This volume provides an introduction to the earliest European printing, with beautiful full-color illustrations held in the collection of Princeton University’s Scheide library. It includes an essay on the early history of European printing and a checklist of printing in the Scheide Library pre-dating 1468, arranged chronologically under printing places. Unique copies are noted, as is printing on vellum; the date of acquisition and source of each item is given.
This book was written in 1770, and might thus plausibly claim the distinction of being the “first American novel.” It is an early work of two men who later came to rank among the most important literary figures of the American Revolution and early Republic. Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748-1816) was a distinguished Pennsylvania jurist and politician. Philip Freneau (1752-1832) was the author of anti-British satires during the Revolution, and an anti-Federalist editor working for Jefferson in the early 1790s. This is a humorous work which contrasts East and West, Bombo’s exotic mission and the mundane world in which he travels. It was actually written to mock members of the Cliosophic Society at Princeton Univ. and the tradition of oriental romance. Illus.
The two playlets by Richard Brinsley Sheridan reproduced here, “The Slanderers” and “Sir Peter Teazle,” preserve in its “seminal state” the finest English comedy of the 18th century. They are preserved at the Princeton University Library in the Richard Brinsley Sheridan archive within the Robert H. Taylor Collection, which arrived at Princeton in 1971 and continued to grow. After Mr. Taylor’s purchase in 1982 from Bernard Quaritch, Ltd. of the collection assembled by Pickering and Chatto -- an unrivaled assortment of early printed Sheridan material -- the library celebrated the acquisition by issuing a facsimile publication of this pair of playlets in the Sheridan manuscripts. Illustrations.
Catalogue of an Exhibition at the Princeton Univ. Library in 1995. The 1890s in Great Britain were characterized by endings and beginnings, traditionalism and iconoclasm, decadence and regeneration. At the center of it all stood Oscar Wilde, whose work and life made him the embodiment of his contradictory age. Born in Dublin in 1854, Wilde became an Irishman who conquered England, a Protestant who loved Catholicism, a married man who loved other men, a socialist who courted West End audiences, and a romantic in an age of realism. In 1895 two of Wilde’s play-- An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest -- opened to critical and popular acclaim. But the Marquess of Queensberry, father of Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas, had Wilde arrested for homosexual acts, and he was convicted and sentenced to two years’ hard labor. In 1897 Wilde left for Europe, never to return to the scene of his earlier successes, and had to omit his name from published works. One hundred years later the name “Wilde” has been restored to his work.
This is the first time the letters between Bernard Shaw and Alfred Douglas have been published. Shaw, the playwright and socialist, and Douglas, the aristocratic poet and ultraconservative, were antagonists in every way. But in 1931, many years after the downfall of Oscar Wilde -- the scandal with which Douglas’s name is always associated -- Douglas, hoping to boost American sales of his autobiography, asked Shaw to write a preface for it. Shaw refused. The exchange did not end, there, however, but continued for more than a decade, until Douglas died at 74. These letters are a wonder; they begin in argument, but soon an enduring friendship develops. They exchange lively comments on Wilde and his circle and such diverse figures, as Shakespeare and Ibsen, Einstein, Freud and Marx, Eliot and Auden, Chamberlain, Hitler, and many others. A significant literary event. Illus.P
This beautifully illustrated catalogue and the exhibition of treasures which it records is presented in honor of Richard M. Ludwig on the occasion of his retirement as a member of the Princeton English faculty and as Associate University Librarian for Rare Books and Special Collections. It celebrates that part of his career in which pedagogic, scholarly, and administrative talents were blended to enhance for students, scholars, and staff the joys of both the collecting and the use of Princeton collections of fine and rare research materials. Over 100 illustrations, some in full-color.
Contents: A Tribute to William H. Scheide, by Harold T. Shapiro; “The Same Purposeful Instinct”: Essays in Honor of William H. Scheide, by William P. Stoneman; William H. Scheide as Seen from the Grolier Club, by G. Thomas Tanselle; The Scheide Psalter-Hours, by Adelaide Bennett; The Scheide Gradual, Bernardino de Capris, and Manuscript Painting in Novara, by Edith W. Kirsch; In Defense of Ancient Liberties: Shrewsbury Abbey and the English Constitutional Crisis of 1297, by Don C. Skemer; The Monastery of San Vittore delle Chiuse: Preliminary Notes for a History, by Giuseppe Avarucci and Ugo Paoli; The Parkerian Legacy of a Scheide Manuscript: William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum, by Carl T. Berkhout; Aldus Manutius’s Paper Stocks: The Evidence of Two Uncut Books, by Paul Needham; Anton Koberger’s First Books: Paper Stocks and Sequence of Printing, by Janet Ing Freeman; Georg Sparsgut, Rubricator, by William P. Stoneman. Illus.
This Guide marks the culmination of a one-year project funded primarily by the John Foster and Janet Avery Dulles fund of the Princeton University Library. The project, entitled World War II Records at Princeton, had three main goals: to appraise and process approximately 600 feet of unprocessed records in the Public Policy papers and Princeton University Archives housed at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library; to plan and mount an exhibition to open on the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor; and to publish a guide to World War II-related holdings throughout the Books and Special Collections. The project achieved all of these goals in eighteen months. Includes an index.
Catalog of an exhibition of portraits of authors by important artists in the Firestone Library, Princeton University, 22 January to 5 July, 2000. They have been chosen, first, because the artists are among the best in the collections and only secondarily because of the renown of the authors portrayed. These 100 portraits dating from 1481 to 1989 were created by some of the most influential artists of their generations, such as William Blake, Constantin Brancusi, Jean-Antoine Houdon, Edouard Manet, Robert Nanteuil, Willem de Passe, and August Rodin. When possible, this checklist notes whether a portrait was created during the author’s lifetime, since this means the author may have had input in the final image. 50+ portraits, a few in full-color.
For the past two centuries, the form of illustration that has been most familiar to much of the world’s population has been that carried on bank notes. Vsevolod Onyshkevych offered Princeton Univ. Library the opportunity to exhibit selections from his extensive collection of world paper money in association with items from the Princeton Univ. Numismatic Collection, which is richest in the paper money of the U.S. This is the catalog of the exhibition, which was held from 30 Aug. 2010 through 2 Jan. 2011. Contents: Preface, by Alan Stahl; Foreword, by Vsevolod Onyshkevych; Bank Note Engraving in the U.S.: A Short Primer, by Francis Musella; Discovered! The First Engraving of an Audubon Bird, by Robert Peck and Eric Newman; Checklist of Bank Notes Exhibited, by Alan Stahl. Illustrations.
