Cuneiform tablets

Clay, Iraq, 3rd–2nd millennia BCE

Wilberforce Eames Babylonian collection,
Manuscripts and Archives Division

The Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library holds approximately 700 artifacts inscribed in an ancient writing system known as cuneiform (Latin cuneus, “wedge”). The script was invented in the mid-fourth millennium BCE in the region known as Mesopotamia, the “Land between the Rivers,” in what is now Iraq. These artifacts were bequeathed by the Library’s chief bibliographer, Wilberforce Eames. Today, we are able to re-engage with the societies of ancient Mesopotamia—their beliefs, art, literature, scientific accomplishments, and much more—thanks to the pioneering work of 19th-century scholars to decipher cuneiform.

Mesopotamian cuneiform was mainly used during the 3rd–1st millennia BCE to write texts in the Sumerian and Akkadian languages, but was adapted to other languages such as Elamite or Hittite. Students of cuneiform learned up to 1,000 different characters impressed by styli made of reed or bone into damp clay.

Royal inscriptions were deposited in the foundations of official architecture, where they could be rediscovered during later renovations. This large clay barrel cylinder from the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 605–562 BCE) mentions his restoration of a temple in Marad (modern Tell Wannat as-Sadun in southern Iraq). According to this inscription, he looked for the original ground plan of the temple and found an inscription of a previous ruler, King Naram-Sin, who reigned some 1,600 years earlier:

As for Lugal-Marada, my lord, whose temple in Marad and whose ancient foundation platform no former king had seen since the days of old, at that time I looked for and found its ancient foundation platform, and upon the platform of King Naram-Sin, my ancient ancestor, I fixed its (new) foundations. I created an inscription written in my name and put it therein.

 

 

Anonymous (Mexican (Toluca))

Council House of Santa Maria Toluca

Ink and pigments on amatl paper, early 18th century

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Spencer Collection

 

In pictures and words, this manuscript records the history and defines the boundaries and landholding titles of a village in the Valley of Mexico. Although its text contains the date 1535, which may reiterate earlier claims, scholars have convincingly assigned the manuscript to the early 18th century—a time of frequent challenges to village land titles that were thus reissued by leaders of pueblo council houses. It is an important example of a Colonial Mexican codex, written in the Central American Indian language Nahuatl and illustrated in a manner that reflects its maker’s contact with examples of European art. The work is executed on indigenous, coarse-grained, unsized, cloth-like amatl paper, manufactured from tree bark fiber. Its views offer powerful evidence for what the Aztecs thought about the European conquest of their lands and an important counterpoint to the Library’s significant holdings of works relating to the discovery of the New World.

 

 

Book of chant fragments

11th–12th centuries

Music Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center

This volume consists of fragments from three separate sources sewn together in a 19th-century binding, and is the oldest known item held at the Library for the Performing Arts. The first two sources likely originated in Swiss or German regions, while the third probably derives from northern Italy or southern France. The left-hand page displayed here comes from the second of the three sources in the volume and dates from approximately 1050. Though likely created soon after Guido of Arezzo’s invention of musical staff notation, this page is notated without staves. The source comes from a book containing chants from the Proper of the Mass, with words and music that would have been specific to certain days of the year. The “Oculi mei” chant shown here is from an Introit, sung during the second and third weeks of Lent. The pictured page features marginalia that outline melodic filigree—ornamental notes that emphasize the primary pitch—to be sung on certain syllables, and a drawing of a man’s face in the “O” of “Oculi mei.” The right-hand page comes from the third of the three sources and dates from the 12th century; its later date is indicated by the use of staves. This source contains chants intended for the first and second Sundays of Lent and the Sunday before Ash Wednesday.

 

 

Biblia Latina

Mainz: Johannes Gutenberg, 1455

Rare Book Division

Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith from the city of Mainz in what is now Germany, undertook the development of a new method of printing in the late 1430s that would revolutionize the production of books and other materials. His combined innovations—conceiving the use and manufacture of movable metal type, formulating oil-based printing ink, and employing a mechanical printing press—enabled the mass production of identical texts, facilitating the spread of knowledge and literacy.

As the cornerstone of printing in the West, the Gutenberg Bible embodies its creator’s achievements. Collector and Library founder James Lenox acquired the Library’s copy, the first one brought to the Americas, in 1847. Its arrival in New York City occasioned not only great excitement but also a romantic legend: that Lenox’s agent instructed the Custom House workers to remove their hats upon seeing it—a fitting tribute, given the book’s historical importance.

 

 

Ketubbah

1866

Dorot Jewish Division

The bond of matrimony marks a new beginning. The ketubbah, the Jewish wedding contract, outlines the legal and financial responsibilities of a husband to his wife. Signed by witnesses, the document is typically hung prominently in a couple’s home, since Jewish law forbids a couple from cohabitating if their ketubbah is lost or destroyed. This particular contract, between a bride named Hanah bat Avraham Yosef Dvek ha-Kohen [Hanna Dwek] and a groom, Netanel Hai ben Yosef Tsemah Dvek ha-Kohen [Netanel Hai Dwek], was signed on 8 Elul, 5626 [August 19, 1866], in Calcutta, India. The pair of fish symbolizes fertility, and the tigers, strength.

 

 

Antiphoner

Illuminated manuscript, late 15th century

Music Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center

This single sheet of chant contains a series of antiphons—melodies intended to be performed in a call-and-response between sections of a choir. These particular antiphons would have been sung in the Catholic service on Christmas, the Feast of St. Stephen, the Sunday after Christmas, and the Epiphany.

The extraordinary gold leaf decoration of the “M” (that begins the word “Magi”) helps to approximate the date for this fragment. The illuminator depicted one of the three kings with dark skin, an illustrative practice that became common across Europe during the 16th century. The coat of arms along the bottom of the fragment may provide a clue to its location of origin: the scholar Anne Levitsky suggests that it may link the fragment to the Benedictine abbey of St. Aegidius in Braunschweig, Germany. One of several illuminated manuscripts held by the Library’s Music Division, this fragment is of special importance because of the extent and variety of its visual symbolism.

 

 

Yūsuf ibn Muhammad al-Qudāmī al-Shāmī (d. after 1675)

al-Bāriqah al-qudsīyah nāzimat la’āli al-shamsīyah (A commentary on ‘Ali ibn ‘Umar al-Kātibī al-Qazwīnī’s a-Risālah al-shamsīyah fī al-qawā‘id al-mantiqīyah)

Illuminated manuscript, copied 1090/1679

Manuscripts and Archives Division

The Library’s collection of Islamic manuscripts—written in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish, on vellum and on paper—span more than a millennium. The earliest texts in the collection were written in the 7th century and the most recent in the late 19th century. Bound in more than 200 volumes, this collection of manuscripts includes copies of the Qur’an and the Bible, as well as religious commentaries and treatises, prayers, and prayer books. Among Arabic literary writings are poems, proverbs, biographical accounts, and jurisprudence. Other learned works concern astronomy, astrology, magic, science, philosophy, logic, and metaphysics. This Ottoman manuscript, which a scribe copied in 1679, is Yūsuf ibn Muhammad al-Qudāmī’s commentary on ‘Ali ibn ‘Umar al-Kātibī al-Qazwīnī’s (d. 1276/77) work on logic, titled al-shamsīyah. The mise-en-page, two columns flanked by commentary written diagonally, is more commonly seen in texts of poetry.

 

 

Flavius Josephus (ca. 37/38–100 CE)

De bello Judaico

Paris: Antoine Vérard, 1492

Rare Book Division

Written by Flavius Josephus at the conclusion of the First Jewish-Roman War (66–73 CE), De bello Judaico offers a firsthand account of the Jewish revolt against the Roman occupation of Judea. Josephus, a soldier and historian, divided the work into seven sections, opening with a summary of Jewish history and concluding with a detailed recounting of the rebellion itself.

De bello Judaico first appeared in print in 1470 and was published in at least a dozen editions across Europe in the 15th century. This 1492 edition from the press of Antoine Vérard is printed on vellum, or calfskin, and contains particularly beautiful rubricated (hand-colored) initials and miniatures. A treasure in its own right, it highlights not only the Library’s splendid holdings of incunabula, or 15th-century printing, but also its Judaica collections, which are known internationally for their depth and breadth.

 

 

Giulio Clovio (ca. 1498–1578), illustrator

Lectionarium Evangeliorum

Illuminated manuscript, ca. 1540

Manuscripts and Archives Division

Giulio Clovio, a native of present-day Croatia and resident artist in the Farnese Palace in Rome, created this illuminated work for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520–1589), who later bequeathed it to the College of Cardinals for use in the Sistine Chapel. Clovio’s prodigious talent had drawn him to Italy, where Michelangelo befriended him. Clovio’s use of color in his miniatures would eventually prompt the contemporaneous art scholar Giorgio Vasari to call him “a Michelangelo in little.” Although books made the transmission of knowledge cheaper and more efficient than manuscripts, wealthy collectors like Cardinal Farnese continued to commission deluxe handwritten texts from artists they patronized; the practice would continue for a century after the print revolution. The prayer book is composed of lections, or scriptural readings, for each of the feast days of the Catholic Church’s calendar. After Napoleon’s victories in Italy, the book was stored in Spain, where the Englishman John Towneley purchased it at the turn of the 19th century.

 

 

Joseph ben Kalonymus ha-Nakden, of Xanten (d. after 1294), calligrapher and illuminator

Xanten Bible

Manuscript on vellum, 1294

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Spencer Collection

The colophon of this very early two-volume manuscript of the Hebrew Bible states: “I, Joseph of Xanten, son of Kalonymus from Neuss have written and illustrated these twenty-four books for my friend Moses, Son of Jacob.” The text is arranged in three columns to the page, with scattered historiated initials and charming pen-and-ink miniatures of flora and fauna. The minuscule writing that appears around the main text forms the Masorah (“Tradition”)—notes for the reader intended to ensure the accurate transmission of the text, its grammar, and pronunciation. The first Hebrew manuscript to enter the Library’s Spencer Collection, the Xanten Bible is an important addition to the Library’s rich collections of Judaica and complements the broad range of Christian devotional literature that the collection also holds.

 

 

Juan Latino (ca. 1518–1596)

Ad Catholicum

1573

Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Panegyric verses—or poems of praise—like this one were common from the 15th to 18th centuries, when writers, painters, and musicians had to seek aristocratic patrons to underwrite their artistic endeavors. Ad Catholicum’s appeal to King Philip II of Spain is unique because its author, the humanist scholar Juan Latino, was the son of enslaved African parents. Latino’s master, a Spanish count, educated him along with the count’s own son, the Duke of Sessa. In 1546, the University of Granada in Spain awarded Latino a baccalaureate, and he later married a noblewoman. Latino’s complete mastery of Latin is evident in the epigrams published in Ad Catholicum, of which only one other copy is known to have survived. Considered one of the rarest books in the world, Ad Catholicum is the earliest imprint by a black author in the Library’s collection.

 

 

David Bar Pesah, scribe and decorator

Mahzor

Illuminated manuscript, 14th century

Dorot Jewish Division

The mahzor is a prayer book that Jews use on the High Holy Days of Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur, and on the three pilgrimage festivals of Sukkot, Passover, and Shavuot. This superb vellum mahzor in two volumes appears to be an example of the large-format, illuminated mahzorim created in Ashkenaz (Germany and Central Europe) in the mid-13th to mid-14th centuries. The only explicit information that has survived is the name of the scribe: a pair of illuminated letters incorporate the signature, “I, David Bar Pesah the scribe.”

This panel illuminates the word kol—the initial word of the Kol Nidre declaration annulling the vows between penitent and God for the coming year. It is chanted three times at the beginning of the Yom Kippur evening service. With its hunting scene and grotesque images of diverse creatures, the volume's illustrations exhibit graphic elements common to much medieval book design. Bezalel Narkiss (author of Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts) notes that “animal headed figures became one of the main Jewish motifs in South-German Hebrew illumination of the 13th and 14th centuries.” It is possible that the hunting scene represents the persecution of the Jews. The New York manufacturer and bibliophile Louis Rabinowitz (1887–1957) purchased this treasure from the Jewish community of Padua, Italy, and donated it to the Library.

 

 

John de Tickhill (fl. early 14th century)

Tickhill Psalter

Illuminated manuscript, ca. 1310

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Spencer Collection

Named after John de Tickhill, the prior of the Augustinian Canon Priory of Worksop in Nottinghamshire, the Tickhill Psalter is among the most lavishly illuminated of all 14th-century English manuscripts. Tickhill was elected prior in 1303 but discharged from his position in 1314 as a result of fiscal misconduct, a wrongdoing to which the steep costs of the manuscript likely contributed. A work of gargantuan ambition, the manuscript features pictorial and textual decorations that include large historiated initials and bas-de-page scenes forming a continuous narrative, commencing with the Old Testament. This astonishingly opulent, full-page opening illustration of the Tree of Jesse notwithstanding, the Psalter has numerous unfinished sheets that offer an unrivaled opportunity to study the genesis of the medieval illuminated manuscript. Acquired by the Library in the early 1930s, the work is among the Spencer Collection’s most valuable holdings.

 

 

Pāli, Buddhist prayer boards

18th century

Manuscripts and Archives Division

Buddhist scriptures, or sutras, have been recorded on palm leaves and bamboo slivers for more than 2,000 years. The Pāli Canon is the standard collection of scriptures in the Theravada Buddhist tradition, preserved in the Pāli language. The lacquered palm leaves with large script inscribed in tamarind-seed ink were often used in the ordination of Buddhist monks. These texts detail principles that monks in Burma (now Myanmar) were required to follow, as well as sutras from the Buddha for use in instruction and meditation. The text itself is read horizontally from left to right.

 

 

Evangelie naprestol’noe

Moscow, 1791

Rare Book Division

This sumptuous binding, the work of French-influenced Muscovite craftsmen, intentionally draws attention to the Word of God and signals the importance of the Gospels. Displayed prominently on the altar during the Divine Liturgy, it would have been raised and held aloft just prior to that day’s gospel reading, to be seen by the entire congregation—hence its alternate name, the Elevation Gospels.

The binding of heavily gilded silver incorporates five enameled miniatures in surrounds of green semiprecious stones. The central medallion depicts Christ in Majesty—on a throne as a ruler—in the vestments of a Russian bishop. The four corner medallions encircle the four Evangelists (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), each with his respective symbols, or attributes. The clasps represent Saints Peter and Paul.

 

 

Mustafâ Darîr (fl. 14th century), translator and elaborator

Abū al-Ḥasan al-Bakrī al-Baṣrī (fl. 6th/13th century), author

Siyer-i Nebī (Life of the Prophet)

Illuminated manuscript, 13th century, copied 1594–1595

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Spencer Collection

This manuscript of the Life of the Prophet is a masterpiece of classical Ottoman illumination. The Spencer Collection’s volume is the only example of the surviving five volumes to retain its original, decorated black morocco binding. This volume is the third out of six; the first two are in the Topkapı Library in Istanbul and the remaining three are now lost. The New York Public Library's volume was copied and illustrated for Sultan Murād III (r. 1574–1595), who was an avid bibliophile and patron of numerous works, at the imperial court scriptorium in Istanbul in 1594–1595. Several of its 128 full-page miniature paintings have been identified as the work of the master known as Hasan, and together they comprise the earliest illustrated version of the text, which begins with the story of the Prophet’s night journey. Escorted by winged angels, Prophet Muḥammad can be seen mounted on his mare Burāq. His face has, according to tradition, been whitened out in this elaboration of a 9th-century account of the life of Muḥammad.

 

 

Moscow: Ivan Fedorov, ca. 1564

Rare Book Division

The New York Public Library is fortunate to hold both the first dated book printed in Russia—The Acts and Epistles of the Apostles, issued in 1564 by Ivan Fedorov during the reign of Ivan the Terrible—and the present work, its undated predecessor, also published by Fedorov. Because it bears no imprint date or attribution, this latter volume is often referred to as the “Anonymous” Gospels. Both works stand as cornerstones of the Library’s rich collections of Slavic-language holdings that document the history and culture of Imperial Russia.

 

 

A curious hieroglyphick Bible; or, Select passages in the Old and New Testaments, represented with emblematical figures, for the amusement of youth.…

Worcester, Massachusetts: Isaiah Thomas, 1788

Rare Book Division

A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible was published in 1788 by Isaiah Thomas, one of the premier printers in North America during the late colonial era and early years of the United States. The volume was intended to help juvenile readers learn both their ABCs and Scripture, and it functioned in part like a rebus—a puzzle in which words are represented by playful combinations of pictures and individual letters. It is notable, as well, for being the most heavily illustrated American book of its time, featuring nearly 500 woodcut illustrations.

While hieroglyphic Bibles were popular during the 18th century, with many thousands of copies printed in the Americas and England, only four examples of the present edition are known, making it one of the great rarities in all of children’s literature.

 

 

The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre

Cambridge, Massachusetts Bay Colony: Stephen Day, 1640

Rare Book Division

The 1640 edition of The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre—better known as the Bay Psalm Book—has the distinction of being the first book printed in British North America. Published in an edition of perhaps as many as 1,700 copies, only eleven are now known to survive, and only five of those are complete.

While the Bay Psalm Book is full of typographical errors and is far from being an aesthetically pleasing production, its importance cannot be overstated. The book symbolizes the early introduction of printing into the English colonies, which in turn reflects the importance that the Puritans placed on reading and education—and, somewhat later, on the concepts of freely available information, freedom of expression, and freedom of the press. All of these principles fed into the revolutionary impulse that gave rise 136 years later to the United States of America.

 

 

John Eliot (1604–1690), translator

Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God Naneeswe Nukkone Testament Kah Wonk Wusku Testament.…

Cambridge, Massachusetts Bay Colony: Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson, 1663

Rare Book Division

The first Bible printed in the Americas, as well as the first Bible translated into a Native American language, resulted from the ecclesiastical efforts of John Eliot, one of the earliest Puritan proselytizers for Christianity in the English colonies.

Soon after his arrival in Boston in 1631, Eliot became convinced of the need for a translation of the Bible into the local Algonquin language. Eliot began his project in 1649 and proceeded to work diligently for the next ten years, not only learning the indigenous language, but also inventing a new orthography with which to write it. He completed the New Testament in 1661, followed by the Old Testament two years later. Although the dialect that he translated is now extinct, Eliot’s Bible stands as a remarkable scholastic achievement.

 

 

Hunt-Lenox Globe

Copper, ca. 1508

Rare Book Division

The Hunt-Lenox Globe is recognized not only as one of the earliest surviving terrestrial globes, but also as one of the oldest known cartographic depictions of the Americas—specifically, the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola, along with the South American continent, which is assigned various regional names such as “Mundus Novus” and “Terra Brazil.”

The Globe is also one of only two medieval or Renaissance-era maps or globes known to bear the famous motto Hic Sunt Dracones, or “Here be dragons.” While today this phrase connotes images of the unknown, it may have originally referenced the Komodo dragons that inhabit portions of the Indonesian archipelago. Originally purchased in France during the 1850s by the noted American architect Richard Morris Hunt, the globe was subsequently gifted to the Library’s progenitor James Lenox.

 

 

Letter from Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) to Luis de Santángel (d. 1498)

February 15, 1493

Rare Book Division

Christopher Columbus detailed his initial voyage to the Americas in the form of several long letters, including this one to Luis de Santángel, Treasurer of Aragon, who funded much of the voyage. Here, Columbus provides a brief account of the lands and peoples that he encountered, while also enjoining the Spanish court to fund a subsequent return expedition.

On receiving the letter in Barcelona in late March 1493, Santángel arranged to have it printed not only as a public announcement of Columbus’s achievement, but also as a propaganda piece to further publicize and strengthen Spanish territorial claims. Though at least several hundred copies of the letter were issued, only the present example is known to survive, making it the rarest example of printed Americana in existence.

 

 

Gerardus Mercator (1512–1594)

Orbis Imago

Louvain, 1538

Rare Book Division

The Orbis Imago is the earliest dated map to apply the name “America” to both continents of the Western Hemisphere. Gerardus Mercator drew the map when he was only twenty-six years old, and it represents the Flemish cartographer’s first published world map. The Library is honored to hold one of only two known copies of this cartographic milestone.

Today, Mercator is best known for the projection that bears his name, a representation that solved the problem of depicting the spherically shaped world on a flat surface. For this earlier map, however, Mercator used a double-cordiform (heart-shaped) projection, which breaks the world sphere into halves, with the equator as the common base, thus allowing for the illustration of both polar regions.

 

 

François Marie Arouet Voltaire (1694–1778)

Initial printing of Candide, ou, L’optimisme / traduit de l’allemand de Mr. le docteur Ralph

Geneva, 1759

Rare Book Division

Voltaire’s satirical novel, first published anonymously, stands as one of the great literary achievements of the 18th century. The innocent hero’s misadventures reveal human cruelty and greed, and he concludes that contentment comes only from tending one’s own garden.

An instant success despite much controversy over its political and religious views, Candide appeared in seventeen editions within a year of its first publication. Voltaire, one of the great minds of the Enlightenment, promoted religious tolerance and legal equality at a time when church and king were powerful and corrupt. Late in life, he was responsible for freeing 12,000 serfs near his Swiss estate.

The New York Public Library is one of only two institutions in the world that hold all of these first-year printings. (The other is the Bodleian Library of Oxford University.) The volumes are held as part of the Rare Book Division’s Martin J. Gross Collection, which contains the finest collection of contemporary editions of Voltaire’s works to be found in any American institution.

 

 

Ptolemy (ca. 100–ca. 170)

Cosmographia

Ulm: Lienhart Holle, 1482

Rare Book Division

Compiled during the 2nd century CE by astronomer and geographer Claudius Ptolemy, Cosmographia gained popularity during the Renaissance following its translation into Latin from Greek and Arabic sources. Indeed, the volume—which comprises an atlas, gazetteer, and scholarly treatise—proved highly influential, promoting mathematics as the basis for accurate mapmaking as well as increasing Europeans’ overall geographic understanding.

The present edition of Cosmographia, issued in 1482 by Lienhart Holle of Ulm, a city in what is now Germany, is notable not only for its place in printing history—it was the first cartographic work to be published north of the Alps—but also for its beauty and sumptuousness: the intense blue coloration adorning many of the book’s full-page maps derives from the use of ultramarine pigment, made from expensive lapis lazuli stone.

 

 

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616)

First edition of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha

Madrid: Por Iuan de la Cuesta, vendese en casa de Francisco de Robles, librero del Rey no señor, 1605

Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature

Don Quixote, the first part of which was published in 1605, is often called the first modern novel. Some say it is the finest ever written, and it is certainly the most influential work of literature in the Spanish language. Before 1605, Cervantes published a few poems and a pastoral novel (La Galatea, 1585), and saw some of his plays produced in Madrid, but much of his life leading up to the publication of Don Quixote was precarious. He spent time in the military, was enslaved for five years in Algiers, worked as a tax collector in Andalusia, and was interned in a Spanish prison. Little is known about his personal life, including when he had time to write his masterpiece.

 

 

Thomas More (1478–1535)

First edition of Libellus vere aureus nec minus salutaris quam festivus de optimo reip. statu, deq; nova insula Utopia

Louvain: Arte Theodorici Martini, 1516

Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature

Dreams of a just and peaceful community date to antiquity, but the most celebrated vision of a perfect community—a utopia—was imagined by Sir Thomas More during the Renaissance. Without private property, Utopians work no more than six hours a day—though their economy is possible only through the enslavement of criminals, foreigners, and adulterers. Hans Holbein the Younger’s brother, Ambrosius, designed the woodcut map on the verso of the title page seen here, which faces a table of the twenty-two-letter Utopian alphabet. Scholars remain divided about whether More intended to praise or satirize the socialist society he invented, as the name “utopia” derives from two identically pronounced Greek words: eu-topos (meaning “good place”) and ou-topos (meaning “no place” or “nowhere”).

 

 

Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues (ca. 1533–ca. 1588)

Laudonnierus et rex athore ante columnam a praefecto prima navigatione locatam quamque venerantur floridenses

Gouache and metallic pigments on vellum with traces of black chalk outlines, 1564–1565

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Print Collection

This rare gouache on vellum drawing is attributed to the esteemed botanical artist Jacques Le Moyne. He was appointed by King Charles IX of France to accompany the second French expedition of Jean Ribault and René de Laudonnière to northern Florida in 1564–1565 in order to establish a Huguenot colony. Le Moyne’s task was to document the local population and exotic habitation. Here, Le Moyne depicts Athore, the son of the Timucuan king Saturiwa, showing Laudonnière the monument Ribault had erected after the first French expedition to Florida two years earlier. A veritable cornucopia of foods placed before the column suggests the origin of the tragic French misconception that the Timucua grew enough supplies to enable the French to survive on trade alone, rather than needing to plant their own crops.

This rare work may be the only surviving drawing Le Moyne produced while accompanying Laudonnière’s voyage. Le Moyne later redrew from memory the majority of his impressions from Florida. After his death, they were published in Theodor de Bry’s 1591 publication Brevis narratio eorum quae in Florida Americai provincia Gallis acciderunt, which became the most widely read and influential history of the region and depiction of its native peoples.

 

 

Hernán Cortés (1485–1547)

Praeclara Ferdinadi Cortesii de Nova Maris Oceani Hyspania Narratio

Nuremberg: Fredericum Peypus Arthemesimus, 1524

Rare Book Division

Hernán Cortés, a Spanish military officer, led an expedition to conquer and colonize the territories now known as Mexico. Ruthlessly ambitious, he ultimately forced the Aztec emperor Montezuma to acknowledge himself and his subjects as the vassals of Emperor Charles V of Spain. This elaborate woodcut of Tenochtitlán—present-day Mexico City—that appeared with the Latin printing of Cortés’s second letter to Charles V is the first European depiction of a city in the Americas.

Cortés was awed by the architectural beauty of what he called “this noble city of Temixtitan.” In his letter, he perhaps unexpectedly describes the indigenous peoples’ conduct as “marked by as great an attention to the proprieties of life as in Spain.” Founded two centuries before Cortés’s arrival and boasting intricate urban planning, Tenochtitlán was successfully defended by the Aztecs on the Spaniards’ first attempt to take the city.

 

 

Juan de Zumárraga (1468–1548)

Doctrina breve muy provechosa de las cosas que pertenecen a la fe Católica y a nuestra Cristiandad en estilo llano para común inteligencia (Short Compendium of Catholic Doctrine in both Nahuatl and Spanish)

Mexico City: Juan Pablos, 1543

Rare Book Division

Juan de Zumárraga, the first bishop of New Spain, established a printing press in Mexico City for the purpose of propagating Christianity. The Doctrina breve—a work outlining the essential tenets of the Catholic faith—was printed at Zumárraga’s behest and expense by Juan Pablos, the viceroyalty’s initial printer.

Pablos traveled from Spain to Mexico at the bishop’s insistence in order to set up a branch office of the famous printing house of Juan Cromberger, arriving in the autumn of 1539. Soon afterward, his press issued a work entitled Breve y mas compendiosa doctrina Christiana en lengua Mexicana y Castellana, of which no copy has been located. Several other works followed, none of which survives in more than fragmentary copies. Published in 1543, the Doctrina breve, of which nine copies are recorded, is the earliest extant complete book printed in the Americas.

 

 

La conquista del Perú (The Conquest of Peru)

Seville: Bartolome Perez, 1534

Rare Book Division

La conquista del Perú, printed in Spain in 1534, provides the earliest published account of European contact with, and subjugation of, the Inca Empire. The work was most likely written by Cristóbal de Mena, who was a captain in the fleet of the conquistador Francisco Pizarro.

In his brief narrative, the author recounts the capture and eventual execution of Atahualpa, the last ruler of the Incan Empire, whose fateful encounter with Pizarro’s forces took place on November 16, 1532. The title page’s woodcut illustration vividly depicts this pivotal event. An attending friar has offered a Catholic breviary to Atahualpa, who hurls the religious book to the ground in either confusion or defiance.

 

 

Mexican Declaration of Independence: La Regencia Del Imperio Se Ha Servido Dirigirme El Decreto Que Sigue … Acta De Independencia Del Imperio

October 10, 1821

Rare Book Division

The Mexican Declaration of Independence was drafted and signed on September 28, 1821, formally ending 300 years of Spanish colonial rule. This printing, undertaken less than two weeks after its signing, marks the first official public appearance of the document. The Mexican Declaration of Independence often mirrors its American counterpart in themes and language, citing “unalienable” rights that are to be restored to the nation’s citizens.

The present copy of the initial publication, dated October 10, 1821, is signed by José Manuel de Herrera, Secretary of Relations, or Foreign Minister, of the newly instituted government. One of only a handful of known surviving copies, it was added to the Rare Book Division in 2011, augmenting the Library’s already rich holdings of Latin American imprints—one of the largest collections of its kind in any American institution.

 

 

Nican Mopohua

ca. 1550–1600

Manuscripts and Archives Division

The Nican Mopohua (“Here It Is Told”) relates the earliest-recorded apparition in the Americas of the Virgin Mary. In this manuscript account, the Virgin appeared in December 1531 to Juan Diego, a Native American man, asking that he build a shrine in her honor on Tepeyac, a hill located on the outskirts of present-day Mexico City. The incident is recorded in Nahuatl, the imperial language of the Mexicas (later called Aztecs), with iron gall ink on European paper with other materials used in sacred rites. The document thus incorporated Aztec tradition into Catholic ritual, and it became an effective instrument for converting indigenous populations.

The document’s authorship continues to inspire debate—it is widely, though not definitively, credited to the Colonial Mexican scholar Antonio Valeriano (1521–1605)—but the Nican Mopohua’s cultural and theological significance is without question. The work is considered a masterpiece of Nahuatl literature of the Spanish Colonial period, and the shrine first built in the 16th century, today much enlarged and known as the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, remains a cherished symbol of Mexico.

 

 

James Latimer Allen (1907–1977)

Brown Madonna (Madonna and Child)

Gelatin silver print, 1930s

Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

One of the three major photographers associated with the Harlem Renaissance (James Van Der Zee and Carl Van Vechten were the other two), James L. Allen captured many of the literary and artistic luminaries of the movement and conveyed the New Negro philosophy through his subjects and photographic techniques. Brown Madonna, reproduced on the cover of the December 1941 issue of Opportunity magazine, is far more than a religious image used to commemorate the Advent season. Allen pays homage to the black woman, defying the stereotype of the mammy so prevalent in Western iconography and elevating her image. Moreover, this depiction of the nurturing maternal figure harks back centuries to African art. Allen is one of the earliest African-American photographers to frame his work in the context of classical art, and his photographs housed in the Schomburg Center were among the first photographic acquisitions of the then-fledgling collection.

 

 

Juddan Dancing Girl, from Beauties of Lucknow, Calcutta

1874

Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center

This photograph belongs to a series of twenty-one images of dancers taken at the Oudh Court of Lucknow. These, in turn, are part of a larger collection of twenty-four images that also includes portraits of actresses and musicians. The British annexation of Oudh in 1856 and the subsequent rebellion completely transformed the life of patronage that artists had typically enjoyed under the Mughal Empire (1526–1857). The region of Lucknow is steeped in rich dance history, particularly the evolution of the Indian classical dance style of kathak. One of the three gharanas, or forms, of kathak is named for Lucknow and is renowned for its expressiveness of the face and graceful mudras (the detailed hand movements that are the forte of Indian dancers). Lucknow was also a fertile site for the evolution of music that accompanied dance. A unique tabla (drum) technique developed in the early 19th century has become inextricably linked with kathak performance.

 

 

Anonymous artist of the Pahari school

Bhagavata Purana (Krishnagita)

18th century

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Spencer Collection

This is a detail of one of twenty-two miniature paintings of scenes from the life of Lord Krishna (Krishnagita), one of the most popular and widely revered Indian divinities. These miniatures were created in the 1700s by an anonymous artist of the Pahari (or Rajput) school, a style of painting that developed and flourished in India’s Punjab Hill states between the late 17th and 19th centuries. (Pahari means “mountain” in Hindi.)

Just as European Renaissance masters turned to the Bible for inspiration, so Indian painters found inspiration in their Sanskrit epics. Pahari miniaturists produced some of the finest images of legendary or religious narratives, and their delicate and lyrical compositions represent an accurate record of the social and cultural life of their time. The Bhagavata Purana was the first sacred Hindu text to be translated into a European language; a French translation by Maridas Poullé, an interpreter who worked for the French East India Company in Pondicherry, was the first to introduce many Europeans to Hinduism and 18th-century Hindu culture during Europe’s colonial era.

 

 

Dante Alighieri (ca. 1265–1321)

First illustrated edition of La Divina Commedia

Florence: Niccolò di Lorenzo, 1481

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Spencer Collection

The first illustrated edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy was not a resounding success. Using engravings rather than woodcuts, Nicolaus Lorenz, a German printer from Breslau, had planned to illustrate all one hundred of Dante’s cantos. He managed only nineteen. Successful with printing the first two, he then pasted in the remaining seventeen; printing them onto the volume’s sheets in the spaces the compositor provided had proved overwhelming. Attributed to the Florentine engraver Baccio Baldini after drawings by Botticelli, the illustrations were designed to offer a figural commentary of each of the cantos in the poem. Only a very few copies, this being one, include all nineteen engravings. One of the last early modern attempts in Italy to use copper engravings as illustrations, it belongs to a trove of incunabula (books printed before ca. 1500) in the Library’s Spencer Collection that offers rich avenues for research on the history of the book.

 

 

“Fujitsubo receives Prince Genji,” from Genji monogatari: Sakaki no maki (back cover)

17th century

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Spencer Collection

Completed around 1019 by Murasaki Shikibu, a lady of the Imperial Court, Genji Monogatari, or The Tale of Genji, follows the life of Prince Genji, the son of an ancient Japanese emperor known to readers as Emperor Kiritsubo. A classic in its time and beyond, the work is sometimes described as the world’s first novel. This early 17th-century example demonstrates the sustained demand for deluxe manuscript editions of the work at a time when cheaper volumes executed with movable type and woodcut illustrations were just beginning to enter the market. The Library’s Spencer and Print Collections have a large and broad range of examples of The Tale of Genji, spanning from as early as the mid-16th century to the early 20th century, reflecting the enduring power of the story.

 

 

Francesco Colonna (ca. 1453–1517)

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1499

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Spencer Collection

The only illustrated book produced by the famed Aldine Press in Venice, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (meaning, roughly, “Poliphilus’s Strife of Love in a Dream”) has been described as one of the most beautiful books ever made. The novel’s enigmatic narrative follows Poliphilus’s search for his beloved, Polia, which brings the protagonist into contact with landscapes filled with perplexing ruins, fragments of epigraphy, and mysterious elements inspired by the art of classical antiquity. Aldus Manutius’s Aldine Press specialized in printing Greek and Roman classics in economical pocket-book formats. Illustrated with 168 woodcuts, the Hypnerotomachia was both considerably larger and more expensive than Manutius’s usual output. More lavish still is the volume shown here. One of only three such deluxe impressions, the Spencer Collection’s copy is printed on the finest Italian vellum and can be studied in conjunction with a second paper-printed copy held in the Library’s Rare Book Division.

 

 

Andō Hiroshige (1797–1858)

Mishima: Morning Mist from The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō

Woodcut, 1832

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Print Collection

The Japanese artist Andō Hiroshige achieved widespread recognition in the West as soon as artists and collectors in the 19th century began discovering Japan’s rich and varied woodcut tradition (also referred to as Ukiyo-e prints). One of the printmaker’s most impressive and important series, The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō, documents the trip the artist undertook from Edo to Kyoto in 1832. Hiroshige made numerous sketches on his journey as part of an official delegation transporting horses to the Imperial Court. Stirred by the beauty of the landscapes, changing weather patterns, and the physical challenges of travel, Hiroshige captured qualities that earned him the appellation “artist of rain and snow.” The Library purchased a rare first-edition impression of Tōkaidō Road in 1955 from the well-known scholar and collector Ernest Fenollosa. It has an important place among the Print Collection’s Ukiyo-e prints and augments the Spencer Collection’s Ehon volumes (Japanese illustrated books).

 

 

Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806)

Gifts of the Ebb Tide

Woodblock printed book with mica and gold leaf on paper, ca. 1789

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Spencer Collection

Gifts of the Ebb Tide pairs poems about seashells with exquisite images of them. The book memorializes a visit to the seaside in 1789, telling us that the renowned poet Akera Kankō (1740–1800) and six companions journeyed across Japan’s Shinagawa Bay to spend time gathering seaweed and seashells. After some heavy drinking, he and the other poets began seeking different sorts of shells, an activity that inspired each to compose a poem. Kankō’s friend Tsutaya Jūzaburō offered to publish the book after the group’s return to Edo, while the young Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro agreed to create the accompanying Ukiyo-e woodcut illustrations. Utamaro rendered the shells mentioned in each poem in full color, embellishing them with sprinkled mica, gold paint, and pipette-blown pigment, and further enhancing their lifelike quality with embossing that conveys their dimpled and coiled exteriors. This is one of two copies of this dazzling volume in the Library’s Spencer Collection.

 

 

Anonymous, after Zhang Zeduan (fl. 12th century)

Along the River During the Qingming Festival scroll

Pigment on silk, 17th century

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Spencer Collection

This 17th-century copy of the celebrated 12th-century Qingming scroll (Palace Museum, Beijing) depicts the celebrations associated with the so-called tomb sweeping, or Qingming, festival. The event has been observed in China for more than 2,500 years and is a cornerstone of traditional Chinese ancestor worship. Rather than focusing on the holiday’s prayers and rituals, however, the scroll is famous for its vivid portrayal of the festivities associated with the day, as well as for its lively depiction of scenes of everyday 12th-century life. Attributed to the artist Zhang Zeduan, the original scroll is one of the most famous works of Chinese art and consequently much imitated; the National Palace Museum in Taipei alone has eight versions. The Library’s copy forms part of the Spencer Collection’s rich and varied holdings of Asian scrolls, which offer numerous opportunities for comparative study.

 

 

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)

Fortuna

Engraving, 1501–1502

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Print Collection

Among Albrecht Dürer’s most ambitious large-format engravings, Fortuna reflects knowledge that the artist put into practice after his first visit to Italy in 1494: the work’s subject derives from a poem by the Italian humanist poet Angelo Poliziano, and the ideal figural proportions of the nude female protagonist are based on those recommended by the classical architect Vitruvius. Inspired by the famous map of Venice that Jacopo de Barbari had created two years earlier, the winged figure surmounting a globe hovers over a bird’s-eye view of an Alpine village, a symbol of the inconstancy of fortune. Centuries before satellite photography or hot-air balloon rides, Dürer rendered the hill town from a vantage point that involved a flight of the imagination. Fortuna is one of more than 400 original prints and illustrated books by the German artist in the Wallach Division’s Print and Spencer Collections, and additional works by Dürer can be found in the Rare Book Division.

 

 

Gaius Julius Hyginus (fl. 1st century CE)

De astronomia

Illuminated manuscript, 1475–1480

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Spencer Collection

The New York Public Library possesses one of the largest and finest collections of medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts in North America. This exquisite manuscript is a Latin astrological poem by the 1st-century CE astronomer Hyginus. It is decorated with thirty-eight illustrations of the constellations in their traditional anthropomorphic or zoomorphic forms by at least two, and perhaps three, different artists. One of these artists is Gabriele Vendramin, a student of the famed Renaissance artist Mantegna. Three of the other illuminations are attributed to another artist known as “the Douce Master” (named after the collection of illuminated manuscripts assembled by the antiquary and collector Francis Douce). The celestial miniatures are placed between sections of text in an elegant humanist script that has been recognized as the hand of Francesco Buzzaccarini.

Hyginus, believing in occult correspondences between earthly and heavenly bodies, based his poem largely on the Hellenistic writer Aratus. He, in turn, relied for his knowledge on the 4th-century BCE Greek mathematician Eudoxios of Cnidos. This 15th-century manuscript may have been produced in Padua, at that time one of the main centers in Europe for the study of astrology.

 

 

Hartmann Schedel (1440–1514)

Liber chronicarum, also known as the Nuremberg Chronicle

Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1493

Rare Book Division

The Liber chronicarum—also known as the Nuremberg Chronicle, after its place of printing—is a universal history of the Christian world from its creation to the 1490s. The work was published in 1493 by Anton Koberger, the most successful German printer of the era, and holds the distinction of being the most heavily illustrated book of the 15th century: its 600 pages are graced with more than 1,800 woodcuts depicting various historical events and personages, along with numerous topographical views. Interestingly, however, these lavish illustrations were rendered with only around 650 wooden blocks, resulting in certain images appearing more than once for differing purposes.

Today, histories such as the Liber chronicarum are valued by researchers investigating early modern Europe. The New York Public Library is honored to hold in trust eight copies of this important work.

 

 

Apocalypsis Sancti Johannis

ca. 1470

Rare Book Division

This example of a block book, or xylographica, combines striking images with an abbreviated text from the Book of Revelation, or Apocalypse. Volumes like this were most likely intended for use by illiterate individuals under the guidance of an educated person who could read the condensed text to explain the pictures.

Woodcut printing persisted alongside the use of a mechanical printing press in the mid-15th century. The printer would lay a leaf of paper over an inked, relief-cut block, and rub the back of the sheet to transfer the ink. The page’s reverse is often blank, because the now-indented paper does not permit a satisfactory double-sided impression. Though undoubtedly produced in some numbers, block books are today of the utmost rarity, with some surviving only in fragmentary copies.

 

 

Shunkichi Kikuchi (1916–1990)

Photographs taken in Hiroshima for the Special Committee for the Investigation of A-bomb Damage

Gelatin silver prints mounted to album pages, October 1–22, 1945

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection

In the weeks following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and Nagasaki three days later, the Japanese Ministry of Education formed a special committee of doctors and scientists to survey the aftermath of the attacks. The committee commissioned the creation of a documentary film, for which it hired photographers Shunkichi Kikuchi and Shigeo Hayashi to shoot stills. Kikuchi accompanied the medical team to triage centers in Hiroshima during the first three weeks of October 1945 and produced more than 700 negatives—among them, the earliest comprehensive visual documentation of the hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) and the devastated cityscape. The pages of this period binder contain contact prints as well as contemporaneous notes—part of an archive related to the production of the film—that offer a graphic account of countless grim scenes that were censored during the Allied occupation of Japan.

 

 

 

Francisco Goya (1746–1828)

Espresivo doble fuerza (Expressive of double force)

Transfer lithograph, 1819

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Print Collection

While Aloys Senefelder’s invention of lithography in Munich between 1796 and 1799 soon found application in cities throughout Europe, it was only in 1819, when the printmaker José Maria Cardano founded Madrid’s first lithographic workshop, that the technology arrived in Spain. At age seventy-three, Francisco Goya was no longer a youngster, but he was game to try his hand at the new medium, resulting in the creation of ten rare trial proofs. Printed on the verso of one of Cardano’s discarded prints, the Library’s lithograph is evidence of the spirit of experimentation in which Goya entered the project. Titled Espresivo doble fuerza, the lithograph shows a couple seated on the ground, apparently fighting or pushing each other. The work belonged to Samuel Putnam Avery’s important collection of close to 18,000 prints, which he bequeathed to the Library in 1900, and which formed the impetus for the Library to start its print collection.

 

 

William Blake (1757–1827)

Milton: a Poem in 2 Books

London, ca. 1804–1811

Rare Book Division

The visionary English poet and artist William Blake explored the relationship between text and image in illustrated works such as Milton: a Poem in 2 Books. The volume’s exquisite illustrations and vibrant coloring, which seem to flow from and wrap around the text itself, become yet another element to be read. The overall effect is at once dramatic and sublime, highlighting intense religious themes of the verse while guiding readers’ eyes across the page.

Blake printed Milton, along with his other books, using an uncommon relief-etching process. He also hand-colored the volumes, so each of the four known copies of Milton is distinct. Today, in addition to being esteemed for their rarity and beauty, Blake’s creations are regarded as important milestones in the history of printing, being forebears of modern-day private press and artists’ book productions.

 

 

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851)

Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

London: Richard Bentley, 1836

The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle

Frankenstein was anonymously published in 1818 when its author was twenty years old, and the story of a chemistry student who creates a living, speaking creature from corpses has captivated readers ever since. Mary Shelley’s introduction to the revised 1831 edition—the first to be illustrated—describes the tale’s origins in a contest held at Lord Byron’s villa on Lake Geneva (“‘We will each write a ghost story,’ said Lord Byron.”) Here we see the creature awakening while his terrified creator flees. This monster is nothing like Boris Karloff’s famous rendition; rather, he resembles Thomas Potter Cooke’s portrayal. The creator of the stage role in 1823, Cooke danced across the stage in a toga, his skin painted blue. The theatrical version of Frankenstein was a hit, ensuring the continued success of the novel.

 

 

Letter from John Milton (1608–1674) to Carlo Dati (1619–1675)

April 20, 1647

Manuscripts and Archives Division

John Milton, the English poet who composed sonnets and wrote epic poetry—including Paradise Lost—also penned tracts concerning political and social issues. Although praised as one of the preeminent writers in the English language, Milton also wrote in Latin, Greek, and Italian. This letter to Carlo Roberto Dati bears testament to a friendship that transcended linguistic and national borders in the early modern period. Milton met Dati, a Florentine nobleman nearly ten years his junior, during his trip to Florence, Italy, in 1638. Milton wrote to Dati expressing his great sadness at leaving Florence and reflecting on the friendships he had established in the city. A line from Milton greets visitors to the Main Reading Room of The New York Public Library: “A good Book is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life.”

 

 

Hesiod (fl. ca. 700 BCE)

“The Golden Age,” from Works and Days

ca. 1300

Manuscripts and Archives Division

Faith in progress, like trust in technological advance, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Much older is the myth of a Golden Age, present in nearly every culture. Unlike the peoples of the Silver, Bronze, and Iron Ages, the lucky inhabitants of this earlier, imaginary era lived without toil or distress, did not suffer the ravages of time, and submitted to death in the form of sleep. Hesiod records one of the earliest poetic treatments of the Golden Age in his Works and Days, where, ironically, hope exists only at the bottom of the legendary Pandora’s jar, or box. This spread of a Renaissance manuscript copy of the Greek original discloses how Golden Agers “had all good things; the grain-giving field bore crops of its own accord, much and unstinting, and they themselves, willing, mild-mannered, shared out the fruits of their labors together with many good things, wealthy in sheep, dear to the blessed gods.”

 

 

Charles Darwin (1809–1882)

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection

London: W. Clowes and Sons for John Murray, 1859

Rare Book Division

Charles Darwin’s seminal work is widely considered the most influential scientific treatise of the 19th century. Darwin presents the theory that populations evolve over time through natural selection—the process whereby organisms that are better adapted to their environment tend to survive and therefore produce more offspring, which then often inherit those advantageous characteristics. It also put forward the theory of common descent, which proposed that biological diversity was the result of a branching pattern of evolution from a common ancestor.

Darwin’s theory has long excited controversy and, at times, outright hostility, but it has nevertheless prevailed within the scientific establishment and is foundational to the field of evolutionary biology. Thinkers and writers in other fields have co-opted many of Darwin's ideas, using them to justify arguments for or against colonialism, free-market economics, and creationism, among other practices and ideas.

 

 

George Stubbs (1724–1806)

Of a Comparative Anatomical Exposition of the Structure of the Human Body, with that of a Tiger and Common Fowl

London: Printed for the author, by W. and C. Spilsbury, Snowhill; and sold by J. White, Fleet-Street, and Longman and Rees, Paternoster-Row, 1803–1806

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Spencer Collection

Well known for his paintings of horses, George Stubbs is not generally remembered as one of England’s great natural scientists. This is a work of uncommon ambition and great rarity, begun when the artist was already seventy-one years of age and continued for the last decade of his life. Pursuing the idea that the anatomies of creatures could be compared with one another, the artist relates the external form and muscular structure of the human body, the tiger, and the common fowl to one another. The idea may seem peculiar now, but it is indebted to other 19th-century studies regarding the shared structure of all living creatures. The prints constitute extraordinarily fine and vivid examples of stipple engraving, a method that uses dots of various density to model form without line. The Library acquired the two volumes in 2016, purchased from the Estate of the Seventh Earl of Clarendon, whose family had owned the work continuously since acquiring it directly from Stubbs.

 

 

Eadweard James Muybridge (1830–1904)

Racking (pacing); saddle; brown horse, Pronto from the series Animal Locomotion. An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements

Collotype, 1884–1887

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection

Eadweard Muybridge first started photographing horses in 1872, when Leland Stanford, the railroad magnate and founder of Stanford University, encouraged him to prove whether all four hooves leave the ground at once during a gallop. (They do.) The challenge led Muybridge to invent a system by which the horse’s movement tripped wires that then released the camera’s shutters. He succeeded in his experiments by 1878, leading him to publish Animal Locomotion with the backing of the University of Pennsylvania. This magnum opus included 781 collotypes—photomechanical prints—that appear to sequentially show how horses and other animals, including humans, move. While some of the plates are more scientific and have gridlines in the background, others—such as his photograph of a woman in semitransparent drapery carrying a teacup up the stairs—are decidedly more artistic. Because of the nudes included in the series, the Library originally cataloged the whole set with other materials having to do with sex.

 

 

Isaac Newton (1642–1727)

Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica

London: Joseph Streater for the Royal Society, 1687

Rare Book Division

First published in 1687, Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophae naturalis principia mathematica set out the principles of the laws of universal gravitation and motion. The Principia formed the dominant scientific viewpoint until the 20th century, when Einstein’s theory of relativity superseded it. In this work, Newton uses his mathematical description of gravity to explain laws of planetary motion as well as to account for tides, the trajectories of comets, the precession of the equinoxes, and other natural phenomena.

While he has long been esteemed as one of history’s greatest scientific minds, Newton himself was more reserved when assessing his achievements. Writing to his colleague and rival Robert Hooke in 1676, he once remarked, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

 

 

Euclid (fl. ca. 300 BCE)

Elementa Geometriae

Venice: Erhard Ratdolt, 1482

Rare Book Division

Euclid’s Elementa Geometriae, first published in Venice in 1482, is the oldest mathematical work still in general use and is historically considered to be the most-read book besides the Bible. It is known to have influenced Galileo Galilei, Abraham Lincoln, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Albert Einstein, and countless others. The text of the initial edition, pictured here, derives from Abelard of Bath’s 12th-century translation of an Arabic-language version of the original Greek text, produced around 300 BCE.

In his preface to the book, the printer Erhard Ratdolt attributes the prevailing dearth of mathematical works to the difficulties involved in illustrating geometrical figures—but he notes with marketing savvy that he himself has discovered a method for printing them. Although he does not share the secret of his success, it involved the use of type-metal rules that, having been bent into the desired shape, could be printed alongside the letterpress text and woodcut figures.

 

 

Peter Apian (1495–1552)

Michael Ostendorfer (ca. 1490–1549), artist

Astronomicum caesareum

Ingolstadt, 1540

Rare Book Division

This work is considered to be one of the most beautiful and spectacular contributions to the art of 16th-century book making. Astronomicum caesareum was published by Petrus Apianus (Peter Apian), one of the foremost mathematicians, astronomers, and cartographers of the 16th century. The book’s title translates to “Imperial Astronomy” and is a direct reference to its two dedicatees, Emperor Charles V and King Ferdinand I of Spain.

This particularly vibrant, pristine copy of Astronomicum caesareum is perhaps Apian’s most notable published work. The book features more than twenty elaborately decorated rotating discs, called volvelles, which, when manipulated, represent the functions of the astrolabe and other astronomical instruments used to calculate the positions of stars and planets.As one might imagine, over time and with use, these moving paper elements do not often survive intact.

 

 

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543)

De revolutionibus orbium coelestium

Nuremberg: Johannes Petreius, 1543

Rare Book Division

Perhaps the most famous—and disruptive—illustration in all of Western science, this image in the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium depicts the sun at the center of our solar system, a revolutionary proposition that countered centuries of geocentric-based theories and principles. Indeed, by placing the sun at the center, Copernicus could explain observed phenomena in a simpler and more elegant manner, accounting for the movement of heavenly bodies.

Copernicus suffered a stroke in late 1542 and died just as his book was being published, and thus he did not witness the furor his then-radical argument caused. While his heliocentric theory would be debated for years to come, and De revolutionibus itself would be subject to censorship by religious authorities, Copernicus’s ideas did, in time, achieve widespread acceptance. His work accelerated the Scientific Revolution and forms the basis for modern astronomy.

 

 

Andreas Cellarius (ca. 1596–1665)

Harmonia Macrocosmica

Amsterdam: Johannes Janssonius, 1661

Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division

This most celebrated of early celestial atlases is also the only one published in the Netherlands during the golden age of Dutch cartography. Harmonia Macrocosmica completes the multivolume history of all creation first conceived by Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It consists of twenty-nine charts depicting the competing worldviews of Claudius Ptolemy, Martianus Capella, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe. Engraved plates in the Baroque style illustrate more than 400 pages of text and depict the motions of the sun, moon, and planets, as well as delineations of classical and biblical constellations. In the preface, Cellarius mentions his intention to create a second volume to address the new astronomical observations made available by the invention of the telescope. Unfortunately, this was never realized, due to his death in 1665.

 

 

Johannes Kepler (1571–1630)

Harmonices mundi (Harmony of the Worlds)

Lincii, Austriæ: sumptibus Godofredi Tampachii excudebat Ioannes Plancvs, 1619

Music Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center

The “music of the spheres” was a literary conceit given new meaning by Johannes Kepler, the first astronomer to correctly identify the elliptical orbits of planets around the sun. His 1619 edition of Harmonices mundi argued that the geometric ratios found in harmonious relationships between musical pitches were based on the same ratios exemplified by the planets as they orbited the sun. The significance of Kepler’s approach—both for astronomy and for music theory—was in its emphasis on the mathematical relationships between physical objects, as opposed to the mathematical properties of objects in and of themselves. “The movements of the heavens,” Kepler wrote, “are nothing except a certain everlasting polyphony.” Or, as the poet John Keats wrote two centuries later, “Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter.”

 

 

Édouard Manet (1832–1883)

Le Ballon (The Balloon)

Lithograph, 1862

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Print Collection

Édouard Manet’s Le Ballon is both rare and profoundly ahead of its time. The publisher Alfred Cadart invited Manet to create a lithograph for a portfolio he hoped would launch a lithography revival. The artist chose as his subject the Fête de L’Empereur, a summer festival held each year to commemorate Napoleon I’s birthday, on August 15. Large crowds of Parisians gathered to watch balloon rides and engage in other popular entertainments on the Esplanade des Invalides. Manet rendered the scene with thick, forceful strokes of the lithographic crayon, creating a poetic interpretation that verges at times on abstraction. Too radical for its time, the work was not considered worthy of reproduction, and Cadart jettisoned his project. This is one of only five impressions of the print. Thanks to a gift from Samuel Putnam Avery, the Library’s Print Department has one of the most important collections of Manet prints in the world.

 

 

Étienne Léopold Trouvelot (1827–1895)

Saturn from the series The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings

New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1881–1882

Rare Book Division

In 1872, Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, a French-American artist and amateur astronomer, joined the staff of the Harvard College Observatory. There—and, later, at the United States Naval Observatory and the Paris Observatory—he produced thousands of sketches of astronomical phenomena, some of which he exhibited at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia to great acclaim.

Encouraged by the public’s positive response to his artwork, Trouvelot resolved to publish a selection of his best images. In 1882, Charles Scribner's Sons of New York issued The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings, a suite of fifteen chromolithographic prints depicting various celestial wonders and comprising one of the most impressive American color plate books. While this work was produced in an edition of perhaps 300 copies, most were broken up over the years. The Library’s Rare Book Division preserves one of four known complete sets of Trouvelot’s Drawings, which still hauntingly evoke the mystery and beauty of the cosmos.

 

 

Johannes von Wonnecke Caub (1430–1503/04)

Gart der Gesundheit

Ulm: Konrad Dinckmut, 1487

Rare Book Division

Johannes von Wonnecke Caub’s Gart der Gesundheit was one of the most important botanical works of the 15th century. Its 435 chapters, written in a southern German dialect, address the medicinal values and uses of 368 plants and eleven animal substances. A woodcut illustration accompanies nearly every entry, making the work one of the more heavily illustrated printed books of the 1400s.

Gart der Gesundheit was a popular book, appearing in fourteen separate editions between 1485 and 1501. This edition in the Library’s Rare Book Division is extremely rare; it is one of only three known complete copies, and the only complete copy in the Americas.

 

 

Magical Prayers Against Demons

1813

Manuscripts and Archives Division

Syriac, the language of ancient Syria, was a western dialect of Aramaic and is the language in which many important early Christian texts are preserved. This text reflects folk beliefs of the East Syriac community, who lived in the neighboring plains of Azerbaijan, in northwestern Iran, and in the mountainous region of eastern Turkey. The community used the texts to cure diseases and thought that they protected believers from dangers. The colophon of this manuscript from Kurdistan reveals it was completed in 1813. It was created in the time of Mar Yūḥannānm, the bishop of the monastery of Mar Ḥazqiyel, located near Rustāqā in Syria. Wilberforce Eames, who had joined the staff of the Lenox Library in New York City in 1885, acquired this manuscript for the Library.

 

 

James I, King of England (1566–1625)

A Counterblaste to Tobacco

London: Robert Barker, 1604

George Arents Collection

A Counterblaste to Tobacco, written by King James I of Great Britain, stands as one of the earliest pieces of anti-tobacco literature. In his treatise, the monarch argues against the recreational use of the plant, seeing the practice as both a social and health concern. Smoking, in particular, draws his ire; he calls it “a custome loathsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, [and] dangerous to the lungs.” Though he did not ban tobacco’s use, James did impose a 4,000 percent tax on its sale. When this measure failed to decrease demand, the king adopted a more pragmatic approach: nationalizing the entire tobacco trade, which enabled the Crown to profit directly, and handsomely, through the crop’s ever-growing popularity.

This first-edition copy of James’s Counterblaste is held by the Library’s George Arents Collection, which documents the history, culture, and lore of tobacco.

 

 

Anna Atkins (1799–1871)

Alaria esculenta from Part XII of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions

Cyanotype, ca. 1849

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Spencer Collection

Encouraged by her father, a prominent member of the British scientific community, Anna Atkins (née Children) began in the early 1840s to experiment with the new art of photography, making her among the earliest women to do so. That distinction would not be her most significant legacy, however. Privy to Sir John Herschel’s accidental invention of the cyanotype, Atkins applied that photographic process—and the deep field of Prussian blue it yields—to the problem of how to make multiple prints that conveyed precise information about her growing collection of British seaweed specimens.

With great skill and determination, she coated, arranged, exposed, and developed photograms of more than 400 unique specimens, issuing them to her “botanical friends” as plates of a self-published book. The first installment appeared in October 1843, making hers the very first photographically illustrated book in history. This stellar example, which demonstrates Atkins’s compositional flair, was produced several years into her decade-long project.

 

 

Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717)

Dissertation sur la generation et les transformations des insectes de Surinam …

The Hauge: Pierre Gosse, 1726

Rare Book Division

In 1699, the German-born illustrator and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian sailed with her daughter from the Netherlands to South America to study the insects of Suriname, which was then a Dutch colony. She spent several years carefully recording the behavior and life cycles of butterflies, beetles, ants, spiders, and other creatures, becoming one of the first naturalists to directly observe insects in their own habitat.

On her return to Europe, Merian published, at her own expense, Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (1705). This pioneering book—the first to depict insects in their natural settings—was viewed as an advance in the field of entomology, and it is still revered today for its scientific accuracy and beauty. This copy, printed in 1726 and given a slightly different title, is drawn from the Rare Book Division’s outstanding holdings of early works in the field of natural history.

 

 

Franz Kafka (1883–1924)

A.L. Lloyd (1908–1982), translator

Copy of The Metamorphosis owned and annotated by Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)

New York: Vanguard Press, 1946

Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature

The Library acquired the archive of Vladimir Nabokov in 1991. Among this enormous collection of manuscripts, diaries (spanning the years 1941 through 1977), notebooks, correspondence (comprising nearly fifty linear feet), portraits, working drafts, and galley proofs of his work, there are several heavily annotated copies of the books that Nabokov used when teaching classes in Russian and European literature at Cornell University between 1948 and 1959. Nabokov’s teaching copies of Mansfield Park, Swann’s Way, and Ulysses provide unparalleled insights into the novelist as reader and teacher. His copy of A.L. Lloyd’s English translation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, which Nabokov dismissed as “idiotic,” contains copious annotations, marginal scorings, drawings, and English translation enhancements so voluminous that they constitute almost a retranslation of the text. Shown here are Nabokov’s entomological notes written to address his question, “What is the ‘vermin’ into which poor Gregor is transformed?” as well as his sketch of the beetle on the facing page.

 

 

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)

Page from scrapbook containing hand-drawn diagrams and manuscript notes

ca. 1946

Vladimir Nabokov Papers, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature

“My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting,” Nabokov said in 1962. His passion for butterflies emerged at an early age: he started collecting specimens when he was seven and over time filled thousands of index cards with notes on the subject. Fifteen years before he published Lolita (1955), Nabokov immigrated to the United States, where he taught comparative literature at Wellesley College and Cornell University. He continued his study of butterflies and, in the mid-1940s, was a research fellow for lepidoptery at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. There, he compiled scrapbooks filled with detailed drawings of the genitalia of blue butterflies of the subspecies Lycaeides, along with wing patterns for several other types of butterfly. Nabokov also discovered a new species, the Karner blue, in upstate New York in 1944.

 

 

John James Audubon (1785–1851)

The birds of America; from original drawings by John James Audubon

London: Pub. by the author, 1827–1838

Rare Book Division

The naturalist and artist John James Audubon traveled extensively throughout the United States during the 1820s and 1830s, endeavoring to record and paint all of the country’s indigenous bird species. This monumental task culminated in 1827 with the publication of his Birds of America. Issued serially in installments over a period of twelve years, Birds of America stands not only as one of the most beautiful books ever created, but also as an important contribution to the ornithological field: of the 435 birds illustrated in the work’s four volumes, twenty-five were previously undocumented, and six are now extinct.

The hand-colored illustration shown here—which is rendered through a combination of etching, engraving, and aquatint print processes—depicts the Carolina Parakeet, a once-common but now extinct species. It serves as a dramatic yet representative example of Audubon’s art, which combines subtle detail and sheer dynamism to portray its subjects in a realistic, life-sized fashion.

 

Umbrella belonging to P.L. Travers (1899–1996)

Rare Book Division

This fanciful umbrella belonged to the author of Mary Poppins and resembles the one that allowed the title character to fly. Pamela Lyndon (P.L.) Travers’s American editor presented the umbrella to The New York Public Library in May 1972; at the same time, Travers herself donated a small collection of artifacts associated with her well-loved storybook series.

Umbrellas of this design, widely available during Travers’s lifetime, had powerful childhood associations for the author. As a girl growing up in Australia, she had greatly admired a similar umbrella that a family maid considered her pride and joy. Travers began to save her pennies to purchase one of her own, only to hear her coolly sophisticated parents ridicule the servant’s—and by implication, her own—idea of finery.

 

 

Ancient cookery manuscript

15th century

Manuscripts and Archives Division

This manuscript is a collection of medieval English recipes formulated by the Master Cooks of King Richard II in 14th-century England. The first printed edition, published in 1780, bore the title The Forme of Cury. The compiled recipes include meat and vegetable dishes that show connections with Arabic cooking, as well as Mediterranean influences from Portugal and Spain. It is among the oldest sources of English cookery, and the first to mention recipes with olive oil and spices such as cardamom, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves. The manuscript, a bequest of Helen Hay Whitney, is also the oldest manuscript written in English held in The Library’s collections.

 

 

Letter from Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1588–1603) to King Charles IX (r. 1560–1574)

August 22, 1572

George Arents Collection

Among the many suitors of Queen Elizabeth I was Francis, Duke of Anjou and Alençon, the brother of King Charles IX of France. Charles hoped that an arranged marriage between his brother and Elizabeth would help forge an alliance between the two countries. In this letter, written during the summer of 1572, Elizabeth explains to the French king that, while she holds both him and his brother in the highest esteem, she nevertheless considers the marriage offer “a thing impossible for me to accept,” principally due to their age difference: at the time, Elizabeth was thirty-eight years old, twenty-one years Francis’s senior.

 

 

William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Published according to the True Originall Copies

London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623

Rare Book Division

Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, commonly referred to as the First Folio, is the first true collected printing of William Shakespeare’s plays, and arguably the most important book in all of English literature. Of the thirty-six plays contained in the volume, eighteen appeared in print for the first time in this edition—including such works as The Tempest, Macbeth, and Henry VIII. Without this printing, these Shakespearean classics may not have been preserved for posterity. Martin Droeshout the Younger, a Flemish-born artist working in London during the period, engraved the iconic frontispiece, one of two contemporary likenesses of the playwright.

 

 

A gift for the “Great Cham of Literature”

Silver and gilt, chased with flowers on black enamel, ca. 1761

Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature

The great lexicographer Samuel Johnson once said of his friend Oliver Goldsmith: “No man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he had.” The Irish playwright, novelist, and poet first met Johnson on May 31, 1761. In this year, according to one Goldsmith biographer, “work and money began to pour in upon him.… He was fond of giving suppers; he was developing a taste for fine clothes, peach-coloured velvets, magnificent rings.” Goldsmith may have given Johnson (titled the “Great Cham of Literature” by his biographer James Boswell) this friendship ring in 1761 or at a later date—Johnson did not receive his first honorary doctorate, from Trinity College Dublin, until 1765. Biographies of Johnson and Goldsmith are silent about the gift of this ring, which was sold as lot 18 in the auction of the property of Bertram, 5th Earl of Ashburnham, on June 28, 1921. The Library acquired the ring when the Owen D. Young Collection was incorporated into the Berg Collection in 1941.