Category: literature & art

A collection of books, articles, and manuscripts by, about, and directly relating to Edward John Trelawny (1792–1881), author of several popular and influential works and memoirs about Byron and Shelley, is now part of the Libraries of The Claremont Colleges and is housed in Special Collections, Honnold/Mudd Library. Accumulated over a period of fifty years by Donald B. Prell, the core of the Collection comprises nearly 140 volumes.
Of particular note in the Collection is a manuscript notebook of Edward Ellerker Williams dating from about 1819–1820. Williams, a retired military officer, was living in Switzerland with Shelley’s cousin Thomas Medwin when he was introduced by Medwin to Shelley. Also, about this time, Trelawny joined Medwin, Williams, and Shelley, living together during those fateful days leading up to the sailing accident in which Shelley and Williams were drowned.
In his notebooks Williams recorded his travels during his stint in the Navy then afterward on the Continent with his friends and family, and are an important source for study of Shelley’s last days. Williams’ notebook in the Prell Collection contains many sketches, botanical specimens, fragments of poems, and one particular pencil portrait that might be of Shelley, pictured above.

On the page facing the title John Taaffe has written the following note:

“This poem was given me by its lamented Author. The notes are my own, and were written by me one night at Florence: and I now copy them from the original which I have given to my beloved sister Fanny. J. Taaffe. Fano. May 1834.”
The margins of every page are filled with Taaffe’s notes, elaborating on the poem, explaining its allusions and sources. On the final blank, Taaffe has written an account of Shelley’s death concluding, “I can’t look upon this poem at present without a crowd of most sorrowful recollections”. The notes are written in ink and pencil; the ink has bled through, rendering reading the notes quite difficult in many places.

Our copy of the Pisa edition of Shelley’s “Adonais” was a gift from William Clary. William Clary graduated from Pomona College in 1911; was an attorney at O’Melveny & Myers in Los Angeles; a trustee of Pomona, Harvey Mudd, and Pitzer colleges; a founding trustee of Claremont College (now, separately, Claremont University Consortium and the Claremont Graduate University); and founding member of the Zamorano Club. His collection on the history of the University of Oxford and its colleges is one of the most distinguished of our Special Collections, along with his collections of Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Milton.

New in Honnold Library Special Collections is John Walker’s Arma Virumque Cano (Untide Press, 1950).

Walker’s poem has twelve numbered parts; this is III:

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.

Found in the Mrs. Humphry Ward Papers in Honnold Library Special Collections is this letter from Arthur Conan Doyle regarding her novel, Daphne (published in the U.S. as Marriage á la Mode) 1909, in which Mrs. Ward argues against America’s divorce laws.

This manuscript poem, along with a letter and a photograph, were found folded into a book owned by Ramiel McGehee in Special Collections: American Diary of a Japanese Girl by Yone Noguchi (London, Elkin Mathews; Tokio, Fuzanbo, 1912) Honnold Miscellaneous Manuscripts: HM 151
Dancer and designer Ramiel McGehee was a friend of many artists and writers in the Los Angeles art scene, including Merle Armitage, Edward Weston, and in the Bay Area, poet and novelist Yone Noguchi. McGehee was a serious student of oriental art and philosophy; his book collection on Japanese art and culture was given to Denison Library, Scripps College after his death.