Book Review: "The Grandeur of Life"

The Grandeur of Life: A Celebration of Charles Darwin and the Origin of Species, by William B. Ashworth, Jr., accompanies an exhibit by the same name at the Linda Hall Library (Kansas City, MO). In just 91 pages (including index and bibliography) this short catalog provides a short but useful overview of natural history scholarship from the dawn of printing through 24 November 1859, when Darwin's Origin was published.

The 57 items included in the catalog are each described in some detail, including information on authors, illustrators and illustrative processes, publication, and sources for the work. Each example is accompanied by several excellent images, usually a detail from the work. The catalog includes a wide range of works, covering the usual botany and zoology as well as the emerging fields of what we now know as geology, paleontology, and biogeography. The final section includes Darwin's pre-Origin publications, as well as earlier works postulating some elements of evolutionary processes.

A colorful, vibrant compilation.

Missing Books Redux

More on the "Are You Missing Some Books?" post from earlier in the week:

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports that the books were discovered at the Brooklyn home of Mary Kolompar, 64, an internationally-known art thief with more than twenty aliases and a criminal record dating back to the late 1970s. Brooklyn police served a search warrant on Kolompar's home on 14 November (investigating charges of counterfeiting and welfare fraud), and found there the stack of rare Civil War books listed here.

Brooklyn detective Kevin McFadden says authorities also found jewelry and sports memorabilia, and Kolompar has been charged with 10 crimes to date. But since the source of the books remains unknown, they've been unable to charge Kolompar with their theft, or to return the books to their owner.

Links & Reviews

- First, a hilarious takedown of an incredibly ridiculous eBay listing, by Book Patrol's Stephen Gertz. This seller was attempting to sell an ex-lib, later edition of Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power Upon History (albeit one from the Department of Defense Library) as "Legitimate Contender World's Most Expensive Book," for $21 million. Wow.

- The next hearing on the Google Books Settlement will be 18 February 2010, according to a report in today's Independent. Opponents will have until 28 January to lodge complaints, and the Justice Department must weigh in before 4 February. The Open Content Alliance has collected a bunch of quotes from people opposing the revised settlement deal, and offers its own "post-mortem" on the settlement revision.

- From McSweeney's, Christopher Robinson offers up "Captain Blackbeard's College of Piracy - Ye Olde Course Catalogue, Spring '10."

- John Overholt notes a new Houghton Library website, Picturing Prayer: Books of Hours in Houghton Library, Harvard University, which had its roots in a 2006 exhibition. John also found a little anti-Johnson ditty in the back of a book in the Hyde Collection.

- Ian offers up his report from the trenches from last weekend's Boston Book Fair.

- Book Patrol offers up a list of their top books about books for 2009.

- Now that it's been published, the mss. (on index cards) of Nabokov's The Original of Laura will be going up for auction, at Christie's on 4 December (est. $400,000-600,000). I'll have a preview of this sale in a few days.

- Artdaily.org reports on a new exhibit at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, "Friend or Faux: Imitation and Invention from the Innocent to the Fraudulent." The show will be on display through July 2010, and sounds very cool. [h/t Literary Fraud & Folly]

- In Collectors Weekly, an interview with Ken Sanders. Incidentally, the books section of Collectors Weekly is pretty nifty; I've added a sidebar link.

- David Aronovitch writes in the Times about spending a day with the anti-Stratfordians (those who believe Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare).

Reviews

- Woody Holton's Abigail Adams is reviewed by Paul Nagel in the Boston Globe.

- Jonathan Yardley reviews Joan Waugh's U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth in the Washington Post.

- In the NYT, Judith Shulevitz reviews Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History. The same book is reviewed by John Gross in the WSJ.

- Also in the Times, Sean Wilentz reviews Robert Merry's A Country of Vast Designs.

- Alexandra Mullen reviews Madeline Goold's Mr. Langshaw's Square Piano in the WSJ.

- Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna is reviewed by Liesl Schillinger in The Scotsman.

Book Review: "Liberty & the American Revolution"

Liberty & the American Revolution: Selections from the Collection of Sid Lapidus (Princeton University Library, 2009) is the catalog to accompany an exhibit of the same name now on display at Princeton's Firestone Library (through 3 January 2010). If the catalog is any indication, the exhibit itself is undoubtedly quite a show, and I certainly urge anyone who can get there to go to Princeton and see this remarkable collection of materials. These 157 items (broadsides, books, prints, but mostly pamphlets) are drawn from Sid Lapidus' 2,500-item collection relating to the "intellectual origins of the American Revolution; the Revolution itself; the early years of the republic; the resulting spread of democratic ideas in the Atlantic world; and the effort to abolish the slave trade in both Great Britain and the United States."

The body of the catalog comprises four major sections: Revolutionary Origins, The American Crisis, Contagious Liberty, and Abolition of the Slave Trade. These are further subdivided into categories, which contain several works apiece; each work is introduced with a short contextual paragraph about the author and the text, followed by an appropriate selection from the text. Most of the items are accompanied by a high-quality image of the title page, a relevant passage, or the binding.

Curator of Rare Books Stephen Ferguson provides a preface to the volume, noting that the exhibited materials should be viewed within at least three separate 'frames' (the story of expanding liberty in the Atlantic world, a narrower frame such as the specific events or topics discussed in the work, and finally the item itself as physical object).

In his foreword Sid Lapidus, the collector, discusses his background as a book collector, musing on how this collection came to take shape and offering much insight into the mind and methods of a truly dedicated, interested and serious collector. He writes about his process of purchasing, of his delight in perusing well-researched dealer and auction catalogs, and of how the creation of his collection has been "a voyage of discovery of part of me I didn't know existed" (p. xxi). This short essay alone would make this catalog worth reading for any collector, since it gets to the heart of what many of those of us who enjoy collecting enjoy about it.

Sean Wilentz, who holds the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professorship in the American Revolutionary Era at Princeton, provides a worthy introduction to the catalog, laying the groundwork and providing much important contextual information to the materials included in the exhibit. This is a succinct and able encapsulation of the themes illustrated by the exhibited texts, and is as good a short summary of the ideas of liberty and rights during the Revolutionary era as any I've read.

This catalog is set in a very appropriate and frankly quite beautiful font, and is extremely well designed (even with a very useful and comprehensive index). It is a lovely complement to Mr. Lapidus' work, and will be a lasting testament to this small portion of his notable and extensive collections (and will stand in its own right as a useful bibliographic resource).

Book Review: "Wolf Hall"

Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, this year's Booker Prize-winning novel (published in the U.S. by Henry Holt, 2009), is the first of two volumes covering the life and times of Thomas Cromwell, a sometime trusted advisor to Henry VIII (typically portrayed as something of a villain). I've included his picture here (by Hans Holbein) since it ends up playing something of a role in the book.

This volume, which takes the reader through Cromwell's rise up to the summer of 1535, ends with the execution of Sir Thomas More; the next (which Mantel has said she hopes to publish in "a couple of years") will encompass the final five years of Cromwell's life (culminating in his precipitate fall from grace).

While I found myself occasionally thinking that this book was plodding along, it was the good sort of plod, the sort that I think must accurately depict anyone's life (even one as fraught with intrigue, politics, and moments of import as Cromwell's was). Mantel has ably captured, I think, the state of Henrician England during the 1530s, as the king sought to put aside Wife # 1 (Katherine of Aragon) and her daughter for Wife # 2 (Anne Boleyn). The ensuing debate, which of course rippled across the political and cultural landscape of not just the British Isles of all of Europe as well, is the stuff of hundreds if not thousands of books, but Mantel has synthesized it remarkably through Cromwell's viewpoint.

Mantel's book can be read by the general reader, but those with some knowledge and understanding of the history of the period will probably get more out of it, as the author offers up much historical context, background and foreshadowing in what might appear to be casual asides. It's also handy to keep a search window up nearby, so you can check names, titles, dates, or topics of interest as you go (or look for images of the characters, which I rather like to do).

Much has been made of Mantel's decision to use "he" to refer almost always to Cromwell, which creates a degree of grammatical ambiguity at times. I didn't find this device as annoying as I feared I might, although it was confusing at times when it wasn't clear just who "he" was supposed to be (it's not always Cromwell).

The texture and detail which Mantel brings to the Tudor court with this book is an absolute delight. Her discussions of contemporary events through the eyes of her characters are illuminating, and her portrayal of Cromwell is simply fascinating. I'll look forward to the next volume with impatience.

Franken-Cromwell

This one's too good to save for tomorrow's links post: from Mercurious Politicus, Nick discusses the potential creation of an entire Cromwell, "Frankenstein's monster-style." Well played!

This Week's Acquisitions

Here's what arrived this week.

- The Passionate Empiricist: The Eloquence of John Quincy Adams in the Service of Science by Marlana Portolano (SUNY Press, 2009). Book cart.

- Romance, Remedies, And Revolution, 1773-1775: The Journal of Dr. Elihu Ashley of Deerfield, Massachusetts; edited by Amelia F. Miller and A.R. Riggs (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007). Book cart.

- Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England by Jenny Hale Pulsipher (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). Book cart.

- Boston Beheld: Antique Town and Country Views by D. Brenton Simons (University Press of New England, 2008). Book cart.

- Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought from Paine to Pragmatism by William H. Goetzmann (Basic Books, 2009). Book cart.

- The Sedgwicks in Love: Courtship, Engagement, and Marriage in the Early Republic by Timothy Kenslea (Northeastern University Press, 2005). Book cart.

- Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession by Russell A. McClintock (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Book cart.

- Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500-1776 by Alden T. Vaughan (Cambridge University Press, 2006). Book cart.

- Lives Shaped by the Revolution: Portraits of a Boston Family: Speakman, Rowe, Inman, Linzee, Coffin & Amory by Jeannine J. Falino (Harvard University Art Museums, 2005). Book cart.

- The Secrets of Tomb 10A by Rita Freed et al. (Museum of Fine Arts, 2009). Book cart.

- The Boston Athenaeum: Bicentennial Essays; edited by Richard Wendorf (Boston Athenaeum, 2009). Amazon.

- The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay by Umberto Eco (Rizzoli, 2009). Publisher.

- Art and Crime: Exploring the Dark Side of the Art World; edited by Noah Charney (Praeger, 2009). Publisher.

Are you Missing Some Books?

Via Everett Wilkie on ExLibris, from Laurel Waycott of the Art Loss Register:

"November 2009 - The New York Police Department has recovered a collection of rare Civil War Era books in the possession of a known thief. The books are believed to be stolen, though the loss has not been reported to the Art Loss Register or the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America. All nine books likely came from the same collection.

The recovered books include:

- Nehemiah Adams, South-Side View of Slavery (1855)
- Albert Barnes, The Church and Slavery (1857)
- Silas Casey, Infantry Tactics (1862)
- Dean Dudley, Officers of our Union Army and Navy (1862)
- William J. Hardee, Rifle and Infantry Tactics (1863)
- Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South (1860)
- Frederick Law Olmstead, The Cotton Kingdom, 2 vol. (1861)
- James Redpath, The Public Life of Captain John Brown (1860)
- Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, 2 vol. (1862)

If you have information on this collection, please contact Detective Michael McFadden of the NYPD at michael.mcfadden@nypd.org or the Art Loss Register at stolen@alrny.com."

Auction Report: PBA & Upcoming

- For the PBA Rare Books and Manuscripts sale on 19 November, full results are here. The expected high spots did not sell. The top prices were $9,600 for Lot 135 (a first edition in English of Plato's Republic, 1763); $7,800 for Lot 159 (a first edition in English of Virgil's Aeneid, 1562); and $7,200 for Lot 138 (a presentation copy of Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies, 1945).

Some upcoming Sotheby's sales include Books and Manuscripts in Paris on 26 November and Western Manuscripts in London on 8 December. In the former, some very interesting books with French royal provenance, a neat selection of books on orchids, and some tremendously interesting bindings.

In the latter, just 53 lots, but what 53 lots! A miniature, showing silver mining in Bohemia, which formed the frontis of an illuminated manuscript choirbook (lost since the 1920s and probably not exhibited publicly since the Middle Ages, est. 200,000-300,000 GBP); the missing volume of the Grammont Abbey Missal (est. 100,000-150,000 GBP); an illuminated copy of the gospels in Greek from the 12th century (illuminated late in the 14th), est. 80,000-120,000 GBP; a pre-Wycliffe English translation of the Psalms by Richard Rolle, est. 40,000-60,000 GBP (this once owned by Thomas Phillipps); some classical fragments, and several other really interesting goodies. Do check out this catalog.

National Book Award Winners

The winners of the 2009 National Book Awards were announced last night. They are bolded in the lists below:

Fiction
- Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
- Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House)
- Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W. W. Norton & Co.)
- Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf)
- Marcel Theroux, Far North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Nonfiction
- David M. Carroll, Following the Water: A Hydromancer's Notebook (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
- Sean B. Carroll, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
- Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
(Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt)
- Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy (Princeton University Press)
- T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
(Alfred A. Knopf)

Poetry
- Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan University Press)
- Ann Lauterbach, Or to Begin Again (Viking Penguin)
- Carl Phillips, Speak Low (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press)
- Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (University of California Press)

Young People's Literature
- Deborah Heiligman, Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith (Henry Holt)
- Phillip Hoose, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- David Small, Stitches (W. W. Norton & Co.)
- Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic)
- Rita Williams-Garcia, Jumped (HarperTeen/HarperCollins)

LeClerc to Step Down from NYPL

New York Public Library president Paul LeClerc said on Wednesday that he will step down in the sumer of 2011, the NYTimes reports. LeClerc has been with NYPL since December 1993 (his is the longest tenure of any NYPL president).

NYPL board chair Catherine Marron and vice chair Joshua Steiner will head a search committee to find LeClerc's replacement, and "said that the new leader could come from any number of fields — academics, technology, the nonprofit sector."

Gordon Wood on Writing History

Eminent historian Gordon S. Wood has an essay in yesterday's Washington Post that every practicing historian (or would-be practicing historian) ought to read. He makes the very good point that the oft-heard argument that academic historians have "forgotten how to tell a story" (and thus, write books that very few people actually sit down and read) is not quite accurate: "Academic historians have not forgotten how to tell a story. Instead, most of them have purposefully chosen not to tell stories; that is, they have chosen not to write narrative history."

Instead, he notes, academic historians tend to write analytic history, "specialized and often narrowly focused monographs" which "seek to solve problems in the past that the works of previous historians have exposed; or to resolve discrepancies between different historical accounts; or to fill in gaps that the existing historical literature has missed or ignored." Wood continues: "Their studies, however narrow they may seem, are not insignificant. It is through their specialized studies that they contribute to the collective effort of the profession to expand our knowledge of the past." He points out the roots of this type of history writing ("the 19th-century noble dream that history might become an objective science"), and maintains (correctly) that as a group these histories have "advanced the discipline in extraordinary ways over the past century."

But, he goes on, this type of writing comes at the price of a limited readership: "Like papers in the other sciences, monographic history is written largely for people within the discipline. Since the monographs build upon one another, the writers of these monographic studies usually presume that readers will have read the earlier books on the same subject; that is, that they will possess some prior specialized knowledge that will enable them to participate in the conversations and debates that historians have among themselves. This is why most historical monographs are often difficult for general readers to read; new or innocent readers often have to educate themselves in the historiography of the subject before they can begin to make sense of many of these books."

Wood concludes "So advising academic historians that they have to write more stimulating prose if they want to enlarge their readership misses the point. It is not heavy and difficult prose that limits their readers; it is rather the subjects they choose to write about and their conception of their readership as fellow historians engaged in an accumulative science." Because of the massive accretion of academic monographs, "most academic historians have tended to throw up their hands at the possibility of synthesizing all these studies, of bringing them together in comprehensive narratives. Thus, the academics have generally left narrative history writing to the non-academic historians, who unfortunately often write without much concern for or much knowledge of the extensive scholarship that exists. If academic historians want popular narrative history that is solidly based on the monographic literature, then they will have to write it themselves."

Wood's concerns aren't new: much of the background in this piece will be familiar to readers of his excellent reviews, which were collected in a 2008 volume, The Purpose of the Past (my review here). And writing as an academic historian who can and does engage in the synthesis of scholarly literature in a way that is at once readable and rigorous, as in his new book, Empire of Liberty (my review here), Wood understands as well as anyone that it can be done. But beyond that, scholarly monographs can be readable and interesting too, and that should be something all scholars strive for.

FDR Papers May be Released

The AP reports today that the last major collection of FDR's presidential papers "may soon be available to researchers and the public," pending the final passage of legislation relinquishing government claims to some of the documents. The fourteen-box collection, accumulated by FDR's secretary, Grace Tully, was purchased by Sun-Times Media Group Inc. in 2001 for $8 million. The group is prepared to donate the materials to the FDR Presidential Library and Museum, but the National Archives claims it already owns parts of the collection (including FDR's notes to Tully). In order for the donors to receive a full tax deduction, that claim must be settled. So the legislation states that "any claim of the United States to such property shall be treated as having been waived and relinquished on the day before the date of such gift."

The legislation passed the Senate by unanimous consent in October, and was agreed to by voice vote in the House yesterday. The Senate must act once more, and then the bill will go to President Obama for his signature.

Once the legislative process is completed the 5,000 documents should be available as soon as the archivists at the FDR library can process them.

Auction Report: Skinner

The results for the annual Skinner Fine Books & Manuscripts sale (held in Boston on 15 November) are here. Highlights from the autograph section:

- Lot 96 (a David Hume letter regarding Rousseau's letters to him, est. $10,000-15,000), sold for $18,368.

- Lot 131 (a fantastic Martin Luther letter, est. $15,000-25,000), fetched $106,650.

- Lot 151 (an Isaac Newton manuscript on ancient European history, est. 10,000-15,000), made $21,330.

- Lot 187 (two manuscript pages of Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, est. $4,000-6,000), sold for $21,330.

Lot 17 (a lock of the hair of John Brown, est. $5,000-7,000, picture on p. 11 of the catalog); Lot 179, a large collection of material relating to Albert Schweitzer (est. $35,000-55,000); and Lot 184 (a Peter Stuyvesant letter, est. $20,000-30,000) did not sell.

Highlights from among the books:

- Lot 204, a Walt Whitman signed and corrected printed folio proof sheet, sold for $17,775.

- Lot 252 (Barton's 1817 Vegetable Materia Medica of the United States, a presentation copy to Commodore William Bainbridge, est. $6,000-8,000) made just $1,541;

- Lot 331 (a set of early printings of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland works, bound uniformly, est. $3,500-4,500) sold for $5,925.

- Lot 359 (a five-volume set of Gould's Birds of Great Britain, est. $60,000-80,000) fetched $56,288.

- Lot 363 (a book from the library of Nathaniel Hawthorne, est. $2,000-3,000) beat the estimate, going for $7,703.

- Lot 397A (a first English edition of Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, est. $20,000-30,000) made $21,330.

And from the illustrations:

- Lot 575, Audubon's Carolina Parakeet, (est. $25,000-35,000) made $38,513.

- Lot 602 (a 1705 Visscher atlas, est. $10,000-15,000) fetched only $5,333.

- Lot 617 (a famous and excellent 1755 map of North America, est. $15,000-20,000) sold for $65,175.

Lot 601 (a 1574 Sebastian Munster world atlas, est. $10,000-12,000) failed to sell.