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Tag Archives: Paris

ДОКТОР ЖИВАГО: РОМАН

23 Tuesday Oct 2018

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Boris Pasternak, communist, declassified, Doctor Zhivago, documents, France, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Lyuba Basin, Milan, Nobel Prize for Literature, novel, novelist, Paris, poems, poet, Russia, Russian, Russian Revolition 1905, Société d'édition et d'ímpression mondiale, Soviet, tourists, United States Central Intelligence Agency, Western Europe, World War I, Борис Пастернаk, Борис Пастернак, ДОКТОР ЖИВАГО: РОМАН, Париж


“No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history’s organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track mind, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshiped for decades thereafter, for centuries.” — Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

ДОКТОР ЖИВАГО: РОМАН
Борис Пастернаk
Париж, 1959

Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak
Paris: Société d’édition et d’ímpression mondiale, 1959
PG3476 P27 D6 1959b

Just because its not a “first edition” and just because its “only a paperback” doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a great story. We present the following case in point:

Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) was a Soviet Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator. In Russia, his first book of poems, My Sister, Life, is considered one of the most influential collections published in the Russian language. However, outside of Russia, Pasternak is best known for his 1957 novel, Doctor Zhivago. Critically depicting life between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and WWI, the manuscript was originally smuggled to Milan and published in 1957 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. The novel quickly rose to fame and by 1958 Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although Pasternak was forced to decline the prize by the Soviet government, Doctor Zhivago continued to be mass-produced outside the Soviet Union and throughout the non-Communist world.

In April 2014, the United States Central Intelligence Agency released dozens of declassified documents confirming that it had covertly distributed thousands copies of the original Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago to Soviet tourists in Western Europe and also funded the publication of a miniature, lightweight paperback edition that could be easily mailed or concealed in a jacket pocket. The front cover and the binding identify the book in Russian; the back of the book states that it was printed in France.

~~Contributed by Lyuba Basin and Luise Poulton

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Boards: A-Book-Part-You-Never-Think-About-But-Is-Super-Important-Anyway

30 Thursday Aug 2018

Posted by scott beadles in Uncategorized

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Antoine Augereau, barf board, Benjamin Eliot, boards, book, bookbinders, bookmaking, Boston, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Colonial America, conservators, Coptic, delaminate, Deseret News, exhibition, felts, fibers, fore-edge, Jim Croft, Jonathan Sandberg, medullary ray, Old Ways of Making Books, paper, paper mill, papermaking, Paris, pasteboard, rare book collections, Samuel Willard, scabbard, scaleboard, Scott Beadles, screen, Simon de Colines, vat, vellum, water, waterleaf, wood, wooden boards, workshop

Judge a book by it’s cover all you want. That cover just keeps on doing what it does best: protecting the book’s text. Covers allows a book to continue to convey information by taking the wear and tear of everyday use. Through the years different materials have been used to cover books.



Coptic Binding
Uncatalogued

Wood. Early books were most commonly covered with wooden boards. Rare Books has several manuscripts with Coptic bindings. These books are well-used, with uncovered wooden boards that are polished by handling, but they are often broken and then repaired with linen thread. The wood is sometimes cut similarly to modern lumber, in a straight line across the log. In the picture below you can see the curve of the tree’s growth rings. Wood is porous and expands and contracts as it takes on or loses moisture from the air. It will expand unevenly around that natural curve, warping and sometimes even cracking the board. The strongest wood boards are cut in a very different way.

Imagine you are looking down on the round end of a log. If you cut this log radially from the center as if it was a pie, two useful things happen. First, boards cut like this (called a quarter cut) resist warping because the grain of the wood is running straight up your board, instead of curving through it. Looking at the boards from the top you see little to none of the curve of the tree’s rings. This board will warp very little as humidity changes. Second, there is a structural feature in wood called the medullary ray. These rays go through the wood from the core out to the bark. They are perpendicular to the main grain of the wood, forming a remarkably durable natural plywood. Many Coptic boards break because they are made with wood that does not have prominent medullary rays.

In the above image, notice the faint curve of the grain near the middle of the left board.

In the image below, we can see the medullary rays and the tree’s grain weaving together. The lighter lines are medullary rays, the darker lines are the tree’s grain creating a strong internal structure.


Handmade book
by Jonathan Sandberg from raw materials
at Jim Croft’s “Old Ways of Making Books” workshop



He kaine diatheke
Paris: [Antoine Augereau for] Simon de Colines, [29 November or 22 December] 1534
BS1965 1534

Pasteboard. All this picky woodwork added complications to the bookmaking process. When bookmakers discovered that they could just paste together paper proofs, misprints, or offcuts to make functional boards, it became common practice to do just that. This has made for interesting discoveries as modern conservators re-bind historical books and find that their boards are made of interesting or rare texts.



Deseret News
By Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Volume 6. March 1856-March 1866
Uncatalogued

Waterleaf. Around the mid-sixteenth century, very soon after pasteboard began to be used, another technique for making boards was developed. If you are familiar with historical papermaking, or you’ve seen our recent paper exhibition, Paper is Fundamental, you know that paper was made by drawing suspended fibers out of a vat of water on a screen, which was then rolled onto a stack of felts. Paper makers found that if they took these raw, wet pieces of paper and compressed them together, it formed a variant of pasteboard that was less likely to separate between pages, or delaminate. Pictured here is a bound volume of the Deseret News from 1856. The very worn board is beginning to delaminate which gives us a great view of individual “pages.” Because the board is never printed on directly and almost always covered, papermakers could include fiber that would normally be unacceptable for papermaking. Here you see small pieces of cloth and thread. Historical bookmaker Jim Croft calls this kind of board “barf board” because of the jumble of reject fibers that go into its production.



The Peril of the Times Displayed
Samuel Willard
Boston : Printed by B Green & J Allen sold by Benjamin Eliot 1700
BX7233 W4292 P47 1700

Scaleboard. The first paper mill in Colonial America wasn’t established until 1690. Rather than using expensive, imported book boards, bookbinders often used thin scales of wood in their place. These scaleboards, originally called scabbards, were much too brittle for the task of protecting a book, but when covered in paper or leather they made perfectly usable covers. This book was printed in Boston in the year 1700. The leather is now peeling away, allowing us to look at the wood scale beneath. The end grain of the board is visible at the fore-edge and spine of the book, instead of the traditional head and tail. It may be quarter-cut, the end grain shows only a slight curve. The board is a little warped, but the book has been through a lot, and scaleboard wasn’t expected to do the same heavy structural work as early wooden book boards were.

~Contributed by Jonathan Sandberg, Rare Books Assistant, with photographs by Scott Beadles, Rare Books Specialist

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Books of the Week — La Méthode de nomenclature chimique & Essai de Statique chimique

27 Monday Aug 2018

Posted by rarebooks in Book of the Week

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alchemical, Alexander von Humboldt, Antoine de Fourcroy, Antoine Lavoisier, Arcueil Society, chemical nomenclature, chemist, chemistry, Claude-Louis Berthollet, Cuchet, Didot, explorer, French, geographer, Greek, language, Latin, Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau, mathematician, nature, Paris, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pressure, quantity, reactants, solubility, temperature


In the study of nature, as in the practice of art, it is not given to man to achieve the goal without leaving a trail of dead ends he had pursued. — Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau

La Méthode de nomenclature chimique
Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau (1737-1816)
Paris: Cuchet, 1787
First edition, first issue
QD7 G85

Antoine Lavoisier’s discoveries made a new and rational chemical nomenclature imperative. Initiated by Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau, the project was taken up by Lavoisier, who soon convinced Guyton of the sense of his new system. The two collaborated with Claude-Louis Berthollet (1748-1822) and Antoine de Fourcroy (1755-1809), all of whom put together Méthode de nomenclature, replacing traditional alchemical language with a new system, still the basis of the language of modern chemistry. The system was quickly accepted after initial mass resistance.


A chemical name should not be a phrase…it should recall the constituents of a compound; it should be non-committal if nothing is known about the substance; the names should preferably be coined from Latin or Greek, so that their meaning can be more widely and easily understood; the form of the words should be such that they fit easily into the language into which they are to be incorporated. — from La Méthode de nomenclature chimique


Essai de statique chimique
Claude-Louis Berthollet (1748-1822)
Paris: F. Didot, 1803
First edition

Trained as a physician, the French chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet attempted to provide a basis for chemistry so that its experimental results could be viewed in the light of theoretical first principles. In this attempt, Berthollet recognized the importance of the theory of affinity.

According to the Essai, there were two main types of force in nature: gravitation, which accounted for astronomical phenomena, and chemical affinity. Berthollet proved that chemical affinity was relative, varying with the physical conditions accompanying a chemical experiment: quantity, temperature, solubility, pressure, and physical state. Berthollet introduced the concept of ‘chemical mass’ — relative affinity combined with the mass of reactants in a chemical combination — to give the total force with which a given quantity of a substance reacted with another.

In his work, Berthollet was critical of some of Lavoisier’s theories. His experiments with acidity, for example, were more substantial than those of Lavoiser. Nonetheless, Berthollet’s theories were never particularly successful in the eyes of his contemporaries.

Still, Berthollet worked closely with some of the best scientific minds of the time: Mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) contributed two extensive footnotes to Essai. He and Berthollet eventually lived next door to each other, forming the Arcueil Society, along with geographer and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), about whom Berthollet said, “This man is as knowledgeable as a whole academy.”

 

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Off With Their Heads!

12 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by rarebooks in Uncategorized

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Académie des sciences, air flow, Antoine Lavoisier, architect, Architecte de la ville de Paris, beheading, Bernard Poyet, chapel, Claude Philibert Coquéau, Eiffel Tower, French, guillotine, hospital, Hôtel-Dieu, Ministry of the Interior, Montecello, Notre Dame, Paris, pharmacy, Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris, Seine, Thermidor, Thomas Jefferson, urban design

Memoire sur la necessite de transfer et…
Claude Philibert Coquéau (1755-1794)
Paris: s.n., 1785
Sole edition

This is architect Bernard Poyet’s proposal for the Paris public hospital (Hôtel-Dieu), then one of the busiest and least sanitary hospitals in the world (and that is saying something!). The hospital housed three to seven thousand patients a day in twelve hundred beds. Erected on the banks of the Seine by Notre Dame between 1200 and 1250, it was enlarged during the subsequent centuries in a haphazard manner. The original buildings suffered a series of fires between 1737 and 1772, leaving a large part of the complex destroyed. To replace the existing facility, Poyet (1742-1824), Architecte de la ville de Paris, conceived a circular building along the river, adjacent to where the Eiffel Tower stands today.

The wheel-shaped building would accommodate five thousand beds and allow for expansion. The ground floor would house the pharmacy, kitchens, administrative offices and other services. The upper floors were devoted to patient care, with sixteen rooms each accommodating eighty-four beds. The ring surrounded a circular courtyard with a freestanding chapel at its center. The plan included specialized outbuildings for birthing and highly contagious patients, large adjoining green spaces, an animal slaughter house. There were several critiques of Poyet’s plan, including that of the Académie des sciences, which objected to the building’s circular form. “The wards are too close as they approach the center…” The Académie was particularly concerned with “infected air” and the best means in which to vitiate it. Air flow was a huge concern. Wind flow was Poyet’s answer to this concern. He believed that the flow of water along the River Seine encouraged the flow of air.

Poyet sited his hospital on an island, maximizing water, and therefore air, flow. The long, spoked wards opened at the short ends, allowing winds to flow the length of the wards and into the open central courtyard.

The royal commission chose an alternative plan, which was not realized until the 19th-century. There is evidence, however, that Thomas Jefferson approved of Poyet’s hospital design and drew from it for his Montecello. Jefferson was in Paris at the time of the publication of this pamphlet.

Poyet continued to be involved in urban design schemes in Paris in the 1790s and in to the early 18th century. The author of this pamphlet, outlining Poyet’s plan, Claude Philibert Coquéau, was also a French architect. He joined the Ministry of the Interior in 1792.

Guilty by association, Coquéau was sentenced to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris and guillotined on 8 Thermidor II.

Three folding etched plates illustrate Poyet’s design.

Rare Books copy in self-wrappers, stabbed as issued.


RELEVÉ DES PRINCIPALES ERREURS CONTENUES DANS LE…
Paris: s.n., 1785
Sole edition

This anonymous critique of Poyet’s ideas for a new hospital downplays general concerns for overcrowding in the current hospital, argues that Poyet’s estimation of twenty-five percent mortality rate is high, suggests the quality of service is just fine, and objects to numerous aspects of Poyet’s design, including the number of steps to the second floor. Our copy is distinguished by manuscript annotations on several pages by the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who points out the discrepancies between the Relevé’s contentions and the facts and clearly sympathizes with Poyet’s point of view. As a dedicated civil servant, Lavoisier was very interested in the reconstruction of the hospital, especially after the fire of 1772.

Lavoisier’s advocacy for renovation continued until he was beheaded in May 1794.

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We recommend — Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light

24 Tuesday Apr 2018

Posted by rarebooks in Recommended Reading

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acanthus, Anglo-Norman Litany of Saints, April, Boise, border, burnished gold, Cami Nelson, chrysalis, color, Connecticut College, Craig Dworkin, Elizabeth Peterson, eye, Finger Lakes, fragment, France, Geoffrey Babbitt, gilded, gold pavé, gutters, heliotropic, Hobart & William Smith Colleges, Idaho, ink, ivy, Jerry Root, Julie Gonnering Lein, Karen Brennan, Kathryn Cowles, leaf, lift, light, littera gothica textualis, littera gothica textualis formata, Luise Poulton, Marriott Library, National Poetry Month, New York, New York City, Office of the Dead, Paisley Rekdal, Paris, pasture, poet, rare books, rinceaux, scribe, Shira Dentz, Special Collections, Spyten Duyvil, street lamp, tendrils, The University of Utah, thunder, Tom Stillinger, transport, vellum, Vespers, vines


“a trace unnameable — place
holding the child
to the first frost,
the street lamp, the pasture — ”

Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light
Geoffrey Babbitt
New York City: Spuyten Duyvil, 2018
PS3602 A224 A6 2018 (General Collection, Level 2)

“This is Geoffrey Babbitt’s first book. His poems and essays have appeared in North American Review, Pleiades, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Notre Dame Review, TYPO, Tarpaulin Sky, The Collagist, Interim, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. Raised in Boise, Idaho, he studied at Connecticut College and earned his Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of Utah. Geoffrey currently coedits Seneca Review and teaches at Hobart & William Smith Colleges in the Finger Lakes region of New York, where he lives with poet Kathryn Cowles and their three daughters.”

Geoffrey acknowledges the help of many friends, colleagues and faculty from the University of Utah including Luise Poulton, Karen Brennan, Craig Dworkin, Julie Gonnering Lein, Cami Nelson, Paisley Rekdal, Jerry Root, Tom Stillinger, Shira Dentz, Elizabeth Peterson, and others.

Congratulations, Geoffrey!


MS Fragment: 4 — Date: ca. 1375 — Origin: France (possibly northeastern) — current location: Marriott Library, University of Utah, Special Collections, Rare Book Division — Materials: Ink, and burnished gold on vellum — Illustration: Detail — Size: 7 1/8 in. x 5 7/16 in. — Section: Anglo-Norman Litany of Saints — Script: littera gothica textualis formata

“vines scritched, chrysalis
onto vellum leaf–all
lost color, stolen thunder
–spiritual curl
of the vine tending
ultimately toward–tattered edge
curling from the gutters…”


MS Fragment: 8 — Date: ca. 1425-1450 — Origin: France (possibly Paris) — Current Location: Marriott Library, University of Utah, Special Collections, Rare Books Division — Materials: Ink, and burnished gold on vellum — Size: 7 1/4 in. x 5 3/16 in. — Illustration: Detail, border — section: Office of the Dead, Vespers — Script: littera gothica textualis

“lit border
buoys — acanthus
place setting
scribe sets — rinceaux
sprays, gilded ivy leaf,
bryony tendrils, gold pavé
fleur-de-lis — heliotropic
buoyancy — motor cells in
the pulvinus synthesize
bouncing light, con-
vert eye movement, displace
page’s gravitropic
polar auxin transport —
downwarding becomes lift”

April is National Poetry Month.

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Book of the Week — Promenade de Longchamp, Optique no. 4

28 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by rarebooks in Book of the Week

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Archbishop de Beaumont, Bois-de-Boulogne, Champs-Élysées, concertina, convent, Easter Parade, fashion, hats, Holy Week, Kentucky Derby, Napoleon, Paris, Paris Opera, peepshow, Promenade de Longchamp, Tenebrae, tunnel book

Facade
— Photographs by Scott Beadles

PROMENADE DE LONGCHAMP, OPTIQUE NO. 4
Paris, ca. 1810

The Promenade de Longchamp was an annual social event which took place on the Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of Holy Week every spring along the Champs-Élysées and through the Bois-de-Boulogne. The tour ended at the abbey of Longchamp, where the nuns sang the office of Tenebrae, a village four miles from Paris. A convent there, established in 1256, had long been a destination for religious pilgrims. In the late seventeenth century, the pilgrimage became unauthorized secular spectacle.

Through

The nun’s choir was fortified with singers from the Paris Opera. The theater in Paris was closed during Lent, which made the Promenade one of the few ways in which high society could flaunt their new spring fashions. A procession of people in festive costume traveled on horseback, in carriages, and on foot. Wealthy citizens of Paris vied to have the most elaborate carriages and clothing, while the lower classes, including laborers, soldiers, and prostitutes, lined the route to gawk. Police turned out in force, to keep the parade participants safe. The Paris Archbishop de Beaumont tried to halt the parade by ordering the convent closed during Holy Week. The parade did not stop. Participants were there to see and be seen.

Through2

In 1789, the Promenade was disrupted by an angry mob. The convent, by then wholly peripheral to the show, was closed by the Revolutionary government. Napoleon revived the parade in the 19th century, in part as a way to bolster the fashion industry, but the later parades did not match the lush grandeur of those in the 18th century. Still, the parade contributed to later fashion phenomena. The American “Easter Parade” and the big, ostentatious hats of the Kentucky Derby can be traced back to the Promenade de Longchamp.

Profile

This early 19th century concertina-style peepshow depicting the Promenade de Longchamp in Paris is etched on the front and back panes and contains four cut-out sections in-between, all hand-colored. The front panel has a circular viewing aperture. It is housed in its original marbled paper slip-case with engraved label.

Slipcase2

Slipcase

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Book of the Week — Atlas céleste de flamsteed…

13 Tuesday Mar 2018

Posted by rarebooks in Book of the Week

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atlas, cartography, celestial, Edmund Halley, engineer, English, engravings, French, Isaac Newton, Jean Nicolas Fortin, John Flamsteed, maps, Paris, stars


“Newton’s design was to make me come to him, force me to comply with his humors, and flatter him and cry him up as Dr. Halley did. He thought to work me to his ends by putting me to extraordinary charges. Those that have begun to do ill things never blush to do worse to secure themselves. Sly Newton had still more to do and was ready at coining new excuses and pretenses to cover his disingenuous and malicious practices… I met his cunning forecasts with sincere and honest answers and thereby frustrated not a few of his malicious designs. I would not court him, for, honest Sir Isaac Newton (to use his own words) would have all things in his own power, to spoil or sink them; that he might force me to second his designs and applaud him, which no honest man would do nor could do; and, God be thanked, I lay under no necessity of doing.” – John Flamsteed

Atlas céleste de flamsteed…
John Flamsteed (1646-1719)
Paris: Chez F. G. Deschamp [et chez] l’auteur, 1776
Second edition in French, the third edition after the first in English of 1729
QB65 F5 1776

John Flamsteed was England’s first Astronomer Royal. He was a lecturer at Gresham College. Flamsteed used a telescope with an aperture smaller than the smallest modern telescope, including those we might give to a child today. Telescopes used by the most casual amateur astronomers have apertures ten times that of Flamsteed’s telescope.

When first published, this altas represented a new era in celestial cartography, recording the 3000 stars John Flamsteed observed using equatorial and ecliptic coordinates. Flamsteed quarreled bitterly with Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley about his findings. His own findings often contradicted those of Christiaan Huygens. The sky was a battleground, fought over with primitive instruments and by the best minds of the day. 

For the French edition, engineer Jean Nicolas Fortin reduced the size of the maps, and fixed the location of the stars for 1780 instead of 1690, the date at which they had been fixed by Flamsteed. Fortin also added new discoveries to this edition. Illustrated with thirty double-page engraved plates.


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Merci, Paris!

24 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by Jonathan Bingham in Uncategorized

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Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, David Taillades, Editions Dervy, Freemasonry, Freemasons, J. Willard Marriott Library, Jon Bingham, Kent Walgren, Margate, Masonic, Paris, Quatuor Coronati, rare books

David TAILLADES, Hiram, Le Mystere de la Maitrise et les origines de la franc-maconnerie (Paris: Editions Dervy, 2017)

Presented as a gift from the author to Rare Books for assistance with Masonic sources, such as articles from the Ars Quatuor Coronatorum.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Title: Ars Quatuor Coronatorum: Being the Transactions of the Quatuor Coronati, Lodge No. 2076, London. Volume I.

Author: Freemasons

Edited by: G. W. Speth, P.M., Secretary

Publisher: Margate: Printed at “Kemble’s Gazette” Office, MDCCCXCV (1895)

Quatuor Coronati is the world’s premier Freemason research lodge. Established in 1884 (and consecrated in 1886), the lodge’s founders wished to advance an evidence-based approach to study Masonic history and research the origins of Freemasonry. Their approach was intended to replace the more imaginative writings of earlier authors and is referred to as the ‘authentic school’ of Masonic research. The Lodge publishes lectures, research papers, and ‘notes & queries’ annually in Ars Quatuor Coronatorum (‘AQC’), which also consists of the transactions of the Lodge. The AQC is distributed internationally. The J. Willard Marriott Library holds the first one hundred and seventeen volumes of the publication (up through 2004). The volumes in Rare Books came to the collections from the library of Kent Walgren.

David Taillades approached Rare Books in November 2016, requesting digital reproductions of articles from the the AQC because the documents “can’t be found in France.” Over the next six months Rare Books worked to support David’s research into the origins of Freemasonry in France by providing access to select articles found throughout its set of AQC. According to David, the support the Rare Books staff provided aided him greatly in his ability to publish his research.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Banned! — Lettre de Thrasibule a Leucippe

26 Tuesday Sep 2017

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Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, Cesare Beccaria, David Garrick, David Hume, Denis Diderot, Edward Gibbon, Enlightenment, France, French, Greek, Horace Walpole, Jean-Jacque Rousseau, L'Encyclopedie, Laurence Sterne, library, Paris, Paul Holbach, salon, Voltaire

BL2773-L458-1768-title

““How could the human mind progress, while tormented with frightful phantoms, and guided by men, interested in perpetuating its ignorance and fears? Man has been forced to vegetate in his primitive stupidity: he has been taught stories about invisible powers upon whom his happiness was supposed to depend. Occupied solely by his fears, and by unintelligible reveries, he has always been at the mercy of priests, who have reserved to themselves the right of thinking for him, and of directing his actions.”

Lettre de Thrasibule a Leucippe
Paul Heinrich Dietrich, Baron d’Holbach (1723-1789)
…a Londres : [no printer or date, but probably Paris, circa 1768]
First edition

An anti-religious and atheistic attack on superstition, this work compares ancient religions and considers Christianity to be a mixture of Judaism and the religions of Egypt. The work was attributed to Nicolas Freret (1688-1749), but is now considered to be by Paul Holbach, who frequently used the names of deceased writers on the titles of his books in order to disguise his authorship. Nicolas Freret was well-known and highly esteemed in his lifetime, but left little of his own writings.

Here, the French text is presented as a translation of an English text that, in turn, is presented as an original Greek text.

Paul Holbach was a French-German encyclopedist and prominent as a salonist in Paris during the French Enlightenment. He supported Denis Diderot financially and contributed articles and translations to L’Encyclopedie – in all about 400 pieces. His salons were exclusively male and attended by such notables as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, David Hume, Horace Walpole, Edward Gibbon, David Garrick, Laurence Stern, Cesare Beccaria and Benjamin Franklin. Well-fed, his guests were surrounded by Holbach’s three thousand-volume library.

Holbach is recognized today for his philosophical writings, published anonymously or under pseudonyms, and printed outside of France. His writings, however, were certainly recognized in his own day. Voltaire, who was sometimes accused of writing these polemics, made it known that he was not a fan of the « anonymous » Holbach’s work.

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Book of the Week — Tablettes De La Vie et De La Mort

18 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by rarebooks in Book of the Week

≈ Comments Off on Book of the Week — Tablettes De La Vie et De La Mort

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attorney, bibliophile, ceremonies, Christine A. Jones, Eugène Paillet, fidelity, fleurs de lys, French, Greek, Hebrew, Jean Thomas, Jesuits, judge, King Henri IV of France, Latin, law, Louis XIII, Lyon, Montauban, morocco, ornaments, Paris, Penard Fernández, Pierre Mathieu, quatrains, reception, religion, royal, Royal Historiographer, Société des Amis du Livre, The University of Utah, Toulouse, tragedies, translation, Valence, war, World Languages and Cultures

PQ1820-M28-T11-1629-Cover
“It seems that from a King, the Majesty fades
Without many servants trailing his royalty
It may be grand to engage them in spades
But it is a great pain to depend on their loyalty.”

Tablettes de la vie et de la mort
Pierre Mathieu (1593-1621)
A Paris: Iean Petit-Paz, rue S. Iacques, à l’eseu de Venise, près les Mathurins, MDCXXIX (1629) avec privilege dv Roy
First and only complete edition with Latin translation
PQ1820 M28 T11 1629

Pierre Mathieu studied under the Jesuits and mastered Latin, ancient Greek and Hebrew. When he was nineteen his first tragedy, “Esther” was performed and published in Lyon in 1585. Before his death, Mathieu published four more allegorical tragedies, exploring contemporary issues of war in defense of religion. He studied law at Valence, receiving his doctorat in 1586. He was chosen and sent by the residents of Lyon to King Henri IV of France in 1594 to represent to him their fidelity. A year earlier, he had been put in charge of organizing the ceremonies of the king’s royal reception during his visit to Lyon. In Paris Mathieu became Royal Historiographer and was privileged guest of the royal court and the king. He fell ill accompanying Louis XIII at the siege of Montauban and died in Toulouse.

This collection of cultivated admonitions was written by Matheiu for Henri IV and then Louis XIII, Henri IV’s son. It is made up of individual parts that were published over a period of sixteen years (the last posthumously) — and were printed alone, in pairs, or all together, often in this irresistible little palm-sized format. Matheiu intended his readership to memorize the three suites, or volumes, each of one hundred quatrains. Attorney Jean Thomas (act. 1645) translated the French into Latin, printed in just this edition.

The present copy belonged to Louis XIII or was for presentation by him. It bears the book plate of Eugène Paillet (1829-1901) and the stamp of one Penard Fernández.

Paillet was a Parisian lawyer and judge and one of the great French bibliophiles of the nineteenth century. He was particularly interested in acquiring a number of different editions of the same work in order to illustrate the history of the publication. He was a founding member of the Société des Amis du Livre in 1874.

The translation of the quatrain above is by Christine A. Jones, Professor, World Languages and Cultures, The University of Utah. She explained that this was a “quick, unpolished” translation “to give the reader a sense of the irony and juicy moral ambiguity of the poems.”

French text facing the Latin translation, ornaments throughout. Each page bears various hand ruled borders in light faded red ink. Bound in contemporary gilt red morocco, chain-and-bloom roll around a central panel diapered with a dotted roll, interstices with fleurs de lys, which also fill the single vertical spine compartment. Marbled pastedowns, all edges gilt.

PQ1820-M28-T11-1629-Pastedown

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