Yesterday morning I presented a paper at the fall meeting of the New England Historical Association, as did J.L. Bell of Boston 1775 and several other friends and colleagues. Mine was an offshoot of the paper I worked on a year or so ago, about the provenance of several extant copies of John Eliot's Indian Bible. The conference was fun, and the papers I got to hear were excellent. I would have liked to hear more papers, but unfortunately was able to listen to just those on my panel and John's, since there were only two sessions with lots of simultaneous panels.
- Over at Boston 1775, a look at the early answers to the question of just what it is that the "V.P. does every day."
- If you haven't already made it a regular stop, Ed & Edgar should be added to your daily rotation. Ed's been and will continue to be very busy documenting his travels with Poe and his advocacy for Philadelphia's Poe Primacy. Also on the Poe front, Rick Ring pointed out that some Poe manuscripts sold at auction this week.
- Book Patrol passes along an essay by publisher David Godine on his principles of publishing.
- Playwright Alan Bennett has donated his archive to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.
Reviews
- In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda reviews Timothy Ryback's Hitler's Private Library.
- Michael Kenney reviews Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates for the Boston Globe. Heller McAlpin reviews Vowell's book for the Christian Science Monitor.
- The two recent books about Han van Meegeren (The Forger's Spell and The Man Who Made Vermeers) are reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker.
Showing posts with label Eliot. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eliot. Show all posts
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Auction Report: Sotheby's
The eleventh portion (English books and manuscripts) of the sale of the Earl of Macclesfield's library was held in two sessions today at Sotheby's in London. The first session realized 1.269 million GBP total (the results of the second session will be out fairly soon). Prices include buyer's premium.
Scoring big in the morning session, as expected, was John Eliot's Indian Grammar Begun (1666), the first copy at auction in at least a century. Sotheby's had estimated the Grammar at 70,000-100,000 GBP; it sold for 288,500 GBP. Another big seller was a collection of four tracts on early America, including the first account of New York printed in English, two of the first guides to Virginia settlers, and Francis Higginson's New Englands Plantation (1630). That also beat its estimate, hammering down at 150,500 GBP.
The little Indian Primer (Boston: Bartholomew Green, 1720), a little book of parallel English and Wampanoag texts, much surpassed its high estimate of 15,000 GBP, making 82,100 GBP.
More on the afternoon session as the prices come in.
[Update: the second session has now finished up; the total tally for both sessions was 2.321 million GBP. Manuscripts were the highlight in the afternoon: a collection of Henry Morgan documents pertaining to the sack of Panama made 132,500 GBP (better than quadrupling its estimate) and a sailor's journal from a 1697/8 voyage to China fetched 156,500 GBP (triple its estimate). And continuing the high prices from earlier in the day, a copy of Roger Williams' Key Into the Language of America (1643) beat estimates, selling for 38,900 GBP. If I get any word on buyers, I'll add another update.]
Scoring big in the morning session, as expected, was John Eliot's Indian Grammar Begun (1666), the first copy at auction in at least a century. Sotheby's had estimated the Grammar at 70,000-100,000 GBP; it sold for 288,500 GBP. Another big seller was a collection of four tracts on early America, including the first account of New York printed in English, two of the first guides to Virginia settlers, and Francis Higginson's New Englands Plantation (1630). That also beat its estimate, hammering down at 150,500 GBP.
The little Indian Primer (Boston: Bartholomew Green, 1720), a little book of parallel English and Wampanoag texts, much surpassed its high estimate of 15,000 GBP, making 82,100 GBP.
More on the afternoon session as the prices come in.
[Update: the second session has now finished up; the total tally for both sessions was 2.321 million GBP. Manuscripts were the highlight in the afternoon: a collection of Henry Morgan documents pertaining to the sack of Panama made 132,500 GBP (better than quadrupling its estimate) and a sailor's journal from a 1697/8 voyage to China fetched 156,500 GBP (triple its estimate). And continuing the high prices from earlier in the day, a copy of Roger Williams' Key Into the Language of America (1643) beat estimates, selling for 38,900 GBP. If I get any word on buyers, I'll add another update.]
Friday, February 15, 2008
Upcoming Auctions
- Bonhams & Butterfields will hold its annual California Rare Books and Manuscripts sale on 17 February. There will be 385 lots, including a miniature Bible from 1780 ($800-1,200), a large selection of William Burroughs and John Steinbeck material, an Ibarra Don Quixote ($4,000-6,000), a first printing of The Great Gatsby with imperfect jacket ($120,000-140,000), a first edition of The Catcher in the Rye ($2,000-3,000), a first edition of Adam Smith's An Inquiry into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations ($60,000-80,000), relics relating to the Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley assassinations (including some pieces of Samuel Mudd's house and a scrap of Lincoln's coat) and a folio copy of McKenney and Hall's History of the Indian Tribes of North America (which I recently discussed here). That's expected to fetch $120,000-140,000.
- PBA Galleries is holding a Rare Books & Manuscripts sale on 21 February. There will be 169 lots, including a 1618 French edition of Petrus Betius' Tabularum Geographicarum Contractarum Libri Septem with 220 of the 221 full-page engraved maps ($20,000-30,000), a 1602 edition of Chaucer ($6,000-8,000), a first issue copy of Dicken's A Christmas Carol ($10,000-15,000), a second edition of Hakluyt's Principal Navigations ($7,000-10,000), a first edition Moby-Dick in a modern Jack Papuchian decorative binding ($15,000-20,000), and an Isaac Newton manuscript page ($25,000-35,000).
- Sotheby's London will hold the eleventh part of the sale of the Earls of Macclesfield's library on 13 March. This portion comprises the English books and manuscripts. There will be 441 lots. Selected items will be on display in New York from 21-23 February. The one lot of most interest to me is John Eliot's Indian Grammar Begun (1666), of which no copy has sold at auction in the last century. The estimate on this one is 70,000-100,000 GBP. This sale also includes a copy of Roger Williams' A Key into the Language of America (1643), the first English-Indian dictionary (15,000-20,000 GBP).
I'll keep an eye on all these and report back with the realized prices when I can.
- PBA Galleries is holding a Rare Books & Manuscripts sale on 21 February. There will be 169 lots, including a 1618 French edition of Petrus Betius' Tabularum Geographicarum Contractarum Libri Septem with 220 of the 221 full-page engraved maps ($20,000-30,000), a 1602 edition of Chaucer ($6,000-8,000), a first issue copy of Dicken's A Christmas Carol ($10,000-15,000), a second edition of Hakluyt's Principal Navigations ($7,000-10,000), a first edition Moby-Dick in a modern Jack Papuchian decorative binding ($15,000-20,000), and an Isaac Newton manuscript page ($25,000-35,000).
- Sotheby's London will hold the eleventh part of the sale of the Earls of Macclesfield's library on 13 March. This portion comprises the English books and manuscripts. There will be 441 lots. Selected items will be on display in New York from 21-23 February. The one lot of most interest to me is John Eliot's Indian Grammar Begun (1666), of which no copy has sold at auction in the last century. The estimate on this one is 70,000-100,000 GBP. This sale also includes a copy of Roger Williams' A Key into the Language of America (1643), the first English-Indian dictionary (15,000-20,000 GBP).
I'll keep an eye on all these and report back with the realized prices when I can.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Links & Reviews
A good bunch of links (and a couple reviews) for this weekend; I'll be traveling for much of the day (taking the train west across Massachusetts, one of my favorite rides) and will be at home in upstate New York for the next week. I'll check in as I'm able during that time.
For holiday reading, I'm hauling along Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, which I just started this week, and Jay Winik's The Great Upheaval. I also have a few recent issues of The American Historical Review and Common-place that I need to catch up on.
- From The Times, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle biographer Andrew Lycett offers "10 things you didn't know about Conan Doyle."
- The BBC reported this week that the eBay auction of a 4,000-year old Iraqi clay tablet carved with cuneiform writing was halted after archaeologists spotted the sale. The tablet was confiscated by police from a Zurich warehouse, and the would-be seller faces a hefty fine (around $300,000).
- Author Alice Walker's papers have been purchased by Emory University. Journals, notebooks, drafts, letters and other materials comprise the 122-box collection. The archive will be processed and available in about a year, Emory says, although some of the journals will remain sealed for the time being. Emory also has the papers of Salman Rushdie, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, among others.
- The NYTimes profiled William Dane, Keeper of Prints at the Newark Public Library.
- From BibliOdyssey, images from the Kalender of the Shepherdes, a medieval almanac first published in the 1490s. Pecay writes "Although Kalender of the Shepherdes is the archetype for the persisting modern interpretation of an almanac (Old Farmer's Almanac for instance), the original work, which proved to be widely influential in both literary and social terms, was fundamentally about achieving salvation. The astrological charts and sherherd's folk wisdom about harvests, diet and medicine were side dishes to the core devotional and religious instructional main course."
- Rare Book Review reports that the Austrian National Archive has purchased the "handwritten manuscripts, notes and work papers of avant-garde Austrian writer Peter Handke" for €500,000.
- Over at Book Patrol, Michael notes a new and different twist on library theft: Tammie Ware has been arrested in Akron, OH after police found more than 1,000 books, DVDs, CDs and toys (worth more than $15,000) in her house, all stolen from the Akron Public Library. "Ware is accused of signing up her children repeatedly, using fake names, and checking out library materials under those names until the fines got too exorbitant." A police detective said "To the point she had listed thirty-five children. She had fines that totaled over eight thousand dollars." Apparently this had been going on for years, until a librarian noticed Ware signing up her kids using different names ... again. Ware's facing felony charges. I'll keep an eye on this one.
- John has the third installment of images from Houghton's Gibbon exhibit, which I finally got to see this week (just in the nick of time). It was very nicely done - kudos, John!
- This week marked the 164th anniversary of the publication of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (one of my favorite books). Michael caught the right date, and also linked to this exhibit of Dickens' Christmas books and stories.
- Over at Campaign for the American Reader, Marshall notes Garrison Keillor's "most important books," as told to Newsweek. They also asked him to name "a classic you revisited with disappointment" ("Moby Dick: Why did it take Melville so looooooonnnng to get to the story? I couldn't make it more than halfway through") and a "book that parents should read to their kids" ("Moby Dick: Two minutes and they'll be asleep"). Heh.
- Typefoundry reports in on the Caslon Tomb, a monument to several generations of Caslons at St. Luke's in Old Street (London).
- Last weekend, Paul Collins wrote about a long-lost feature of 19th-century periodicals: "the mysteriously one sided 'Editor's Chair' or 'responses to readers' sections, which give answers to individual readers without ever telling you what the questions were." Those from the Boys Own Paper have apparently now been collected in book form as Your Case is Hopeless. I agree with Paul: "I simply must have this book..."
- Michael has a new essay out, "The Internet and the Traditional Bookseller: A Failing Relationship." I think he's right that this is still very uncertain territory and that big changes are probably in the offing for how booksellers (and book buyers, for that matter) use the Internet.
- A copy of the 1685/1680 second edition of John Eliot's "Indian Bible" is currently for sale on eBay. Something you don't see every day. Asking price: $175,000.
Reviews:
- In The Telegraph, John Adamson reviews John Burrow's A History of Histories.
- In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Desmond Ryan reviews Eve LaPlante's Salem Witch Judge.
For holiday reading, I'm hauling along Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, which I just started this week, and Jay Winik's The Great Upheaval. I also have a few recent issues of The American Historical Review and Common-place that I need to catch up on.
- From The Times, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle biographer Andrew Lycett offers "10 things you didn't know about Conan Doyle."
- The BBC reported this week that the eBay auction of a 4,000-year old Iraqi clay tablet carved with cuneiform writing was halted after archaeologists spotted the sale. The tablet was confiscated by police from a Zurich warehouse, and the would-be seller faces a hefty fine (around $300,000).
- Author Alice Walker's papers have been purchased by Emory University. Journals, notebooks, drafts, letters and other materials comprise the 122-box collection. The archive will be processed and available in about a year, Emory says, although some of the journals will remain sealed for the time being. Emory also has the papers of Salman Rushdie, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, among others.
- The NYTimes profiled William Dane, Keeper of Prints at the Newark Public Library.
- From BibliOdyssey, images from the Kalender of the Shepherdes, a medieval almanac first published in the 1490s. Pecay writes "Although Kalender of the Shepherdes is the archetype for the persisting modern interpretation of an almanac (Old Farmer's Almanac for instance), the original work, which proved to be widely influential in both literary and social terms, was fundamentally about achieving salvation. The astrological charts and sherherd's folk wisdom about harvests, diet and medicine were side dishes to the core devotional and religious instructional main course."
- Rare Book Review reports that the Austrian National Archive has purchased the "handwritten manuscripts, notes and work papers of avant-garde Austrian writer Peter Handke" for €500,000.
- Over at Book Patrol, Michael notes a new and different twist on library theft: Tammie Ware has been arrested in Akron, OH after police found more than 1,000 books, DVDs, CDs and toys (worth more than $15,000) in her house, all stolen from the Akron Public Library. "Ware is accused of signing up her children repeatedly, using fake names, and checking out library materials under those names until the fines got too exorbitant." A police detective said "To the point she had listed thirty-five children. She had fines that totaled over eight thousand dollars." Apparently this had been going on for years, until a librarian noticed Ware signing up her kids using different names ... again. Ware's facing felony charges. I'll keep an eye on this one.
- John has the third installment of images from Houghton's Gibbon exhibit, which I finally got to see this week (just in the nick of time). It was very nicely done - kudos, John!
- This week marked the 164th anniversary of the publication of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (one of my favorite books). Michael caught the right date, and also linked to this exhibit of Dickens' Christmas books and stories.
- Over at Campaign for the American Reader, Marshall notes Garrison Keillor's "most important books," as told to Newsweek. They also asked him to name "a classic you revisited with disappointment" ("Moby Dick: Why did it take Melville so looooooonnnng to get to the story? I couldn't make it more than halfway through") and a "book that parents should read to their kids" ("Moby Dick: Two minutes and they'll be asleep"). Heh.
- Typefoundry reports in on the Caslon Tomb, a monument to several generations of Caslons at St. Luke's in Old Street (London).
- Last weekend, Paul Collins wrote about a long-lost feature of 19th-century periodicals: "the mysteriously one sided 'Editor's Chair' or 'responses to readers' sections, which give answers to individual readers without ever telling you what the questions were." Those from the Boys Own Paper have apparently now been collected in book form as Your Case is Hopeless. I agree with Paul: "I simply must have this book..."
- Michael has a new essay out, "The Internet and the Traditional Bookseller: A Failing Relationship." I think he's right that this is still very uncertain territory and that big changes are probably in the offing for how booksellers (and book buyers, for that matter) use the Internet.
- A copy of the 1685/1680 second edition of John Eliot's "Indian Bible" is currently for sale on eBay. Something you don't see every day. Asking price: $175,000.
Reviews:
- In The Telegraph, John Adamson reviews John Burrow's A History of Histories.
- In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Desmond Ryan reviews Eve LaPlante's Salem Witch Judge.
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Dilemma of the Day
My current commute-book is Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey, the Sweet Liquid Gold that Seduced the World by Holley Bishop. Somewhat overly casual style and silly subtitle notwithstanding (a rant for another day), the book looked interesting, and I was enjoying it fairly well ... until the bottom of page 36, when Bishop, discussing the arrival of honeybees in North America via the English settlers, writes "Native North Americans at the time had never seen bees or honey and had no words for them. John Elliot [sic], the New England Puritan pastor who was translating the Bible into native dialects for the Algonquian and Cherokee tribes ..." (my italics).
The misspelling of Eliot's name I would have been able to deal with, but Bishop's inclusion of Cherokee among Eliot's translation projects is completely outrageous. Eliot worked in the mid-1600s (his translation of the Bible into the Natick dialect of Algonquian was published in complete form in 1663, and is something I've recently been researching). It wasn't until 1824 that efforts to create a Cherokee translation were even begun (and a full version of the entire Bible in Cherokee wasn't published until 1965). Not to mention the fact that Eliot, a New Englander as Bishop notes, was hardly in the correct region of the country for missionizing to the Cherokee even if he'd wanted to.
So, my dilemma: is this error of sufficient gravity that I won't be able to take any of the rest of the book at all seriously? I recognize fully the nit-pickiness of this, but such a blatant and frankly ridiculous error is quite troubling. I think I'm resolved to give it another chapter or two and see if I can manage, but it might be a tough go.
The misspelling of Eliot's name I would have been able to deal with, but Bishop's inclusion of Cherokee among Eliot's translation projects is completely outrageous. Eliot worked in the mid-1600s (his translation of the Bible into the Natick dialect of Algonquian was published in complete form in 1663, and is something I've recently been researching). It wasn't until 1824 that efforts to create a Cherokee translation were even begun (and a full version of the entire Bible in Cherokee wasn't published until 1965). Not to mention the fact that Eliot, a New Englander as Bishop notes, was hardly in the correct region of the country for missionizing to the Cherokee even if he'd wanted to.
So, my dilemma: is this error of sufficient gravity that I won't be able to take any of the rest of the book at all seriously? I recognize fully the nit-pickiness of this, but such a blatant and frankly ridiculous error is quite troubling. I think I'm resolved to give it another chapter or two and see if I can manage, but it might be a tough go.
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Colonial Ribaldry
August having finally arrived, I can at long last share a minor bibliographic discovery I made a couple months ago. For a seminar paper this spring I wrote on John Eliot's 1663 "Indian Bible," (Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God) a single-handed translation of the Bible into the Natick dialect of Massachusetts. This was the first Bible printed (in any language) in North America, and was the most substantive single printing project in the colonial period.
As part of the paper I decided to write up a bibliographic/provenance history of each of the copies of Eliot's Bible currently held at Massachusetts libraries (ten of the several dozen extant copies worldwide), by way of partially updating the most recent census of copies (done way back in 1890 by Wilberforce Eames). My full findings will hopefully make their way out into the world eventually, but I'm waiting on a couple outstanding questions before I do too much more with them (and, if I have time someday, I'd like to complete the full census of all remaining copies).
The most interesting and unexpected discovery I made was close to home; when I examined the Eliot Bible held at the Massachusetts Historical Society I found some odd lines of verse scrawled on a rear endleaf. They were not mentioned in either the MHS catalogs or Eames' bibliography of the Bible, so needless to say I was surprised to see them, and more than a little perplexed, since they didn't seem to make much sense at all:
"When sturdy storms are gon and past
shall pleasand calmes appare
I oftimes see in ashes deepe
ly hiden coles of fire
with fervent thou"
I called in the Librarian - who was just as surprised as I was to find them there - and we started digging around, searching databases and other sources for some of the strange word strings in the poem ("hidden coals of fire," "sturdy storms" &c.). JSTOR yielded the answer, and it turned out to be a fascinating one, so we've made the poem our Object of the Month for August. Turns out the poem, in complete form, is an acrostic - read the first word of each line from top to bottom, and there you'll have the question (the complete form and more commentary are here).
I'm still doing some research into acrostics of this sort and during this time period, but my guess is that this is probably a particularly early example of this specific type. As I find more, I'll certainly pass it along, and if any readers have any suggestions or thoughts, I'd love to hear them.
It's things like this that make bibliography fun - not only for the little hint of scandal, but also simply for the many neat avenues of inquiry that open up with each new discovery.
As part of the paper I decided to write up a bibliographic/provenance history of each of the copies of Eliot's Bible currently held at Massachusetts libraries (ten of the several dozen extant copies worldwide), by way of partially updating the most recent census of copies (done way back in 1890 by Wilberforce Eames). My full findings will hopefully make their way out into the world eventually, but I'm waiting on a couple outstanding questions before I do too much more with them (and, if I have time someday, I'd like to complete the full census of all remaining copies).
The most interesting and unexpected discovery I made was close to home; when I examined the Eliot Bible held at the Massachusetts Historical Society I found some odd lines of verse scrawled on a rear endleaf. They were not mentioned in either the MHS catalogs or Eames' bibliography of the Bible, so needless to say I was surprised to see them, and more than a little perplexed, since they didn't seem to make much sense at all:
"When sturdy storms are gon and past
shall pleasand calmes appare
I oftimes see in ashes deepe
ly hiden coles of fire
with fervent thou"
I called in the Librarian - who was just as surprised as I was to find them there - and we started digging around, searching databases and other sources for some of the strange word strings in the poem ("hidden coals of fire," "sturdy storms" &c.). JSTOR yielded the answer, and it turned out to be a fascinating one, so we've made the poem our Object of the Month for August. Turns out the poem, in complete form, is an acrostic - read the first word of each line from top to bottom, and there you'll have the question (the complete form and more commentary are here).
I'm still doing some research into acrostics of this sort and during this time period, but my guess is that this is probably a particularly early example of this specific type. As I find more, I'll certainly pass it along, and if any readers have any suggestions or thoughts, I'd love to hear them.
It's things like this that make bibliography fun - not only for the little hint of scandal, but also simply for the many neat avenues of inquiry that open up with each new discovery.
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