Tag: Illustrations
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“A Book Is Best! Absolutely!”
Presented without comment, jacket copy from the first American edition of Australian writer Charlotte Jay‘s thriller The Voice of the Crab (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), held in the Caroline F. Schimmel Fiction Collection of Women in the American Wilderness at Penn’s Kislak Center (Schimmel Fiction 6057): A Book Is Best!Absolutely! It really is.…
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Postcard from Ramonaland
I recently cataloged an early twentieth-century postcard in the Caroline F. Schimmel Fiction Collection of Women in the American Wilderness of potential interest to both deltiologists and aficionados of the mythology of Southern California. The image on the card is a square sepia photograph of a Native American woman seated with her hands in her…
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Lions on the Clock II: Six Owners, Five Marks of Provenance, One Book (and Two Lawsuits)
Lions are primarily pursuit predators, although “ambush behaviour has been observed … mainly during daylight when stalking prey is more difficult” (“Predatory Behaviour”). I presume this accounts for the way three more books from the press of sixteenth-century Swiss printer Nikolas Brylinger—he of the clock-watching lions—leapt out at me from the Kislak Center’s holdings after…
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Two Unrecorded Woodcuts from Urs Graf’s “F.M.S.” Cycle
In the spring of 2019 the Penn Libraries acquired for the Henry Charles Lea Library a German Hortulus animae or Seelengärtlein (BX2085 .S44 1515), a type of lay prayer book that enjoyed a brief burst of popularity in western Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century.1 The first known Hortulus animae—Latin for “little garden…
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Lions on the Clock: Woodcut Devices of Nikolas Brylinger
Lions have long been the device of choice for western royalty, from the lion-headed coins of the Kingdom of Lydia to the blazons of half the monarchies of Europe, including England, Norway, and Spain. More plebeian institutions haven’t shied from employing the King of Beasts, either: the Swiss canton of Thurgau retained the two lions…
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First, Catch Your Hare: Woodcut Device of … Heudrik Connix?
Thanks to Bugs Bunny, collateral descendant of the trickster hares of African and Native American folklore, the “wascally wabbit” is probably the primary trope associated with this animal in the western mind. Even the generous Easter Bunny hides eggs for/from children all over the yard! But in the art and emblem books of the European…
Unique at Penn 