Printmaker and artist Werner Pfeiffer visited the Watkinson last night to speak to students in Erin Valentino’s First Year Seminar on post-9/11 art and Jonathan Elukin’s History of the Book course.

Werner constructed his work entitled “Out of the sky” as he spoke about where he was on 9/11 (crossing a bridge into Manhattan–he saw the second plane hit) and how the project took shape in his mind and through his hands over the next five years.

The towers, depicting names of the the victims and images of falling bodies, girders, and steps, are made up of 36 prints carved into 18 blocks of wood–blocks that Werner carved himself, a relief process that involves cutting away what one does not wish to see in the print.

The act of building the towers and taking them back down is intended as a kind of birth, life, and death of the memory of the tragedy.  You open it up to remember and reflect, and you close it down and put it away to move on.

In a small booklet Werner listed the victims from all four planes and the sites they struck.

Werner always designs hands-on productions, and he encouraged the students to handle the towers, and even help take them down.

Railway Economy: a treatise on the new art of transport (New York, 1850).

According to the dealer’s description, this is the first edition of possibly the most comprehensive book ever written on railways.  The author, Dionysius Lardner (1793-1859) was an Irish-born professor, polymath and prolific writer on astronomy, economics, natural philosophy, and electricity.

Lardner begins with a brief history of transportation through the ages and then focuses on trains, providing many tables and statistics.  He leaves out no detail of railway systems in America, Europe, and the U.K., from the cost of building particular lines, to the operation of the boilers, to the behavior of passengers in stations, to the odds of being killed per mile traveled.  He concludes with a chapter on the politics of railways, a discussion similar to those of today relating to funding of ownership of roads and the Internet.

The night side of nature: or, ghosts and ghost seers, by Catherine Crowe (London, 1852 [3rd edition]). This was the most popular and influential work on paranormal phenomena in the nineteenth century. The author recounts hundreds of “authentic” tales of supernatural occurrences, including premonitory dreams, poltergeists, and döpplegangers, in a passionate plea for scientists to conduct serious investigations into these strange occurrences. She was “a hugely important figure in the emergence of modern ghost-seeing culture chiefly because of her relentless calls for society to turn its attention to the unexplained phenomena in its midst and investigate them in an objective manner.” (McCorristine, Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750-1920, p. 10). A sensation in its day, this work introduced many Victorians to the occult, and is considered to have “marked the turning point in society’s relationship with the paranormal.” (Evans, Intrusions: Society and the Paranormal, p. 88).

Crowe (1790-1872), a noted English novelist, was a popular figure who socialized in the same circles as Dickens, Thackery, Hans Christian Anderson, and Charlotte Brontë. She became a celebrity advocate for scientific research into the occult with the publication of  The night side, and is credited for introducing the German word poltergeist into the English language with this work (see Blum, p. 15). She was the object of scandal in 1854 when reports circulated that she was found wandering nude and deranged on the streets of Edinburgh—a claim she adamantly denied.

Late 19thC decorative bindings are endlessly fascinating, and this book by J. M. Barrie is even more delightful.  This is the first American edition of My Lady Nicotine. A Study in Smoke.  In a series of wispy little essays (33 of them, generally under 2,000 words) Barrie explores the pleasures and pitfalls of dedicated smoking recounted by one who has happily married (with tongue lightly in cheek), and has “quit”–but still dreams of bachelor days and the pipe, the cigarette, and the cigar. 

Illustrated for the first time throughout (well over 130 illustrations in all) by the American impressionist painter Maurice B. Prendergast (only one of two books he illustrated himself).

Chapter titles include, “Matrimony and Smoking Compared,” “His Wife’s Cigars,” “The Romance of a Pipe-Cleaner,” “How Heroes Smoke,” and “The Perils of Not Smoking.”

From these posts it might seem that we only acquire “old” things–so here is an antidote to that assumption.  Below is the bookseller’s description, which gives a nice precis of the scope of the magazine:

Feminist Bookstore News.  47 issues from 1987 to 1999.  Published in San Francisco by Carol Seajay from 1983 to 2000, FBN is an unparalleled primary source for hard-to-find information about feminist publishing and bookselling of the day.  It is packed with feature articles, news notes, book reviews, surveys of the field, business strategies, profiles of publishers and shops, ads, and more.  The ups and downs, causes and concerns, of the feminist book community come across with great immediacy.  Although the focus is on the U.S., there is a great deal of international coverage, including Third World feminism.  Some issues focus on themes, such as Black History, Children’s Books, University Press, and Travel.  All kinds of publishers are represented–mainstream trade, scholarly, small press, lesbian, etc.

I’m very pleased to announce our most recent publication, John Piper in the Watkinson: An Illustrated Checklist, produced to celebrate the recent gift of a collection of books and ephemera related to the British artist John Piper (1903–1992) to the Watkinson Library. 

 The catalogue contains an essay by the donor (William J. McGill, Trinity Class of 1957) on his interest in Piper for over three decades, and an annotated list of the entire collection of ca. 200 items.  Designed by Arley-Rose Torsone, the text and full-color illustrations were printed by Finlay (Bloomfield, CT).  The cover, which features a stylized representation of the immense baptistry window of Coventry Cathedral which John Piper designed, was printed in four-color letterpress by DWRI Letterpress of Providence, RI.

 The catalogue was printed in only 500 copies, and will be available soon from our distributor, Oak Knoll Books. (www.oakknoll.com).

This new acquisition is cool on so many levels.  I love the binding–so striking–and the fact that it’s an early science fiction novel by John Jacob Astor IV (1864-1912).  Astor was 47 when he went down with the Titanic, although his 18-year-old bride and her unborn son survived.

A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future was published in 1894 in New York.  This is early “steampunk,” a century before it became a genre. 

The novel is set in the year 2088, and explores three utopias–a Christian heaven on Saturn, and Eden-like new world on Jupiter, and a technologically oriented, entrepreneur’s paradise on Earth.  Space travel is possible through “apergy,” a kind of anti-gravity.

One of the most intriguing chapters is “professor Cortland’s historical sketch of the world in AD 2000.”  Remember, this is 1894, twenty years before the start of World War I, and only 30 years after the Civil War.  Astor’s professor interestingly gets the population right–300 million–but the U.S. now includes all of Canada, Mexico, and Central and South America, in ultimate fulfillment of the Monroe Doctrine.  Here’s an excerpt (pp. 39-40):

“Gradually the different states of Canada–or provinces, as they were then called–came to realize that their future would be far grander and more glorious in union with the United States than separated from it; and also that their sympathy was far stronger for their nearest neighbors than for anyone else.  One by one these Northern States made known their desire for consolidation with the Union, retaining complete control of their local affairs, as have the older States.  They were gladly welcomed by our government and people, and possible rivals became the best of friends.  Preceding and also following this, the States of Mexico, Central America, and parts of South America, tiring of the incessant revolutions and difficulties among themselves, which had pretty constantly looked upon us as a big brother on account of our maintenance of the Monroe doctrine, began to agitate for annexation, knowing they would retain control of their local affairs.  In this they were vigorously supported by the American residents and property-holders, who knew that their possessions would double in value the day the United States Constitution was signed.  Thus . . . the Union has increased enormously in power, till it now embraces 10,000,000 square miles [the land area of the Western Hemisphere is roughly 16 million square miles], and has a free and enlightened population of 300,000,000 [the population of the Western Hemisphere is about 860 million] . . . and as a result of modern improvements, it is less of a journey now to go from Alaska to the Orinoco than it was for the Father of his Country to travel from New York or Philadelphia to the site of the city named in his honour.”

Today we finished shifting the heavy metal map cases out of the press room, and we are now ready to clean, paint, and otherwise outfit it for production.  Still a long way to go–the Washington press is still in pieces (working on it), and the Vandercook will need some TLC.  But the stage is set, so to speak, and I still have hopes that I’ll get one or both presses in working condition this fall.  The room is small–only about 75 square feet, but we have heavy duty shelving just outside the room for supplies and equipment (paper, ink, furniture, etc.).

Here is a sweet little item we acquired last week–the only other copies I can find are at Yale and the British Library.

Songbooks like this are truly ephemeral pieces of popular culture, and in the mass are invaluable for the windows to the mores of their times.  We have hundreds of songbooks, both religious and secular, as well as over 25,000 pieces of sheet music in the Watkinson–see our guide here: http://library.trincoll.edu/research/watk/documents/watkguidesmusic.pdf

Of particular interest in this collection to me personally are numbers 12 & 15.  Number 12, “Negro boy sold for a watch” is a 24-line guilty lamentation of a person who sold a boy into the Atlantic slave trade for “this poor simple toy.”  Number 15, “Sailor’s Farewell,” is a sailor talking to potential sweethearts about his actions during the Anglo-Egyptian War of 1807.