Month: April 2009

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Letters of Lorenzo de Medici and Angelo Poliziano

Newly digitized from the Bodman Collection, Special Collections, Honnold/Mudd Library are eleven autograph, signed letters written between members of the Medici family of Florence and others in their social and political circles, including Angelo Poliziano, the Sforza family, Palla Strozzi, and Francesco Guicciardini. Written between 1426 and 1522, these letters touch on a number of issues urgent to the House of Medici including military campaigns, political associations, and the trials of family life.
1478, 20 September:

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In 1483, Lorenzo de’ Medici gave his Villa Diana to the poet and then tutor of the Medici children, Angelo Poliziano. In the twentieth century, Harold C. Bodman (1886-1960) and his wife Ysabel acquired the Villa Diana, making it their home of some years. Poliziano’s villa sparked Bodman’s interest in collecting the works of Poliziano and those works produced at the time by the Medici’s “think tank” of humanist scholars, philosophers, artists, and writers. Mr. Bodman’s studies in this area led him to assemble his splendid collection, which he gave to Honnold Library from 1956 to 1960.

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The Myrtle Tyrrell Kirby Fashion Plate Collection

The Myrtle Tyrrell Kirby Fashion Plate Collection comprises 650 images of nineteenth-century fashion plates from the Macpherson Collection of the Ella Strong Denison Library at Scripps College. The collection was donated to the Denison Library in 1948 by Scripps Trustee Benjamin Kirby (1876-1957) and is named for his first wife, Myrtle Tyrrell Kirby (1881-1942). In addition to the Myrtle Tyrrell Kirby collection, the digital collection includes 65 fashion plates donated to the Denison Library by Elliot E. Lawrence.


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The full-color fashion plates in the Kirby collection were culled from a variety of women’s periodicals and other mass-circulating works published between 1789 and 1914. The images are primarily from France, Britain, America, and Spain, and depict scenes of nineteenth-century middle- and upper-class life with an emphasis on the leisure practices of bourgeois women, men, and children. Many of the fashion-plate images in this collection circulated in nineteenth-century women’s periodicals or in bound collections. Fashion plates from the nineteenth century bear witness to the importance of fashion in our recent past and, as widely circulating precursors to photographic images in modern-day fashion magazines, anticipate fashion’s role in today’s mass-media, image-driven culture.

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17th century manuscript — Journal of the House of Commons

Newly processed in Honnold Special Collections is the official record, in manuscript form, of the House of Commons during the first and second Parliaments of Charles II. The manuscripts are bound in three volumes covering the years 1661-1678. Call number J 301 .K2 1661.
On view below is the first page of the first volume, May 8, 1661:
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Typically, Parliament secretaries took verbatim notes employing a variety of abbreviations and shorthand. These three volumes are elaborately written out longhand in red and black, with ornate initial letters at the beginning of each new section and flourishes and decorative pen work, clues that these volumes were commemorative, probably for a member of the House of Commons.

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Stereotypes in Advertising exhibition–part 2

Stereotypes in Advertising: World War I and World War II Posters and Ephemera

The students of GRMT134: Stereotypes in Advertising, taught at Pomona College by Prof. Felix Kronenberg, are organizing a series of three exhibitions in Honnold/Mudd Library. On exhibit through the end of spring semester will be Special Collections’ World War I and World War II posters and ephemera as well as imagery and advertising of current world events.

The second of these exhibitions is “Wartime Patriotism: Past & Present”. A version of this in-library exhibition is also available as a web exhibition.
The students in this interdisciplinary course are exploring the depiction of the other in the world of advertising, looking at various stereotypes pertaining to categories such as nationality, ethnicity, gender, or age from a cultural studies perspective.

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John Walker’s Arma Virumque Cano

New in Honnold Library Special Collections is John Walker’s Arma Virumque Cano (Untide Press, 1950).
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Walker’s poem has twelve numbered parts; this is III:
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The Untide Press carefully selected materials and design, and set all their work by hand. The press garnered awards for excellence in printing and design with William Everson’s War Elegies (1944), Jacob Sloan’s Generation of a Journey (1945) and John Walker’s Arma Virumque Cano (1950).
Letterpress printed in an edition of 500, Arma Virumque Cano was designed with linoleum cut decorations by Kemper Nomland, printed in Bembo and Futura types, hand-set, on Kilmory Text paper.
The Untide Press was founded by William Everson, Kemper Nomland, Kermit Sheets and William R. Eshelman, in a camp of conscientious objectors in Waldport, Oregon in 1943, as an expression of protest against World War II. The name of the press originated in opposition to the camp weekly called The Tide, the slogan of the press being “What is not Tide is Untide”. The Untide Press moved after the War to Pasadena, where they produced an occasional literary magazine and small books of poems, many of them by the poets and writers who were later to form the nucleus of the San Francisco literary renaissance.
The Rare Book Room at Denison Library and Special Collections, Honnold Library, have other examples of the work of William Everson and other mid-century poets and printers of the west coast of the U.S. The Papers of the Untide Press are at the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.

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Manicules, or, those pointing hands in manuscripts

Our Bodman Collection copy of Filipo Beroaldo’s Orationes: Prelectio[n]es, Praefationes: & Quaedam Mythic[ae] Historae Philippi Beroaldi (Parrhisiis, in aedibus Ascensianis: & Joannis Parui [1515]), call number HON SPCL BODMAN PA 8475 .B6 1515, is full of whimsical manicules and cartoons drawn in the margins by at least one 16th century reader. For students of Renaissance books, these marginal notations are charming; each one is drawn with a unique sleeve style. Was this reader a student of fashion as well?
Two sample pages:
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closer view:
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