Tag: Provenance
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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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A Coincidence of Mermaids: Two Bookplates of the Mason Family
The Kislak Center’s American Culture Class Collection holds fifty-four nineteenth-century editions of works by William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870), an author who embodies the contradictions of his era: the son of a bankrupt, he married a plantation heiress; a member of the Young America circle, he rejected Americanism in favor of sectionalism; a Unionist during the…
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Peter Falck and Friends: A Renaissance Man and His Library
Among the titles held in the Penn Libraries’ Incunable Collection are two Latin works bound together in a single volume with the call number Inc A-1192: Auctoritates librorum Aristotelis (Paris: Pierre Le Dru, ca. 1495; ISTC ia01192000), a popular philosophical florilegium, and Albertano da Brescia’s Liber de Doctrina Dicendi et Tacendi (Lyon: Johann Neumeister for…
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The Very Considerable Merit (in a Certain Cast of Parts) of Harriet Taplin Chambers
You never know who you’ll meet when you catalog a rare book: a pair of conjoined twins, a dog-sledding bigamist, the terrible-tempered Mister Bang … This year I was fortunate enough to encounter Harriet Taplin Chambers in the pages of an eighteenth-century copy of Thomas Hull’s tragedy Henry the Second, or, The Fall of Rosamond,…
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The Princess and the Piarists (Or, The Mystery of the Misidentified Monogram)
Marks of provenance tend to accumulate as books pass from one owner to another. New bookplates are pasted next to or over old ones; stamps and ownership inscriptions are added, emended, cut out or struck through; entire textblocks are rebound to display the arms of proud possessors. The dynamics of this process are equal parts…
Unique at Penn 