We recently acquired a few more items for our collection on Lydia H. Sigourney (1791-1865), the “sweet singer of Hartford.”

Shown here is a letter to an unidentified friend dated 22 July 1857. In it, Sigourney apologizes for the delayed response, and is empathetic to an obviously bereaved friend, who lost someone named Elizabeth: “Strongly have I been reminded of your mother and yourself, and your desolated house, by the image of dear Elizabeth . . . objects from her tasteful hand continually meet my eye–the needle-case in my work-basket, the embroidered cushion in the guest chamber, the “Holy Family” upon the walls of the apartment which my daughter used to occupy…”

Another letter, dated 19 May 1857, seems to be to a publisher or distributor, who apparently had asked if she would be able to use 750 copies of Voices of Home.  “It is true that have occasionally desired some as gifts for friends going on voyages,” she admits, but for those purposes she requests only 50 copies.

There are two engraved portraits of Sigourney as well, and two manuscript poems:” Addressed to Madame Wadsworth, on seeing her surrounded by her children, and grand-children, on Thanksgiving Day” dated 30 November 1816; and “Lines written on reading this morning ‘A Letter to Maj. General Dearborn by Colonel Putnam, repelling an unprovoked attack on the character of his deceased father, the late Maj. General J. Putnam,” dated 5 June 1818.

We recently acquired a small archive of forty-three (43) WWI-era letters from enlisted Ohio native John Burkin to his wife Evelyn between August and December 1918.

John (or Jack, as he often refers to himself) was recruited by the army in the summer of 1918 and sent to Fort Slocum in New York to await orders, then to Camp McClellan in Anniston, Alabama, where he made First Sergeant and wrote to his wife Evelyn nearly every day.

“The higher I can get in military circles, the greater chance of having my Evie near. They don’t pay attention to a Private, he is the dog who does the work.”

His letters home speak candidly of the longing most soldiers felt during the uncertain times at the end of the Great War. Camp life was training, waiting, and loneliness. “I am so sad I can hardly talk. There are a great number of soldiers in camp here. They are coming in and going out continually. We are right on the shore and have a fine view but to hell with the views. There is only one that would look good to me.”

Although never shipped overseas, his anxiety about the possibility can be seen throughout the letters.

As a curator, keeping one eye on the rare book trade not only means that I see possible opportunities for acquisition–it also serves to focus attention on overlooked items. Here is my most recent “re-discovery.”

John Randel, The City of New York as laid out by the Commissioners with the Surrounding Countryside (New York, 1821).

A copy of this map recently came up for auction in New York, and although the one for sale was printed on satin (and is therefore much more valuable on the collector’s market), ours is still a scarce and important copy (one of only two or three known). We have contracted with a conservator to address some condition issues, to ensure this map can be used and displayed. Here are “before and after” pics–our conservator, Sarah Dove, worked miracles!

Here is excerpted text from the lot description (Swann Auction Galleries):

As New York City entered the 19th century, It became clear that plans for its expansion northward were in order. The narrow streets from the early Dutch and English settlers could no longer handle the increasing population. This was coupled with an increase in disease spawned by the close quarters of the city at that date.

In 1807 the Common Council of the city petitioned the State Legislature to create a Board of Commissioners to oversee the laying out of a future street system. The board was created and mandated to finalize its plans within a four year period. Governor Morris, Simeon de Witt, and John Rutherford became the commissioners. Simeon de Witt had been the Surveyor General for the state and had become impressed with the work of one of the surveyors under his charge, namely John Randel.

Randel was hired as chief engineer and surveyor for city. He began his work soon after. Though Manhattan Island was hardly a wilderness, it contained 60 miles of running streams, around 20 ponds and lakes, as well as hills, valleys and plateaus. With some surveying instruments of his own devise, Randel set to work. The difficulties of topography were not the only obstacles he was to encounter. Free-holders and lease-holders on the land being surveyed were fearful of losing their land and their rights. Randel was arrested a number of times for trespassing, and just as many times released on the order of the City Council.

Randel finished his project a bit ahead of schedule. The survey overlaid with the now famous grid street plan was ordered to be prepared for publication under the direction of William Bridges. Peter Maverick, the well known engraver, was chosen to engrave the map. The map map appeared in 1811 (Haskell 651) and is based almost entirely on the survey conducted by Randel, with some additions by Bridges. Randel’s name did not appear on the map. Thus began a long and acrimonious relationship between Randel and Bridges. Randel claimed that Bridges had not copied his survey faithfully and that it was full of errors. Randel took charge of the survey and embellished it further. He was set to have it published in 1814 but decided against it -the British had recently burned Washington and Randel feared his map would be too great an aid to the enemy should they decide to attack the city. The manuscript copy of the Randel embellishment is currently under the protection of the New York Historical Society.

In 1821 the finalized version of the map appeared under Randel’s name (his name appears 3 times on the map). The grid system begins with 1st street and runs northward to 155th street with the streets running from east to west. It is intersected by 12 avenues running from south to north. It is the grid which modern day inhabitants and the city’s many visitors have come to count on for easy navigation of the metropolis.

The Randel map was printed on paper and a very few seem to have been printed on satin. The only other existing copy on satin that we can locate is held by the New York Public Library, gifted by the well-known New York iconographer I. N. Phelps Stokes, who had acquired it from Randel’s nephew.  Two paper copies are known.

In addition to the great importance this map bears in its relationship to the mapping of the city, it is a beautiful map to behold. In addition to the grid plan for New York City, there are incorporated maps of parts of Connecticut and Rhode Island as well as an inset of the city of Philadelphia. These are neatly overlaid on one another and with a trompe l’oeil effect they appear to roll in upon themselves.

For the fullest and most succinct history of the evolution of the map, Augustyn and Cohen’s Manhattan in Maps should be consulted.

The Watkinson Library is seeking help from its friends and the alumni of Trinity College to acquire one of the great rarities of American literature–a first edition (1855) of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

All donors who give $50.00 or more before December 31, 2013 will receive a letterpress printed broadside “honor roll” with his/her name under the following levels:

Versifier ($50-$99)
Rhymer ($100-$249)
Balladeer ($250-$499)
Poet ($500-$999)
Laureate ($1,000-$4,999)
Patron of Letters ($5,000+)

If you would like to contribute to this purchase, please contact Richard Ring, Head Curator & Librarian (richard.ring@trincoll.edu).

ABOUT THE FIRST EDITION:

“Whitman paid out of his own pocket for the production of the first edition of his book and had only 795 copies printed, which he bound at various times as his finances permitted. Though critics and biographers have often speculated that the book appeared on the Fourth of July, thus serving as an appropriate marker of America’s literary independence, advertisements in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle make it clear that Leaves was actually issued in late June. His joy at getting the book published was quickly diminished by the death of his father a few weeks after the appearance of Leaves. Walter Sr. had been ill for several years, and though he and Walt had never been particularly close, they had only recently traveled together to West Hills, Long Island, to the old Whitman homestead where Walt was born. Now his father’s death along with his older brother Jesse’s absence as a merchant marine (and later Jesse’s growing violence and mental instability) meant that Walt would become the father-substitute for the family, the person his mother and siblings would turn to for help and guidance. He had already had some experience enacting that role even while Walter Sr. was alive; perhaps because of Walter Sr.’s drinking habits and growing general depression, young Walt had taken on a number of adult responsibilities—buying boots for his brothers, for instance, and holding the title to the family house as early as 1847. Now, however, he became the only person his mother and siblings could turn to.

But even given these growing family burdens, he managed to concentrate on his new book, and, just as he oversaw all the details of its composition and printing, so now did he supervise its distribution and try to control its reception. Even though Whitman claimed that the first edition sold out, the book in fact had very poor sales. He sent copies to a number of well-known writers (including John Greenleaf Whittier, who, legend has it, threw his copy in the fire), but only one responded, and that, fittingly, was Emerson, who recognized in Whitman’s work the very spirit and tone and style he had called for. “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” Emerson wrote in his private letter to Whitman, noting that Leaves of Grass “meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean.” Whitman’s was poetry that would literally get the country in shape, Emerson believed, give it shape, and help work off its excess of aristocratic fat.

Whitman’s book was an extraordinary accomplishment: after trying for over a decade to address in journalism and fiction the social issues (such as education, temperance, slavery, prostitution, immigration, democratic representation) that challenged the new nation, Whitman now turned to an unprecedented form, a kind of experimental verse cast in unrhymed long lines with no identifiable meter, the voice an uncanny combination of oratory, journalism, and the Bible—haranguing, mundane, and prophetic—all in the service of identifying a new American democratic attitude, an absorptive and accepting voice that would catalog the diversity of the country and manage to hold it all in a vast, single, unified identity. “Do I contradict myself?” Whitman asked confidently toward the end of the long poem he would come to call “Song of Myself”: “Very well then . . . . I contradict myself; / I am large . . . . I contain multitudes.” This new voice spoke confidently of union at a time of incredible division and tension in the culture, and it spoke with the assurance of one for whom everything, no matter how degraded, could be celebrated as part of itself: ” What is commonest and cheapest and nearest and easiest is Me.” His work echoed with the lingo of the American urban working class and reached deep into the various corners of the roiling nineteenth-century culture, reverberating with the nation’s stormy politics, its motley music, its new technologies, its fascination with science, and its evolving pride in an American language that was forming as a tongue distinct from British English.

Though it was no secret who the author of Leaves of Grass was, the fact that Whitman did not put his name on the title page was an unconventional and suggestive act (his name would in fact not appear on a title page of Leaves until the 1876 “Author’s Edition” of the book, and then only when Whitman signed his name on the title page as each book was sold). The absence of a name indicated, perhaps, that the author of this book believed he spoke not for himself so much as for America. But opposite the title page was a portrait of Whitman, an engraving made from a daguerreotype that the photographer Gabriel Harrison had made during the summer of 1854. It has become the most famous frontispiece in literary history, showing Walt in workman’s clothes, shirt open, hat on and cocked to the side, standing insouciantly and fixing the reader with a challenging stare. It is a full-body pose that indicates Whitman’s re-calibration of the role of poet as the democratic spokesperson who no longer speaks only from the intellect and with the formality of tradition and education: the new poet pictured in Whitman’s book is a poet who speaks from and with the whole body and who writes outside, in Nature, not in the library. It was what Whitman called “al fresco” poetry, poetry written outside the walls, the bounds, of convention and tradition.”

From “Walt Whitman” by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price

The Walt Whitman Archive  http://whitmanarchive.org/biography/walt_whitman/index.html

We recently acquired the first English translation of a famous chronicle of the New World, written and compiled by Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas (d. 1625), who was appointed the official historian of the Indies (Cronista Mayor de Indias) by King Philip II in 1586.

Originally published between 1601-15 as the Historia General de los Hechos de los Castellanos en las Islas i Tierra Firme del Mar Oceano, the History is, according to one scholar, “a huge work of erudition.  Its author, who never crossed the Atlantic Ocean, incorporated the greatest collection of sources up to that date, including many important writings that had not yet been published, such as the histories of Bernal Diaz and Bartolome de las Casas, and the valuable Geografia y Descripcion Universal de las Indias by the cosmographer Juan Lopez de Velasco.   . . . [It constitutes] a true encyclopedia of all the facts pertaining to the Spanish involvement with the Indies between 1492 and 1555.  The narrated events are arranged in chronological order by decades.  Since the author was sufficiently removed from the facts he narrated, he made judgments without worrying about possible accusations and lawsuits by the people involved, a common problem in many of the earlier histories of the Indies.”

Cited source: Spanish Historical Writing about the New World: 1493-1700 by Angel Delgado-Gomez. (Providence: John Carter Brown Library, 1992).

We recently acquired a travel narrative of the Ohio River issued with this fabulous cover, written by Reuben Gold Thwaites, a Massachussets native who moved to Wisconsin in 1866 and became the director of the state historical society, as well as a noted historian (famously editing the monumental, 73-volume Jesuit Relations, relating to their missions to the natives of North America).

In January of 1895 this book, Afloat on the Ohio, was in manuscript, and he was shopping around for a publisher.  We have two letters from Thwaites in our Robert’s Brothers collection, the first of which, dated 18 January 1895, addressed to Messrs. Roberts Brothers, begins:

Gentlemen: I am sending you today, prepaid, by American Express, the MS of a new book I have just completed–“Afloat on the Ohio.”  My other two books built on the same lines–“Historic Waterways” [1888] and “Our Cycling Tour in England” [1892] were published by Messrs. McClurg & Co., Chicago; but I thought it best to secure for this one, in particular, an Eastern publisher.”

Later he suggests a marketing strategy, predicting that “it might have a steady sale to tourists taking the annual summer steamboat tour down the Ohio–and thousands do this. Then again, in the Ohio Valley states I should suppose that there might be some demand on the part of teachers, as extra reading in connection with instruction in history and geography.”

The Roberts Brothers apparently did not agree, for they sent no reply to Thwaites for several weeks, which spurred him to write our second letter, dated 1 March 1895, asking them for an answer to his first.  Eventually, he evidently gave up and the book was published by another Chicago firm, Way & Williams.

Last fall I got a call from a man in Illinois who said he had bought three 19th-century letters on e-Bay related to the Watkinson family, and did we want them? I admitted we were interested, since we are the main repository of Watkinson family papers, asked for a few details, which he provided, and then I asked what he wanted for them.  “I want to give them to you,” he said, and continued, “I like to buy historical letters and documents like this, and if I find a place were they belong, I like to give them away.”

I was both astounded and pleased, of course, and I wish there were a thousand more like him.

The letter shown here was written March 18 & 19, 1827 by our founder, David Watkinson, to his brother, John R. Watkinson, asking the latter to represent David’s interest in an insurance claim.  “I am requested by the Hartford Fire Insurance Company to . . . persuade you to accompany one of our Directors to Jewit [sic] City to appraise the damage . . .”  A fire broke out in Jewett City, and the claimants estimated $20,000 in damages, to which David comments, “probably their property destroyed was not worth more than half the amount.”

“The Fish Hawk may be said to be of mild disposition.  Not only do these birds live in perfect harmony together, but they even allow other birds of very different character to approach so near to them as to build their nests of the very materials of which the outer parts of their own are constructed.  I have never observed a Fish Hawk chasing any other birds whatever.  So pacific and timorous is it, that, rather than encounter a foe but little more powerful than itself, it abandons its prey to the White-headed Eagle, which, net to man, is its greatest enemy . . .

The Fish Hawk differs from all birds of prey in another important particular, which is, that it never attempts to secure its prey in the air, although its rapidity of flight might induce an observer to suppose it perfectly able to do so.  I have spent weeks on the Gulf of Mexico, where these birds are numerous, and have observed them sailing and plunging into the water, at a time when numerous shoals of flying-fish were emerging from the sea to evade the pursuit of the dolphins.  Yet the Fish Hawk never attempted to pursue any of them while above the surface, but would plunge after one of them or a bonita-fish, after they had resumed their usual mode of swimming near the surface.”

–J. J. Audubon, Ornithological Biography, I (1831), 415-16 [excerpted].

“I shot two of these birds whilst traversing one of the extensive prairies of our North-western States.  Five of them had been running along the foot-path before me, for some time.  I at first looked upon them as of the Common Brown Titlark species (Anthus Spinoletta), but as they rose on the wing, the difference of their notes struck me, and, shooting at them, I had the good fortune to kill two, which I discovered, on examination, to be of a new and distinct species, although in the general appearance of their plumage they were very nearly allied to the Brown Titlark.  The rest I pursued in vain, and was forced to abandon the chase on account of the approach of night, and the necessity of preparing for a rest after a long walk.”

–J. J. Audubon, Ornithological Biography, I (1831), 408 [excerpted].