Special Collections & Archives

 

Secotan priest

In 1590 the Frankfurt printer and engraver Theodor deBry published a folio edition of Thomas Hariot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia with engraved illustrations based on John White’s watercolor paintings. DeBry’s engravings were the first images of indigenous North Americans that most 16th century Europeans had ever seen.

 

Ceremonial dance held at Secotan

Thomas Hariot, a scientist, and John White, an artist and cartographer, had journeyed to North America in 1585 as part of Sir Walter Raleigh’s attempt to found an English colony in the new world. Hariot and White were charged with providing an accurate description, in words and images, of the geography, native peoples, and natural resources of the new world.

Raleigh and his associates wanted to encourage settlement in the Virginia colony in order to stake an English claim to compete with the Spanish and French conquests of much of North and South America. Accordingly, Hariot’s account emphasizes the abundant resources and generally friendly Indians that he encountered in Virginia.

John White created the first accurate map of the Virginia coast.He also painted watercolor images of the Indians he encountered, documenting their clothing and tools, religious and social rituals, agricultural methods, buildings, ships, and weapons.

 

Village of Secotan

Hariot and White returned to England in 1586 and delivered their accounts to the colony’s backers. In 1587 another group of English colonists set out for Roanoke, with John White as appointed governor of the colony. Also in this group were White’s daughter Eleanor and her husband Ananias Dare, future parents of Virginia Dare. The settlement did not fare well: food supplies ran low, and White was sent back to England for provisions the next autumn. When he finally returned in 1590 the Roanoke settlement had been abandoned and the colonists had disappeared.

Meanwhile in England Thomas Hariot’s account of his experiences, titled A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, had been published as an individual quarto and as part of Richard Hakluyt’s extremely popular compendium of travel literature, Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589). Hakluyt’s book contained no illustations, however, and in 1590 he contracted with Theodor deBry, a skilled engraver and printer, to publish a deluxe volume of Hariot’s work along with illustrations based on White’s paintings.

DeBry’s edition was the first volume in a series of travel narratives –Collectiones Peregrinationum in Indiam Orientalem et Indiam Occidentalem (1590-1634)– for which he became famous. Accounts of European exploration and conquest of the Americas, Africa, and Asia were hugely popular in the 16th and 17th centuries. And DeBry’s Briefe and True Report has many features typical of the genre. Although ZSR’s copy is in Latin, DeBry also published editions in Hariot’s original English as well as Dutch, German, and French. Latin was still the language of international scholarship in 16th century Europe– but travel accounts were written by soldiers and adventurers, not academics. At the beginning of the century, nearly all printed material was in Latin; by 1600 a shift was underway toward publishing in the vernacular languages.

 

Title page from the 1588 London quarto edition of Hariot’s Briefe and True Report (openlibrary.org)

The 16th century also saw the beginnings of an empirical approach to science and history. Instead of relying on classical and church authority, naturalists and explorers recorded their first hand observations of the new lands and cultures they encountered. Thus the early modern travel narrative set itself in opposition to classical works of cosmography.

In many ways Thomas Hariot’s narrative and John White’s images typify this new approach. And deBry from his very title page makes it obvious that he is charting new territory. Instead of the classical figures who usually inhabited the ornate architecture on such pages, DeBry’s book features White’s Algonquian Indians. The new world literally replaces the old on the book’s first page.

Despite the flood of firsthand travel narratives, 16th century Europeans were still influenced by the ideas of classical authors. In particular, images based on Pliny the Elder’s descriptions of the monstrous races from lands beyond the known world held firm sway over the imaginations of many Europeans.

 

Monstrous inhabitants of lands beyond Christendom (from the ZSR copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1498)

John White and Theodor deBry’s Indians– exotic but dignified and definitely human– provided one of the first correctives to these mythical images.

 

A chief woman of Pomeiooc and a young girl (Hariot identifies the girl’s doll and rattle as gifts of the English)

DeBry’s engravings reproduce White’s paintings with reasonable accuracy. But a comparison of the paintings and engravings makes clear that deBry felt free to make some alterations. He added multiple perspectives to the depictions of several figures. He also filled in White’s spare backgrounds, and he altered the human figures, giving them more European facial features and the defined musculature typical of figural illustrations of the time.

 

John White’s original drawing “The Flyer” (from the British Museum)

 

Theodor deBry’s version of “The Flyer”

DeBry also includes some additional images at the end of the volume–John White’s rather fanciful depiction of ancient Picts. For readers steeped in classical learning these images had obvious connotations: they were a reminder that for the Greek and Roman authors, the ancestors of deBry’s European readers were the barbarian races.

 

A Pictish warrior. White’s original painting is even more striking, since the figure is covered in bright blue body paint.

The 1590 first edition of this volume is part of the ZSR Special Collections Americana collection. These materials were purchased between 1938 and 1943 with matching funds from the Wake Forest College Board of Trustees and the Tracy W. MacGregor fund.

The Society of American Archivists College and University Archives Section Winter 2012 newsletter, “The Academic Archivist“, includes news from ZSR! Section III, News from our colleagues, highlights the completion of the Gertrude and Max Hoffman Papers finding aid, The Gertrude and Max Hoffman Music Manuscript Collection, as well as The Biblical Recorder project. What a thrill to see some of our completed projects featured in the national newsletter!

We are happy to announce that the Wake Forest Catalogues and Bulletins are online! Thanks to the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center for doing the scanning and to Vicki Johnson for organizing and transporting the bulletins. Varying titles and binding made this project no easy feat, but the benefits far outweigh any challenges this project may have presented. As of now, you can access the titles through the Special Collections and Archives page by clicking on the Howler Yearbooks under Popular Resources.

A genteel English woman of the 18^th century had few resources to fall back on if her husband proved unable to support her financially. A girl’s education generally emphasized elegant accomplishments like drawing, music, and fine needlework, rather than practical skills. So when Elizabeth Blachrie Blackwell’s neer-do-well husband landed in a London debtor’s prison in 1736, leaving her with a baby to support, few would have blamed her if she had abandoned him and gone back to her parents in Aberdeen. But Blackwell was more resourceful than most.

Elizabeth Blackwell was skilled at drawing, and her husband Alexander, who had once worked as an unlicensed physician, was knowledgeable about the medicinal properties of herbs and plants. They came up with a plan to produce a new Herbal – a book with illustrations and descriptions of various plants.

Herbals had been important reference works since ancient times. They were widely circulated as manuscripts and, with the advent of printing, as books. Many herbals existed in England in the early 18^th century, but Elizabeth Blackwell realized that there was a need for a new guide that included many species of plants discovered in the Americas.

In her entry for the “Coco-nut” (i.e. Cacao) tree, Blackwell observes that “The Kernels of the Nuts is what we make the Chocolate of, which is now so much used for Food; being accounted nourishing, restorative, fatning & provocative.”

In 1736 Blackwell took lodgings nearby the famous Chelsea Physic Garden. This botanical garden on the bank of the Thames was founded in 1673 as a nursery for medicinal plants and a training ground for botanists and apothecaries. The garden cultivated many species of plants imported from all over the world, including the Americas. Blackwell drew illustrations of the various plants cultivated there, then wrote descriptions of their attributes and medicinal properties in consultation with her husband and other experts and reference works. After receiving encouragement from Sir Hans Sloane and Dr. Richard Mead for some preliminary drawings, Blackwell undertook to create a comprehensive, illustrated guide to the plants in the garden.

Blackwell created the original drawings and watercolors, then engraved the illustrations on copper plates. An unusual feature of her herbal is that the entire pages are engraved- text as well as illustrations. Blackwell also hand-colored the plates for some copies of her publication.

A Curious Herbal was published first in parts. Between 1737 and 1739 Blackwell published four plates per week, for an eventual total of 500 engraved illustrations.

In 1739 publisher John Nourse printed two large folio volumes containing all 500 of Blackwell’s engravings. ZSR Library owns a copy of this first collected edition.

Alexander and Elizabeth Blackwell negotiated favorable terms with their publisher. And with the endorsement of many well-known physicians and scientists, the book sold well.

With profits from A Curious Herbal Elizabeth Blackwell was able to pay off her husband’s debts and free him from prison (Alexander did not reform his ways, however, and was executed in 1747 for his participation in a Swedish political conspiracy). Elizabeth died in 1758. But her book, the first English herbal by a woman, remained popular and was reprinted several times throughout the next two centuries.

In conjunction with the Words Awake celebration of Wake Forest writers, the spring exhibit in the Z. Smith Reynolds Library Special Collections and Archives features six Wake Forest authors whose papers reside in the archives and manuscripts collections.

Laurence Stallings, Harold Hayes, John Charles McNeill, W.J. Cash, and Gerald Johnson received their undergraduate degrees from Wake Forest. Maya Angelou was awarded an honorary doctorate and is a member of the WFU faculty. Each collection is a fascinating record of the author’s life and career.

A writer’s published works are the end products of a long process of thinking, researching, drafting, and editing. The material on view in Writers’ Lives illustrates this process. In one letter Harold Hayes tries to interest Gerald Johnson in writing an article for Esquire on the hypothetical result of the South winning the Civil War. In another Laurence Stallings describes the trials and tribulations of rehearsing a Broadway musical with his collaborator Oscar Hammerstein. W.J. Cash’s typewriter sits next to his annotated typescript of The Mind of the South. John Charles McNeill’s college notebook contains manuscript versions of poems published in Wake Forest’s Student magazine. An early draft of Maya Angelou’s screen adaptation of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is handwritten on notebook paper.

All of the archival materials in these collections were donated to ZSR Library by the authors themselves or by their family members and friends. The Special Collections and Archives department now makes them available to researchers all over the world.

The Writers’ Lives exhibit will be on view in the library’s Special Collections Reading Room (Reynolds Wing, 6th floor west) through June 2012. Special Collections is open Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. For more information or to make an appointment to view the exhibit after hours, please contact Megan Mulder at 336-758-5091 or mulder@wfu.edu.

In the fall of 2012 ZSR Library will offer a new class called History of the Book, 1500-2000 (LIB260). Taught by Special Collections Librarian Megan Mulder, the 1.5 credit class will introduce students to the exciting interdisciplinary field of Book History.

Book History (sometimes called History of Print Culture) combines history, literary studies, and bibliography. Its purpose, as set out by Robert Darnton in his seminal 1982 essay “What Is the History of Books?,” is “to understand how ideas were transmitted by print and how exposure to the printed word affected the thought and behavior of mankind during the last five hundred years.” While it is impossible to cover the whole scope of book history in one semester, this course will give students an introduction to the field and provide them with the theoretical and practical tools to pursue further study in the History of the Book and its many related disciplines.

The course will begin with the premise that we can approach printed texts as objects of study in three major ways: 1) as material objects with artifactual value, 2) as vehicles for text, and 3) as social constructs and agents of social change. Beginning with the first approach, students will learn to examine books as physical objects and to understand the processes by which they were created. In the process students will gain a basic vocabulary of descriptive bibliography, a necessary starting point for further study in the history of print culture. Our studies will also incorporate the other two approaches to the study of print culture, considering the role of books in the societies that produced them and the ways in which print conveys and shapes texts.

The class will meet in the ZSR Library Special Collections reading room. In each class meeting students will examine materials from the Rare Books Collection that illustrate concepts under discussion. They will learn how books were made during the hand-press period and will construct a small book of their own in the library’s Preservation Lab. As a final project each student will select one book from the Rare Books Collection and write its “biography”. This will provide practical experience with bibliographic description and with other techniques of book history research, including provenance research and reader analysis.

This class will meet weekly on Wednesdays 3:30 – 4:45 p.m. for the entire fall semester. It is open to anyone with an interest in books and their histories. For more information, contact Megan Mulder at mulder@wfu.edu or 758-5091.

Lindsey has been working in Special Collections for two years now and we couldn’t be luckier to have her. She is currently working on the tremendous “Bio File” project that includes creating a finding aid and digitizing thousands of biographical files. This is a highly used collection and will be a great online resource when it is completed. Lindsey is also one of two students working to transcribe and make available the finding aids for over a thousand church record microfilms (CRMF) that we have in our collection. This is a very important project and we couldn’t do it without Lindsey’s dedication and attention to detail. Thanks to Lindsey and all of the student assistants, we couldn’t do it without you!

The author’s object in this work, was to place before the reader a constant succession of characters and incidents; to paint them in as vivid colours as he could command; and to render them, at the same time, life-like and amusing.

Charles Dickens

In February of 1836 the young publisher William Hall dropped in unannounced on Charles Dickens at his lodgings in Furnival’s Inn. The firm of Chapman and Hall wanted to hire the 24-year-old author to provide narrative for a new serial publication featuring illustrations by the popular caricaturist Robert Seymour.

Dickens had begun to make a name for himself as “Boz”, the author of satirical newspaper and magazine pieces. But for Chapman and Hall his narrative was of secondary importance to Seymour’s depictions of lower and middle-class Londoners engaged in sporting pastimes typically associated with the landed gentry. The young Dickens, however, had other ideas.

First part of The Pickwick Papers, April 1836

The serial was titled The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club and was “edited by Boz”. Chapman and Hall published it in monthly issues beginning in April 1836 with part 1 and ending in November 1837 with a double issue containing parts 19 and 20. The first booklet, cheaply bound in green printed paper wrappers, contained four illustrations and about 20 pages of narrative. The monthly parts were priced at an affordable 1 shilling each.

Dickens was not, as undergraduate legend has it, paid by the word, but rather by the issue. His starting salary at Chapman and Hall was about £14 per month.

The first part of The Pickwick Papers was not a commercial success. Dickens’s narrative was disjointed and hastily written, and his characters– Samuel Pickwick and his motley assortment of friends and followers– were not yet well developed. Dickens’s relationship with Seymour was strained and became more so when, at a meeting arranged by the publishers, he criticized the illustrations for the second part. The hypersensitive and mentally unstable Seymour committed suicide the next day.

Illustration by Robert Seymour

After the loss of their illustrator, Chapman, Hall, and Dickens reevaluated their plans for the publication. They decided to continue, but with Dickens’s narrative as the driving force, and with the number of illustrations in each issue reduced from four to two. R.W. Buss was hired to illustrate the third part, but he proved unsatisfactory. For the fourth part, young illustrator named Hablot Knight Browne was brought in. He soon adopted the pseudonym Phiz and embarked on a fruitful collaboration with Dickens.

Illustration by “Phiz”

The fourth part also introduced the character of Sam Weller, Pickwick’s comic manservant, who proved key to the development of Dickens’s story. The popularity of the serial took off, and by the end of the year the publishers had all they could do to keep up with demand for current and past issues of The Pickwick Papers. The relative cheapness of each issue meant that even working-class readers could afford to buy them.

Serial fiction was a new form of publication in the 1830s. Newspapers and magazines often featured installments of sensational stories, but novels were typically published as triple-deckers– three volumes published simultaneously– for the convenience of lending libraries. Pickwick was the first serially published work of fiction to gain widespread popularity, amongst a more socially and economically diverse group of readers than had ever been seen in Britain before.

ZSR Library’s 19 separately issued parts of The Pickwick Papers, from the Charles Babcock collection

Publication in parts did present certain challenges to the author, which Dickens described in the Preface to the first book edition of Pickwick.

The publication of the book in monthly numbers, containing only thirty-two pages in each, rendered it an object of paramount importance that, while the different incidences were linked together by a chain of interest strong enough to prevent their appearing unconnected or impossible, the general design should be so simple as to sustain no injury from this detached and desultory form of publication, extending over no fewer than twenty months. In short, it was necessary — or it appeared so to the author — that every number should be, to a certain extent, complete in itself, and yet that the whole twenty numbers, when collected, should form one tolerably harmonious whole, each leading to the other by a gentle and not unnatural progress of adventure.

The experience of a 21st century student who encounters Dickens in a thick volume (perhaps with scholarly footnotes) is vastly different from that of the Victorian reader eagerly awaiting the next monthly installment of an exciting story! Dickens published most of his later novels in installments, and it was in the writing of Pickwick that he learned and mastered the form.

By 1837 Dickens had become so famous that when he had to delay the May issue following the death of his sister-in-law, his readers became distraught. The author had to address their concerns in a note in the June issue.

The popularity of Pickwick opened up a new source of revenue for its publishers: advertising. The first few issues featured only Chapman and Hall book notices on the back cover. But later issues contained “Pickwick Advertisers”– thick pamphlets advertising all manner of goods and services.

As the serial publication neared completion, Chapman and Hall began to advertise their single-volume edition of Pickwick.

The “new work” advertised was Nicholas Nickleby, which Chapman and Hall would begin publishing in serial form the next spring.

First edition of Pickwick as a single volume, 1837

Pickwick proved as popular in book form as it had in parts. ZSR Library’s copy of the first edition has the signature of the English artist Thomas Leeson Rowbotham, who apparently opted for the half-morocco-with-marbled-edges option for the binding of his volume. It was donated to the Wake Forest College library early in the 20th century and has clearly seen some enthusiastic use.

February 7, 2012 marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birth. The author whose career was launched by The Pickwick Papers remains beloved by readers worldwide two centuries later.

Alan Alexander Milne (1882-1956) never intended to be a children’s author. A former editor at Punch magazine, Milne was by 1924 a successful playwright and author of several volumes of essays and poetry for adults. When he announced to his editors (at Methuen in London and Dutton in New York) that his next manuscript was a book of children’s poems, they were skeptical. But When We Were Very Young was an immediate bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. The publishers reprinted the book four times in November and December of 1924.

Note from dust jacket flap, first edition

Punch illustrator Ernest H. Shepard provided the “decorations.”

First edition, 1924

The bear who would become famous as Winnie-the-Pooh made his first appearance (as Edward Bear) in the poem “Teddy Bear.”

Milne took his craft seriously, observing that

The practice of no form of writing demands such a height of technical perfection as the writing of light verse. . . When We Were Very Young is not the work of a poet becoming playful, nor of a lover of children expressing his love, nor of a prose-writer knocking together a few jingles for the little ones, it is the work of a light-verse writer taking his job seriously even though he is taking it into the nursery.
Autobiography, 282

Although his English-nursery parlance can strike modern readers as a bit twee, Milne’s depiction of childhood is not sentimental. He later wrote that he sought to strike a balance between conveying the “artless beauty… innocent grace… [and] unstudied abandon of movement” of young children while also recognizing their “lack of moral quality, which expresses itself…in an egotism entirely ruthless” [Autobiography, 283].

Two years later Milne brought out a volume of stories about Winnie-the-Pooh and other stuffed animals from the collection of his young son, Christopher Robin.

Title page from first American edition (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1926)

Milne’s publishers this time anticipated the demand for his book, and they ordered two sets of electrotype plates from which to print. The first American edition included 200 signed and numbered large-paper copies, of which Wake Forest’s is number 137.

The foibles of Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends Piglet, Eeyore, Owl, Rabbit, and Kanga and Roo were told with wry humor that captivated readers young and old. Milne later confirmed that all of the animals except for Rabbit and Owl were based on actual toys. The originals are still on view at the New York Public Library. The illustrations for Pooh, however, were actually based on a teddy bear named Growler, which belonged to Shepard’s son Graham.

Winnie-the-Pooh was indeed wildly popular, and Milne followed it in 1927 with another book of verse, Now We Are Six. Pooh makes an appearance in one of the poems, “Us Two.”

From the first edition of Now We Are Six (London: Methuen & co., 1927)

The animals of the Hundred Acre Woods also appear in several illustrations.

The next year Milne published another volume of stories about Pooh and friends, The House at Pooh Corner, which introduced the character of Tigger.

From the first edition of The House at Pooh Corner (London: Methuen & co., 1928)

The House at Pooh Corner (1928) was Milne’s last work for children. He returned to writing plays, essays, and novels for adults. But none of Milne’s other writings approached anywhere near the popularity of Pooh. Literary critic Alison Lurie contemplated Pooh’s lasting renown on the fiftieth anniversary of Winnie-the-Pooh‘s publication, wondering “why this mild story about a group of English toys should have almost instantly become, and remained for 50 years, an international classic- probably the best-loved children’s book of the 20th century.” She concludes that

In spite of their apparent simplicity, “Winnie-the-Pooh” and its sequel, “The House at Pooh Corner,” tell a story with universal appeal to any child anywhere who finds himself, like most children, at a social disadvantage in the adult world. What Milne has done is to turn this world upside down, so that Christopher Robin becomes the responsible adult, while everyone around him has turned into toys or animals, inferior in both size and authority.

In later years Milne resented being pigeonholed as a children’s author.

I wrote four ‘Children’s books,’ containing altogether, I supposed, 70,000 words–the number of words in the average-length novel. Having said good-bye to all that in 70,000 words, knowing that as far as I was concerned the mode was outmoded, I gave up writing children’s books. I wanted to escape from them as I had once wanted to escape from Punch. . . . In vain. England expects the writer, like the cobbler, to stick to his last.
Autobiography, 286

Milne once complained that critics viewed all of his subsequent work through the lens of Pooh and Christopher Robin:

As a discerning critic pointed out: the hero of my latest play, God help it, was ‘just Christopher Robin grown up.’ So that even when I stop writing about children, I insist on writing about people who were children once.
Autobiography, 287

But Milne’s protests were indeed for naught. His children’s books, with their enduring appeal both for children and for people who were children once, have made Winnie-the-Pooh his legacy.

Illustration from the first edition of Winnie-the-Pooh

The books in Z. Smith Reynolds Library’s A.A. Milne collection were acquired from a variety of sources. The signed and numbered first edition of Winnie-the-Pooh was part of publisher Lynwood Giacomini’s collection, which was purchased by the library in 1976. When We Were Very Young came from the Charles Babcock collection and also has the bookplate of Dickens bibliographer John C. Eckel. Other volumes were purchased by the library.

References

Alison Lurie. “Back to Pooh Corner.” Children’s Literature 2 (1973): 11-17; “Now We Are Fifty.” New York Times Book Review (14 November 1976).

A. A. Milne. Autobiography. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1939.

John R. Payne. “Four Children’s Books by A. A. Milne.” Studies in Bibliography 23 (1970): 127-139.

We found a very interesting photograph in a book undergoing repair last week. The scene is a 1930′s vintage cocktail party- held somewhere in London. On the reverse of the photo is a stamp from the processor which reads: A.V. Swaebe, Society & General Press Agency, 11 Mitre Court, London. A note on the reverse of the photo, written in pencil reads: “At a party of C.R.W. – Nevisons R.R. smiling at M.F.” The photo itself is one of a society party where the party goers are reveling and talking. Everyone is dressed to the nines! This photograph was found inside: Men and Memories, Recollections of William Rothenstein 1892-1900 (ND497 R85 A27 1931). The inscription by the author reads: “For my dear John with whom I have spent some of the happiest hours of my life – Will Rothenstein Jan-1932″