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W.T. Moncrieff, Memoirs and Anecdotes of Monsieur Alexandre, the Celebrated Dramatic Ventriloquist. Adventures of a Ventriloquist; or, The Rogueries of Nicholas . . . . Illustrations by Robert Cruikshank (London: J. Lowndes, 1822). Graphic Arts Cruik R 1822

Graphic Art holds a rare copy of the memoir of Nicolas-Marie-Alexandre Vattemare (1796-1864), an actor, ventriloquist, quick-change artist, and philanthropist, who used as his stage name Monsieur Alexandre. Although trained as a doctor, Vattemare's natural talents as an entertainer led him onto the stage, a career which lasted from 1815 to 1835.

Vattemare performed a one-man show in which he transformed into dozens of different characters, each with their own costumes and voices. Bound with his memoir are scripts of the various sketches he performed, each one illustrated with a frontispiece portrait of that individual persona, made by Robert Cruikshank (1789-1856).

Vattemare's fame led to great wealth, which he used to acquire a vast collection of rare books and coins (among other things). Late in his life, Vattemare was instrumental not only in founding of the Boston Public Library but also a system of interlibrary loans and cultural exchanges between libraries around the world.

"The extraordinary life of Nicolas-Marie-Alexandre Vattemare (1796-1864)," wrote Suzanne Nash (Princeton University Professor of French and Italian, Emeritus), "known today by a handful of bibliographers as the founder of the American Collection at the Bibliothèque Administrative de la Ville de Paris and for his role in the creation of the Boston Public Library, deserves to be told, not only as a revealing page in the history of Franco-American relations, but as a window onto the rapidly changing cultural history of nineteenth-century France."
"Alexandre Vattemare: A 19th Century Story," Society of Dix-Neuviémistes (2004) http://www.sdn.ac.uk/dixneuf/september04/nash/vattemare.pdf

In 1824, Sir Walter Scott wrote Vattemare an epigram:
Of yore, in Old England, it was not thought good
To carry two visages under one hood;
What should folks say to you who have faces so plenty
That from under one hood you last night showed us twenty?

Stand forth, arch-deceiver, and tell us in truth
Are you handsome, or ugly? In age, or in youth?
Man, woman, or child? Or a dog or a mouse?
Or are you at once each live thing in the house?

Each live thing, did I ask, each dead implement too?
A workshop in your person -- saw, chisel and screw.
Above all, are you one individual? I know
You must be, at the least, Alexandre and Co.

But I think you're a troop, an assemblage, a mob,
And that I, as the sheriff must take up the job;
And instead of rehearsing your wonders in verse,
Must read you the riot act and bid you disperse.

Unbalanced Color (left) and Balanced Color (right)

In his introduction, color theorist A.H. Munsell writes, “With white at the North pole and black at the South pole; and its axis between these points a measured scale of grays, we have a decimal neutral scale which painters call Value. The middle point of this axis must be a middle gray, and a plane passing through to the equator must contain colors of middle value. If, therefore, the equator be spread with a color circle … we have the equator as a decimal scale of hues merging gradually from one to the next and returning upon itself….”

“Each of these hues is supposed to grow lighter until it merges into the North pole at white, and darker similarly to black, and these are called the values (light) of color. They may also be imagined as passing inward until they disappear in the gray axis. Should there be still stronger colors, they will continue upon the same radii outside the sphere. These we call the chromas (strength) of color.”

Postridge,Tennyson, 1900. Carved marble. Museum Objects Sculpture Collection

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), Alfred Tennyson, albumen print from wet collodion-on-glass negative, 1869. Graphic Arts GAX 2011-00455

According to Tennyson’s son, Hallam Tennyson, around the same time Cameron was immortalizing his father, a letter arrived from the Tennyson Society of Philadelphia. The Society was asking permission to use the poet’s name and to give their organization a motto.

Tennyson replied, “You have done me honour in associating my name with your institution, and you have my hearty good wishes for its success. Will the following Welsh motto be of any service to you? I have it in encaustic tiles on the pavement of my entrance hall: “Y Gwir yn erbyn y byd” (The truth against the world). A very old British apophthegm, and I think a noble one, and which may serve your purpose either in Welsh or English.” —Alfred Lord Tennyson: a Memoir By His Son (1897)

James Midgley Clark points out that the most interesting items at the St Gall Abbey in Switzerland are the ivory tablets attributed to Tuotilo. “They form the cover of the famous Evangelium Longum. Both tablets are enclosed in a frame of gilded silver with precious stones. … The second tablet depicts a fight between animals, surrounded by foliage, the assumption of the Virgin Mary, two scenes from the life of St Gall with the inscription: S. Gallus panem porrigit urso [St Gall gives bread to the bear].”

“There is a striking resemblance between the decorative foliage of this tablet and the designs on a small ivory relief which serves as the cover of Codex No. 60. The subject depicted here is lions and panthers attacking a bull and a hind. The upper cover consists of skillfully carved but plain rosettes. That Tuotilo was a historical personage is an indisputable fact; after his death he was reversed as a saint and a chapel in the Abbey Church was named after him, from which we may conclude that he was one of the outstanding personalities of his day.” —The Abbey of St Gall as a Centre of Literature and Art (1926). (F) DQ549.4 .C6 1926

To see a digital image of the original, see: http://tinyurl.com/tuotilo

Laurence Binyon (1869-1943), The Drawings and Engravings of William Blake (London: The Studio, Limited, 1922). Gift of Sinclair Hamilton, Class of 1906. Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) Oversize 2006-0730Q

When the bibliophile Sinclair Hamilton died in 1978, he left a group of 150 rare books to the Princeton University library. Forty-nine of these were bound by his wife, Christine Hamilton (died 1968) who studied bookbinding under Eleanor van Sweringen in New York and Charles Pagnier in Paris.

“For many years she headed the Guild of Book Workers in New York. Books bound by her were exhibited at the World’s Fair in San Francisco in 1939, at the exhibition at the Grolier Club in 1947, at the Princeton Exhibition in 1951, and on many other occasions. An exhibition devoted entirely to her work was held at the Argent Galleries … in 1949.”—Library Chronicle Autumn 1978

Here are a few more examples.

Gordon Christian Aymar (born 1893), Bird Flight ([S.l.]: Dodd, Mead, 1935). Gift of Sinclair Hamilton, Class of 1906. Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) 2006-2574N

Woldemar von Seiditz (1850-1922), A History of Japanese Colour-Prints (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1910). Gift of Sinclair Hamilton, Class of 1906. GAX 2012- in process

Henry Adams (1838-1918), Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925). Gift of Sinclair Hamilton, Class of 1906. Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) Oversize 2006-0757Q

William Blake (1757-1827), A Squatted Devil with Young Horns, ca. 1810. Pencil on paper. Butlin no. 596. Robert H. Taylor art collection.

This pencil drawing by William Blake was never published and in fact, it hasn’t yet been identified as a study for any particular book or print or painting. Blake wrote about many devils but the word satyr does not appear in any of Blake’s poetry (which we can check thanks to the searchable Blake archive at the University of Virginia).

However, Blake did engrave two satyrs in the print he made after William Hogarth’s painting Beggar’s Opera. In Hogarth’s design the stage is framed with a crouching satyr on either side and according to the Tate records, the original frame also had two satyrs carved into the sides.

Princeton’s drawing is mentioned twice in Blake literature. Butlin writes, “The title is taken from Rossetti, who continues, ‘The face is somewhat of the Satyr type. Ordinarily good.’ Certainly, a satyr rather than a devil seems to be intended in this fairly highly finished figure. The background is slightly indicated to suggest rocks.” (Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake (EX N6797.B57B87Q)).

William Rossetti is quoted from p. 251 in Alexander Gilchrist (1828-1861), Life of William Blake, “Pictor ignotus”. With selections from his poems and other writings … (London, Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1863). Rare Books (Ex) 3631.3.692.

Janice Biala (1904-2000), Benfolly, no date [1930s]. Oil on canvas.
Museum object collection GA 2006.02658

In 1913, Schenehaia Tworkovska (1903-2000) and her older brother Yakov (1900-1982) immigrated to the United States from Biala, Poland. She took the name Janice, he became Jack, and they anglicized the family name to Tworkov. Each worked to pay for painting classes at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League. To avoid the stigma of being a female artist, Janice painted under the name of her hometown, Biala. Before long, both Janice and Jack were American citizens.

Janice traveled to Paris in 1930 to continue her education in art and there, she met and moved in with the English writer Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939). Ford was the founder of The Transatlantic Review, where he published James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and other friends. Describing their relationship, Janice wrote, “He found a little handful of dust and turned it into a human being.”

Through Ford, she met the poet Allen Tate (1899-1979) and Tate’s wife Caroline Gordon (1895-1981), who worked as Ford’s secretary. The Tates invited Ford and Biala to spend time at their antebellum home on the Cumberland river near Clarksville, Tennessee. Purchased with the help of Tate’s brother Ben, the house was dubbed Ben’s Folly or Benfolly. In the summers it was filled with visiting writers and artists, as seen in Biala’s painting (purchased by Princeton from the Tates’ daughter).

“All of Biala’s paintings seem touched by a tough ingenuousness — never sentimental or naive, but slightly nostalgic in their playful intimacy. Suffusing them is the outlook of a painter who has found what she needs and knows what she wants to do. The results glow with a wondrous candor.” John Goodrich, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” New York Sun, December 13, 2007

See also: Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), Provence: from Minstrels to the Machine; illustrations by Biala (Philadelphia; London: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1935). Gift of Edward Naumburg. (Ex) 2004-1848N

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), Great Trade Route; with drawings by Biala (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1937). (Ex) PR6011.O53 Z99036

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), An Essay on the Genius of George Cruikshank. With Numerous Illustrations of His Works ([London]: H. Hooper, 1884). Extra illustrated copy. Unique binding by Joseph Zaehnsdorf in full red calf; solid gilt edges, original cloth covers bound in. Graphic Arts Collection (GA) Cruik 946

Samples from our Change Packet Collection. GC149 Graphic Arts Ephemera

“Among the refinements of middle-class Victorian shopping was the giving of change not directly from hand to hand but in paper packets. Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal in a review of London shops and shopping (15 October 1853), makes passing note of the custom. A customer seeking to buy a pair of kid gloves ‘is met at the door by a master of the ceremonies, who escorts him to the precise spot where what he seeks awaits him … He walks over rich carpets, in which his feet sink as though upon a meadow-sward; and he may contemplate his portrait at full length in half-a-dozen mirrors, while that pair of gentlemen’s kids at 2s 10 ½ d is being swaddled in tissue-paper, and that remnant of change in the vulgar metal of which coal-scuttles are made … is being decently interred in a sort of vellum sarcophagus ere it is presented to his acceptance’.”

“The envelope, known as a ‘change packet,’ measured some 60 mm (2 ½ in) square and was printed with the legend ‘The change, with thanks’, often in a decorative roundel or other device. Printing was generally in a single colour; sometimes the design appeared as a white, embossed image on a coloured background.”

“The packets were supplied to the shopkeeper either as a stock design in which there was no trade message, or printed specially to order with name, address, and designation presented as a form of miniature trade card. Additionally, the shopkeeper might be supplied with the packets at much reduced rates, if not free of charge, by the new breed of national advertisers who used the printing space on the packet for their own message. Typical of these were Huntley & Palmers, biscuit manufacturers, whose change packets were widely used. Their Royal Appointment design appears in two packet sizes and a variety of colours.”

“Stock packets supplied by printers and stationers are also found with topical references, as for example one specimen commemorating the International Exhibition of 1862 [above left]. Wording also provided some variation; a number of specimens bear, in addition to an expression of thanks, the words ‘The favour of your recommendation is respectfully solicited’.”

Quoted from:
Maurice Rickards, The Encyclopedia of Ephemera: a Guide to the Fragmentary Documents of Everyday Life for the Collector, Curator, and Historian. Edited and completed by Michael Twyman (New York: Routledge, 2000). Graphic Arts Reference Collection (GARF) Oversize NC1280 .R52 2000q

Feuillets d’art (Pages of Art) (Paris: L. Vogel; New York, C. Nast, 1919-1922). Bimonthly. Charles Rahn Fry Pochoir collection. GAX 2004-0383Q

Lucien Vogel (1886-1954) founded several gorgeous high fashion magazines including Gazette du Bon Ton, L’illustration des modes, and La jardin des modes. Feuillets d’art was dedication to “finding in the taste of the moment all that is traditional and durable.”

Each issue contained only five or six pages of text covering articles on contemporary literature, theater, music, and fashion. A pochoir print was also inserted “for the beauty alone” designed by some of the greatest illustrators of the day, such as Georges Lepape, George Barbier, Édouard Halouze and Charles Martin. Literary contributors include Marcel Proust, Paul Claudel, Jean Giradoux, Paul Valery, Jean Cocteau, and Anatole France.

During the same period, Vogel’s wife Cosette de Brunhoff worked as editor of the French Vogue and Vogel served as art director from 1922 to 1925. If that was not enough, in 1920 he and his brother Jacques founded a perfume company named Vigny, after the poet Alfred de Vigny, with such fragrances as Golliwog, Chick-Chick, Guili-Guili, and Be Lucky.

[Facsimile edition of the Biblia Latina, commonly known in English as the Gutenberg Bible, formerly known as Mazarin or Mazarine Bible] [Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1913-1914]. 2 v. Copy 6 of 300. Gift of Elmer Adler. GA Oversize 2006-0087F

“Diese faksimile-ausgabe des ersten [-zwelten] bandes der zweiundvierzigzeillgen Gutenburg-Bibel erschien im jahre 1913[-14] im Insel-verlag zu Leipzig. Die wiedergabe in mehrfarbigem lichtdruck erfolgte durch die Hofkunstanstalt Albert Frisch in Berlin nach dem pergament-exemplar der Königlichen bibliothek in Berlin und dem der Ständischen landsbibliothek in Fulda. Gedruckt wurden 300 exemplare / davon nr. 1-3 auf pergament / die übrigen auf van Gelder-bütten. Durch professor Ansgar Schoppmeyer in Berlin wurden die exemplare nr. 1-3 mit der hand ausgemalt und bei diesen / wie auch bei 10 exemplaren auf büttenpapier nr. 4-13 das gold mit der hand aufgelegt. Der einband ist dem Fuldaer exemplar nachgebildet.”

Johann Gutenberg (1397?-1468), working with merchant and money-lender Johann Fust (1400-1466) and printer Peter Schöffer (ca. 1425-ca. 1502), completed the printing of a 42-line Bible some time before August 1456. This lavishly produced facsimile edition of their book is based on the copies held by the Berlin Koniglichen Bibliothek and in the Stadtischen Landes-bibliothek in Fulda (the binding comes from this copy). Our former curator of graphic arts, Elmer Adler, generously donated a copy to Princeton University. A second set is housed in the William H. Scheide Library.

HAP Grieshaber

Georges Lemoine

Juana Faure

Gisela Sternstein-Feucht

Viktor Hermann

Beginning in 1958, the Swiss artist Sven Knebel (born 1927) established a publishing firm to promote the work of young writers and artists. Felix Rellstab joined him as an editor. The oversize format of their quarterly magazine Spectrum accommodated large scale original woodcuts, linocuts, and screen prints in every issue.

Authors include Günter Eich, Max Frisch, Ludwig Hohl, Alfred Andersch, Rainer Brambach, Walter Gross, and many others. One of artist Knebel frequently published was the German printmaker Helmut Andreas Paul (HAP) Grieshaber (1909-1981), who cut large, dramatic images on course wood blocks. Bert Schmidmeister, Samuel Lier, Viktor Hermann, and Juana Faure are among the many other artists given a platform at Spektrum.

Pre-Columbian Stamp Seals and Roller Seals Collection, Pre-Columbian era to approximately 1600 ADE. Graphic Arts Collection GC185. Gift of Gillett G. Griffin.

Thanks to the generosity of our former curator of graphic arts, Gillett G. Griffin, we hold a collection of 147 clay stamp seals, roller seals, and flat seals with handles. Housed in four large boxes, staff members Teresa T. Basler and Charles E. Greene organized the collection into the following series: Series 1: Stamp Seals: Anthropomorphic Designs; Series 2: Stamp Seals: Zoomorphic Designs; Series 3: Stamp Seals: Geometric, Floral, and Other Designs; Series 4: Large Flat Seals (with handles); Series 5: Roller Seals.

Mesoamerican seals (or sellos) were used for printing with colored pigments. The Oxford Companion to Western Art, notes that surviving Pre-Columbian examples are made of clay or terracotta and occasionally of stone, but later seals have been found made of wood. The relief patterns were either for a positive or negative image (by contrast, the designs on Ancient Near Eastern seals are always negative, since they were intended to produce positive images on wet clay).

The use of seals was widespread in Mesoamerica, parts of the Caribbean, and in the intermediate areas between Mesoamerica and the central Andes in South America. Use in Mesoamerica began about 1500 B.C.E. during the Pre-Classic period. A large numbers of seals have also been found at Olmec sites in the Gulf Coast region from the same era.

For more information, see Anthony Ortegon, Pre-Columbian Stamp Seals (Pueblo, Colo.: AOA Associates, 1999). Rare Books: Reference Collection (ExB) E59 .A7 1999

You can’t do this on google books. A selection of nineteenth-century American imprints in the Sinclair Hamilton Collection, Graphic Arts

See also: American Decorated Publishers’ Bindings, 1872-1929 / collected and described by Richard Minsky (GA Oversize Z269.3.P89 M567 2006q)

Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827), Highland Broad Sword: As Practiced by the Dismounted Troops of the Light Horse Volunteers of London and Westminster ([London]: Henry Angelo, 1799). 56 x 39 cm. Graphic Arts Rowlandson 1798.11

This large color etching with aquatint contains 150 figures drawn by Thomas Rowlandson depicting the various positions in the use of the Highland broad sword. Graphic Arts is fortunate to hold two copies, which shows us the coloring differed greatly from copy to copy. Each sheet was folded to fit into a paper slipcase measuring 17 x 14 cm.

The images depict the ten lessons (or “set play” sequences) of fencing as dictated by Henry Angelo (1756-1835) and followed by the Guards of the Light Horse Volunteers of London and Westminster. Angelo ran a fencing academy on Old Bond Street and financed the publication (which is still followed today http://youtu.be/rt8gFOjMopM).

Later the same year, Angelo also published a training manual for cavalrymen entitled Hungarian and Highland Broadsword (Rowlandson 1798.12f). That volume includes twenty-four color plates, also designed by Angelo’s good friend Thomas Rowlandson.

“Shelved in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections in the Princeton University Library—and totally unexplored so far as I know—are sixty-three … [Thomas] Rowlandson drawings,” writes Joseph Rothrock, professor emeritus, University of New Mexico and former curator of graphic arts.

“Almost all are laid down in a mid-nineteenth-century album acquired from Scribner’s on July 13, 1920 and donated to the Library in 1933. Its leaves, without watermarks or identifiable collectors’ marks, measure 9 1/8 by 12 1/2 inches. The drawings themselves are on both wove and laid papers with various watermarks. A light-table reveals on the reverse of many of the drawings one pen sketch, a variety of inscriptions and money accounts, and that the backs of several were used as watercolor palettes.”

“The album was part of a major gift to the Princeton University Library of Rowlandson’s illustrated books and of around two thousand prints by Rowlandson, Bunbury, Woodward, and Gillray. Well over half the prints are by Rowlandson and include many of his earliest etchings as well as numerous proofs, proofs delicately hand colored, and prints not listed in the estimable Grego.”

“The collector was Dickson Q. Brown, Princeton Class of 1895. Brown donated most of the material in 1928 and continued to augment it until his death in 1939.” The rest of Rothrock’s article and a complete listing of the drawings can be found in Princeton University Library Chronicle 36, no. 2 (winter 1975): 87-110. http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visual_materials/pulc/pulc_v_36_n_2.pdf

Along with the books and papers that came to Princeton University in 1964 from Sylvia Beach’s Paris bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, was the signboard that hung outside the shop’s front door. With a brightly colored enamel portrait of William Shakespeare on one side and the bookstore’s name on the other, this heavy steel sign became the icon for the shop until it closed in 1941.

Princeton’s is the third of three signs commissioned for the shop, this one painted by Marie Monnier-Bécat (1894-1976), the wife of the artist Paul-Émile Bécat (1885-1960) and sister of Sylvia Beach’s partner Adrienne Monnier (1892-1955).

Beach wrote, “Charles Winzer, a Polish-English friend of Adrienne’s, made the signboard, a portrait of Shakespeare, to be hung outside. Adrienne didn’t approve of the idea, but I wanted it anyway. The signboard hung from a bar above the door. I took it down at night. Once, I forgot it, and it was stolen. Winzer made another, which also disappeared. Adrienne’s sister made a third one, a rather French-looking Shakespeare, which I still have.” - Sylvia Beach (1887-1962), Shakespeare and Company (ExB 0350.854.15)

See Steve Ferguson’s rare book blog for more information: http://blogs.princeton.edu/rarebooks/2011/01/thedispesalofsylviabeachs.html

And here is a video of Beach talking about her life in Princeton and then, in Paris: http://www.rte.ie/player/#!v=1129703=

From there, Haberly moved to Gregynog Press but only stayed for two years, producing only four volumes. His best work during this period may be Cyrupaedia, (1936) published in an edition of 150 hand-set and hand-bound copies. Haberly’s bindings tend to be overly ornate but in this case, he successfully balances a simple design with bright color.

Haberly returned to the United States and ended his long career as an English professor and dean at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. The original University shield, recently updated, was designed by Haberly. He continued to print and publish books of his own poetry throughout his life.

With thanks to Jay Satterfield, who has written an extended biography of Loyd Haberly (1993): http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/spec-coll/Bai/satter2.htm

His obituary in the New York Times can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/1981/03/28/obituaries/loyd-haberly-dies-at-84-poet-teacher-and-dean.html