grands Fiefs de la…

03 Monday Feb 2014

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Abrege Chronologique des Grands Fiefs de la…
Pierre Nicolas Brunet (1733-1771)
Paris: Desaint & Saillant, 1759
First edition
DC36.6 B78 1759

Pierre Brunet was a French poet and dramatist. He is known for a heroic poem he published in 1756. Less successful were his plays, but he worked for several years with the Paris Opera on opera and ballet productions. He edited the political newspaper “Mercure de France,” contributing several pieces. Abrege is his longest and most serious attempt at writing, a history that he worked on with his father. Well-educated and articulate, Brunet was not a particularly good writer, nor was he a very strong researcher. Still, his history of medieval fiefs is an example of the study of medieval France going on in his day.

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Book of the Week – Emblemata et Aliqvot Nvmmi Antiqvi…

31 Friday Jan 2014

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Emblemata et Aliqvot Nvmmi Antiqvi…
Janos Zsamboki (1531-1584)
Antverpiae: Ex officina Christophori Plantini, mdlxix [1569]

The emblem book addressed a wide range of interests within humanist culture, among them the purpose of poetry and the relative power of the visual and the verbal. The first edition of physician Janos Zsamboki’s Emblemata was printed by the Plantin press in 1564. It was the first new emblem book to appear outside of Italy or France and is one of the largest and most influential examples of the genre at an early state of its development. An expanded edition was published in 1566 and was reprinted four times.

Janos Zsamboky was a Hungarian humanist who spent much of his life in Vienna as court-historiographer to the Habsburg emperors Ferdinand I, Maximilian II, and Rudolf II. This edition opens with an emblem dedicated to the newly elected emperor Maximilian II. Zsamboky prepared his emblem book at the end of two decades of traveling throughout Germany, France, Italy, and the Low Countries, before he entered the court in Vienna. Other works from Zsamboki include editions of classical texts and historiographical works. His was renowned for his scholarly patronage and an impressive collection of books and old manuscripts.

Emblemata consists of single pages containing a motto, a woodcut illustration and an epigram. Nearly a third of the emblems are also accompanied by dedications to well-known humanists, powerful courtiers, clergymen and friends and relatives. Zsamboki commissioned Lucas d’Heere to draw the illustrations. Christopher Plantin had half of d’Heere’s designs redrawn by Geoffory Ballain and Pieter Huys. The woodcuts were produced by Gerard Janssen van Kampen, Cornelis Muller and Arnold Nicolai. The Plantin printer’s device appears on the title-page. A full-page engraving of Zsamboki faces the preface. Various decorative vignettes throughout. Several leaves with wood engravings of Roman coins at the end of the book.

From the Kenneth Lieurance Ott Collection donated to the Okanagan County Museum, Washington.

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Book of the Week – An Embassy From the East-India Company of the…

20 Monday Jan 2014

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An Embassy From the East-India Company of the…
Johannes Nieuhof (1618-1672)
London: Printed by J. Macock for the author, 1669
First printing in English translation

Johann Nieuhof was delegation secretary under ambassadors Pieter de Goyer and Jocab de Keyser for Holland’s mission to China, arriving there in 1656. His book describing his travels in China quickly became a best seller of its day. First published in Leyden in 1665, it was reprinted in Dutch in 1670 and again in 1693. It was translated into French (1665), German (1666) Latin (1668) and English (1669). The English translation was reprinted in 1673.

Nieuhof’s book was richly illustrated with 150 maps and engravings of cities, flora and fauna, and costumes, all based on drawings by Chinese artists. The illustrations provided western Europeans with one of its earliest and most accurate depictions of the exotic Far East. John Ogilby, the English translator, included only about a third of the illustrations for the English edition.

The English artists, including Wenceslaus Hollar, who copied the original engravings, replaced the original artist’s signatures with their own, a standard practice at the time. Ogilby added nearly twenty-five illustrations that were not in the Dutch editions, some of which were copied from the works of Athanasius Kircher, an early Jesuit visitor to China.

Nieuhof included a history of China in the second half of his book, the first full history using Chinese sources to reach European readers. Among Nieuhof’s detailed discussions about what he saw in China, he included printing. He was impressed with the speed of the Chinese printers and compared their technique and the quality of their printing favorably with that of European printers. He wrote “…they print…with so much ease and quickness that one man is able to print 5000 sheets in a day…”