“Women Ain’t No Fools” – The Paul Eldridge Papers

Paul Eldridge (1888-1982) was a poet, novelist, essayist, short story writer, and teacher. Eldridge was born in Bucharest, raised in Philadelphia, and spent most of his life in New York City. He married fellow writer, stage actress, and soprano, Sylvette De La Mar (also known as Sylvette De Lamar, née Sylvia Reiss). Whenever I catalog a collection, I love to find photographs that allow me to picture the collection’s creator as I work, so imagine my delight when I came across these dapper photos of Paul and Sylvette, below.

 

Paul viewed Sylvette as his intellectual equal and dedicated all of his books to her. Alongside this respect for his wife and life partner, Paul Eldridge displayed a playful irreverence with regard to concepts of male and female roles, as is evident in the subjects and titles of many of his works.

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“A Glimpse of the Garden at Sunshine Cottage”: Una Nixson Hopkins’ Model Neighbors

In 1911 Una Nixson Hopkins published her only novel, A Winter Romance in Poppy Land (Boston: Richard G. Badger).  Remembered now largely as an architect and interior designer, as well as a Hollywood art director, she was also a frequent contributer of articles and short stories to magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal.  The plot of A Winter Romance in Poppy Land is very much in the vein of such magazine fiction:  George Oliver and June Winthrop, both visiting Pasadena, fall in love, but June rejects him when an overheard conversation suggests his complicity in a jewel theft from their hotel.  Once June learns that Oliver is an aspiring playwright and the conversation concerned a plot twist in his latest work (the actual theft was a mere coincidence), she yields to his advances and the two announce their engagement.  “An interesting love story with rather an unusual plot of misunderstandings,” concludes a contemporary reviewer in Out West, commending the book’s affectionately “vivid and true” depictions of its California settings (James 59).

016

Frontispiece (featuring Julia S. Holmes and “our gardener John”) and title page of A Winter Romance in Poppy Land, previously owned by the Dewey family of Pasadena, Calif.

The characters are all stock figures (distressingly so in the case of the African-American gardener, Japanese servants, and Hispanic locals), but when it came to choosing models for the photographic illustrations of her tale, Hopkins eschewed stock in favor of her Pasadena neighbors.  Uncredited in the book itself, their identities are revealed in an eight-page manuscript tucked into the copy recently donated to the Penn Libraries by Caroline F. Schimmel as part of the Collection of Women in the American Wilderness.

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“I Do Not Propose To Sit Idly Down And Be Made To Suffer”: The Curious Case of the Two Mrs. Pigotts

AmonPigottDakotaGirlCoverg the volumes presented to the University of Pennsylvania Libraries by Caroline F. Schimmel as part of her Fiction Collection of Women in the American Wilderness is an inscribed copy of That Dakota Girl by Stella Gilman, a Western romance published in 1892 to tepid reviews: “The pony that always figures in stories of Western life is introduced in the initial chapter, and has its share to do with the love-making and various subordinate incidents. But the reader looks in vain for the genuine local coloring that is to be expected from the title” (Public Opinion 13 (1892): 487).  Gilman, a resident of Hudson, South Dakota, is a shadowy figure; in the biographical note to her only other book, A Gumbo Lily and Other Tales, she writes that she was born in Philadelphia and emigrated with her family to the West as a child in 1878. The Schimmel Fiction Collection copy of The Dakota Girl has a 19th-century gift inscription (“To Uncle Herbert, with The love of The Author. July 15. 1892.”) on the front free endpaper and a partially effaced autograph in a childish hand (“Mabel Lucy Pegott [sic]. 329 Chestnut, Philadelphia, Penna.”) in pencil on the verso of the back free endpaper.

PigottAutographsStella Gilman’s inscription to “Uncle Herbert” (above)
and Mabel Lucy Pigott’s autograph (below)

A little investigation discovers that Mabel Lucy Pigott, born in 1881, was the daughter of H. Herbert Pigott of 329 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. Perhaps, I thought, an inquiry into Mr. Pigott’s family might shed some light on Stella Gilman’s antecedents. Sadly, it did not¹ — but it did uncover a tale of betrayal and bigamy in the Pigott family that culminated in a dog-sled chase through the lumber camps of British Columbia, a true-life romance as fascinating as any early twentieth-century fiction. Continue reading

Old Friends Reunited

Earlier this month, Middle East Studies Librarian David Giovacchini brought a Turkish manuscript to the Special Collections Processing Center for cataloging.  David had already created the core of a catalog record for the manuscript, identifying the author, text, and the source manuscript from which this manuscript had been copied.  But there was also a bit of mystery:  there was no information about how or when the manuscript had come to the Penn Libraries.

The manuscript is a 20th-century copy of Ms. Veliyüddin 2351 in the Bayezidiye Library in Istanbul.  The text is the sixth part (the only part now extant, largely a history of the Ottoman dynasty) of the late 15th-century universal history Cihannüma by the Ottoman historian Neşrî.  Some of this information was written in a note, in English, pasted inside the upper cover.  David also knew that Franz Taeschner, professor of Islamic studies at Münster in the mid-20th century, had used this manuscript in his scholarly work on this text.

Note inside cover of Ms. Codex 1643

Note inside cover of Ms. Codex 1643

In a routine search of Penn’s catalog for other copies of the same work, I was surprised to find that Penn’s Ms. Codex 38 is another manuscript copy of the Cihannüma, a 19th-century copy of a manuscript in the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna.  I was even more surprised to discover that it had exactly the same kind of note in English pasted inside its upper cover, with a citation to Taeschner’s work.  At some point in their histories, these two manuscripts had passed through the same hands.  The date of Ms. Codex 38’s arrival at the Penn Libraries was also unknown.

Codex38note

Note inside cover of Ms. Codex 38

The two manuscripts also have similar inscriptions in pencil near the notes:  Ms. Codex 38 is marked 426/1204 and the new manuscript, now Ms. Codex 1643, is marked 426/1207.

Note on Ms. Codex 38 flyleaf

Note on Ms. Codex 38 flyleaf

Note on Ms. Codex 1643 flyleaf

Note on Ms. Codex 1643 flyleaf

Attempts to find more information about Franz Taeschner led to the discovery that the catalog of his library of Turkish materials, published by Brill in 1970 after Taeschner’s death in 1967, was numbered 426.  So almost fifty years ago these manuscripts were together in his library.  The English notes perhaps were added as part of the sale process, as the pencil numbers certainly were.  And the manuscripts came to Penn after 1970.  Whether they arrived together or separately is still a mystery for now.

Biblio-Deception

In its nondescript cloth binding, the University of Pennsylvania’s copy of The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro Translated by John Ogilby (London : T. Maxey, 1650) at first appears unremarkable. However, the book’s association with the infamous 19th c. forger Harry Buxton Forman (1842-1917) makes it noteworthy. When this volume of Virgil’s works in the Latin Culture Class Collection was rebound, the binder took care to preserve Forman’s bookplate by affixing it to the title page. LatC V5874 Eg1 1650 H. Buxton Forman was a respected bookman of his time. He was a bibliophile and scholar, establishing his reputation with bibliographies of Shelley and Keats. During his years of book collecting and literary pursuits Forman developed a friendship with T.J. Wise (1859-1937), also a collector and respected bibliographer. Their friendship ultimately took a criminal turn as they used their combined bibliographic expertise to fabricate dozens of counterfeit works.

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One fewer frustrating book stamp

There’s nothing more frustrating to catalogers and bibliographers than a partially legible book inscription or stamp. While a completely smudged, faint, or illegible provenance marking might be disappointing it at least has an air of impossibility. Those that have some letters or words clearly rendered can suck hours of time. “So close! If only I could read those last few letters!” I’ve experienced this frustration too many times to count but the Penn Provenance Project has recently made the experience of finding a partial marking more exciting than exhausting.

A few weeks ago while reviewing the provenance records for all our codex manuscripts I came across one in a 16th century collection of Italian statutes that seemed tantalizing. The record read: “Illegible ex libris stamp: “Bibliotheca …”” Fortunately I could consult both the physical item and a new digital facsimile to try and reach my own conclusions.

MsCodex92Stamp

Ink stamp in UPenn Ms. Codex 92. A 16th c. compilation of Florentine statutes.

I spent a few minutes squinting at the bottom part of the ink stamp, sure I could make out a dash and an ‘M’ but not really making much progress otherwise. I figured I’d head to the PPP site to try my luck. Though “Biblioteca” was sure to be dime a dozen on the stamps photographed in the project, it’s amazing how quickly one can scroll through a page of thumbnail images and so I got started:

Biblioteca

Knowing that I was looking for an oval stamp with a hyphenated bottom word made a quick visual scan a cinch and in less than a minute I’d spotted the following mark:

CCstamp

Bookstamp of the Malvezzi-Medici Library in Bologna in a collection of printed Ferrara texts c.1600. Penn call# Folio IC6 F4122L C600

I saved this to one side for comparison and moved through the rest without finding any other likely suspects. Going back to compare the two I was pretty satisfied I’d found the right one, the stamp of the Biblioteca Malvezzi-Medici in Bologna. The library of the counts of Malvezzi de’Medici was housed in their grand palazzo, one of the stars of Bologna until its sale in 1931. It turns out in fact that the Penn libraries hold at least twelve titles in print and manuscript bearing the Malvezzi-Medici stamp, acquired from the antiquarian market in the years after the sale.

Malvezzi

Photograph of one of the now empty libraries (the Biblioteca del Segretario Generale) in the Palazzo Malvezzi – Medici. Rivista mensile del Comune di Bologna 23.3 (March 1935), p. 16.

Without the Penn Provenance Project and an easily searchable visual database of bookstamps I can’t imagine I would have found a match. Now the record for UPenn Ms. Codex 92 has been changed to reflect the new information and knowing the shared origin of this manuscript with other titles in the library will help us in the library as well as  scholars of Italian cultural and literary history better understand the collecting practices and historical imagination of Italian elites like the Malvezi de’Medicis. As we expand the PPP I can’t wait to hear many more similar stories of matches and surprising finds!

Provenance Party!

The Penn Provenance Project on Flickr has now received over 1,000,000 views!! Congratulations to everyone who struggled to read illegible inscriptions, identified bookplates and stamps and enriched Penn’s catalog records with detailed information about the former owners of our rare books.

1,000,000 views

1,000,000 views

If you haven’t visited yet, come take a look at some of our sets and begin identifying!

A Monster’s Mediterranean Tour

Once, while I was teaching at a summer program for gifted high school students, I was called with some other faculty members into the office of the director, a biology professor, to listen to a series of increasingly importunate messages from a local morning radio show.  Someone had found a two-headed toad in his yard and the hosts wanted to interview a biologist about it.  But since their approach was less Nature than Weekly World News (“C’mon, doc, this is weeeeird stuff!  What’s next?  Two-headed snakes?  Two-headed turtles?  Two-headed babies?”), the director declined to comment on a potential polycephalic apocalypse.

I was reminded of this incident while cataloging our copy of an incunable edition of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses printed in Bologna by Benedetto Faelli on August 1, 1500 (Goff A-938).  On a blank leaf at the end of the volume are two handwritten notes in Latin, one dated November 13, 1513, and the other March 2, 1515, describing the appearance of a pair of conjoined twins in Rome and Geneva.  The first note, in a very clear humanist hand, tells us that:

there was brought from Spain to Rome a twelve-year-old French boy bearing in his chest a monster in the form of a perfect little boy, headless but with very thin arms without hands, his head hidden within the boy’s chest and hanging down by a small neck from the chest of the same, with separate bodies, their bellies cleaving together but the feet scarcely touching the boy’s knees.  And, strange to say, the boy eliminates together with the monster and urinates, and food provides each of them with nourishment.  And if something touched the monster, the boy immediately felt it. (… puer natione Gallus annoru[m] xij Monstrum in pectore gerens ad forma[m] perfecti pueruli acephali brachijs tamen gracillimis sine manibus ostendentis caput suum intra pectus pueri condidisse et per paruum collum a pectore ip[s]ius dependere diuisis corporibus, ventribus inter se coherentibus genua pueri uix pedibus attingentis. Quodq[ue] mirum dictu est puer una cum monstro egerit, mingitq[ue], tamq[ue] cibo unius utriq[ue] alimenta prestentur.  Et si quid monstrum tetigerit, puer statim sentit.)

The author insists that this is no popular tale (vulgaris fabula) but that many trustworthy men in Rome as well as France and Spain can attest to its veracity.

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For the Love of Reading: Reading on a Windowseat with a Dog Nearby

Bookplate of Edith Barbara Tranter.

Edith Barbara Tranter was secretary to W. T. H. Howe (1874-1939), president of the American Book Company in Cincinnati, and subsequently administrator of his estate. She appears herself to have collected books and manuscripts; her library was sold at auction by Parke-Bernet on March 18, 1952.

Penn Libraries call number: EC8 B7898 W857g
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