Unfortunately we do NOT have the so-called “First Folio” (London, 1623) of Shakespeare–a critically important book in Shakespeare studies as the first collected edition of his plays, wherein were printed for the first time eighteen plays!  They were as follows:

The Tempest, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, All’s Well that Ends Well, Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, King John, Henry VI part I, Henry VIII, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline.

We do, however, have an excellent facsimile of it, produced in 1866 by Howard Staunton, which was created using the newly invented technology of photo-lithography. These were initially issued in sixteen (16) monthly parts at 10s. 6d. per part, or a total of 8 guineas–the price was relatively high (about $1,500 in today’s money).

In 2012, through the generosity of the Watkinson Board of Trustees,  we were able to acquire a copy of the “2nd Folio” (1632) of Shakespeare. This copy had been in one family’s possession since the mid-19th-century.

This second edition, as it were, was issued with five different title-pages (representing the five different principal investors).  However, since ours lacked the title-page, we don’t know which issue we have. The 2nd Folio bears over 1,200 corrections (mostly in restoring meter and the spelling of Latin phrases and classical names), but is principally famous for the dedicatory poem to Shakespeare written in 1630 by John Milton—which was his very first publication of English verse (he was 24).

As noted, our copy of the fourth edition (technically) of Othello is only one of two 17th-century “player’s quarto” editions of Shakespeare in the Watkinson.

“We should remember that no concept of ‘copyright,’ in its modern sense, existed in Shakespeare’s time. ‘Ownership’ of texts was confined to publishers, who established their right to produce a work by licensing it with their professional body, the Stationers’ Company; a publisher might additionally guarantee ownership of the text by paying a futher fee to have the title entered into the Stationers’ Register. An author who brought a new work to a publisher would be paid for the text—sometimes, in part at least, by being given copies of the printed book—but this payment secured outright ownership of the text . . . In the case of theatrical scripts, a further transactional layer intervened between the writer and the publisher. Plays for commercial production were, for the most part, commissioned by theatre companies from a pool of jobbing playwrights, many of them working collaboratively to produce scripts . . . Once purchased, the play became the property of the theatre company.”

–Murphy, Shakespeare in Print

In celebration of the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, I will be posting about our holdings every day in April.

The first play by Shakespeare to be printed, as far as we know, was Titus Andronicus in 1594, which survives in only one copy. It was discovered in Sweden in 1904, purchased by Henry Clay Folger, and now resides at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.  Of the many editions of the plays which were published in quarto prior to 1700, the Watkinson owns only two—the first separate edition (1684) of Julius Caesar, and the fourth edition (1681) of Othello.

Both of these were given by Allerton C. Hickmott (Hon. 1958), a very generous donor to the Watkinson who gave both books and funds for acquisitions. Among his many gifts were private press books and English imprints ranging from the 16th to the 19th centuries, especially (as here) Elizabethan and Jacobean titles.

In the case of Julius Caesar, five more editions were produced in the next 6 years, mostly due to the performances of actor Thomas Betterton and to a general interest in the tragedies.

[Posted by Sally Dickinson, Associate Curator & Preservation Librarian]

That the Watkinson library has hidden treasures in its stacks is accepted lore at Trinity, but it is always a delight to discover that we own an unusual item from an interested 3^rd party!  Such was the case with Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling, a book owned by George Washington when he was a young man. The library received a request last spring from the Mt. Vernon museum in Virginia to borrow Washington’s copy of Tom Jones for the exhibition “Take Note! George Washington the Reader.”  The exhibition celebrates the opening of the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mt. Vernon. The book, in four volumes, was printed in London in 1750. The Watkinson owns volumes 1 & 4, which are both signed “Washington” at the head of the title-page.

The books, along with 2 other titles owned (and signed) by Washington, were bought in 1883 with credit extended to Trinity College by Joseph Jesse Cooke to be used to purchase books at the sale of his library. Three sales were held in New York City on March 13, October 1, and December 3, 1883, consisting of 8,326 lots of well over 20,000 items.  Trinity bought 1,300 volumes from the sale for a total of $5,000 (to buy the equivalent material today, if it were on the market, would require well over $6 million!). Tom Jones was from Part II, October 1883 (lot 866).  The other titles owned by Washington are the 2^nd edition of Considerations on criminal law by Henry Dagge (London, 1774) and William Rowley’s Rational practice of physic (London, 1793.) Rowley’s work is inscribed “To his Excellency General Washington from the author” and also has “Geo. Washington” signed on the title-page.

Some of the Watkinson’s most beautiful and rare books were bought at Cooke’s sale, including several 15^th c. manuscript Books of Hours, five incunabula (books printed before 1501) and numerous other early printed books.

Shown here are two photos of our book in situ:

Photos provided by Sarah Wolfe, Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.

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.

After 3 years of looking, I have finally acquired a 4,000-year-old Sumerian cuneiform tablet!  This clay tablet was written in Mesopotamia (current-day Iraq), dates from 2230-2221 BCE, and is a receipt (as many of these documents are) for twenty bundles of sheepskin hides for garments, with a seal of the royal scribe and the date.  It originated from Umma at the city-state of Ur.

The period of the Third Dynasty of the city-state of Ur was one of the most brilliant periods of Mesopotamian history.  What we know of the workings of the government and the economy are derived from these documents.  Dated the sixth month of the eighth year of Bur Sin, King of Ur. With a fine seal impression which reads “on the authority of the Royal scribe, Ursulpe, son of Lugulsaga.”  The balance of the information on this tablet has not been translated.

PROVENANCE (history of ownership): Apparently one of the many artifacts excavated by Hormuzd Rassam (1826-1910), the famous discoverer of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and given in 1895  with a group of other tablets to Theophilus G. Pinches, LL.D. (1856-1934), an eminent Assyriologist at the British Museum.  Pinches described some of these tablets in The Amherst Tablets (1908).  The tablets passed to a student and colleague of Pinches named Chappelow in the 1920s, and after the latter’s death, went to Sotheby’s (London) for auction.  The Sotheby catalog was prepared by Dr. R. D. Barnett of the Dept. of Western Asiatic Antiquities at the British Museum and the tablets sold on July 28, 1958 to Dr. Herman Serota of Chicago.  In 1978 Dr. Serota sent the tablets to the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago  where they were transliterated by Dr. Piotr Steinkeller (of Yale).  Dr. I. J. Gelb also examined the tablets and provided some translations. Serota died in 1981, whereupon the record ends–most likely the tablets entered the trade and were dispersed, possibly moving through private hands occasionally.  The Boston dealer from whom we purchased this tablet bought it from a California dealer in February–but we trust it has arrived at its final destination!

It is a tiny artifact, shown here with a penny for scale.  In terms of book and writing history, these tablets are so important to be able to show as one of the oldest extant examples of writing.

Prof. Alden Gordon & students from Art History 391, Prints and Printmaking, examine an etching in the 1^st edition in Dutch of The new and strange world, or, Description of America … (1671). This is the second of 3 or 4 class visits to look at prints from the collection. The students are learning to identify printing techniques by studying examples of woodcuts, engravings, etchings and lithographs.

Associate Curator Sally Dickinson is shepherding these visits, which started with early printed books and woodcut illustrations in the profusely illustrated Nuremberg Chronicle (1493) and Albrecht Durer’s series the Life of the Virgin of 1511.

[Posted by Sally Dickinson, Associate Curator]

The Watkinson purchased several intriguing pieces from two British book artists this year.  Rick Myers visited the library late in 2011 to show some of his amazing art which centers around innovative printmaking techniques with strong associations to historical artifacts and interactions with paper.  Before and After Breath (2009) is a series of 5 prints from an edition of 37 housed in a thin plywood box.  The prints are the result of a forceful interaction between a pre-1908 carbon filament light bulb and a 50 ton industrial tooling press used to crush the bulb between sheets of carbon paper.  The glass shards, which punctured the paper, and the carbon make successively fainter images with each imprint.  Ideas emerge from the event: the release of “breath” after over 100 years of being contained in a bulb, the symbolic use of carbon paper as media since carbon is one of the basic elements of life. Myers focuses on process and the use of found materials as much as the end result.  Another recent Myers acquisition is a series of 8 prints entitled Itself , described as a “removal of carbon black xerographic toner, then re-used for its reproduction.”   The edition is limited to the quantity of toner, (36 realized.) The texture of these prints evokes the surface of the moon as much as anything else.

A few months later Myers returned to the library with his friend and fellow artist Sam Winston. The synergy between the two was apparent, lightened by a dose of British humor.  I spent a stimulating couple of hours listening to Winston explain his intricate work, a blend of visual art and story, with a very high level of craft thrown in.  We bought 3 titles: Dictionary Story, Made-Up True Story, and Solace from the Romeo and Juliet series.  Winston also gave the library a letterpress print of an illustration he did for the New Yorker, a whirling vortex of letters for a book review called “The English Wars” (May 14, 2012)

Dictionary Story, written and designed by Winston, is in the form of an accordion book.  “From order to chaos and back to order … Dictionary Story graphically illustrates the balance between a world that’s safe but boring and a high risk universe full of creative possibilities.”  The graphics of the typography help explain what is happening in the story.  The story runs in one column against the outer edge of the page and the definitions opposite their words in another column on the reverse side. As the characters get out of hand, so does the graphic layout as letters tumble over the pages. Made-Up True Story based on the interaction of different kinds of literature from train schedules to fairy tales is another typographic adventure with a charming story built in.  Winston augments the effect with a fury of penciled scribbling.  In the Romeo and Juliet series he explores the text of a classic work in an analytical dissection, cutting apart the letters and arranging them into 3 emotional states: passion, rage and solace.

Both Myers’ and Winston’s paper art is in major collections in the U.S. and abroad,  including the British Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Library of Congress.