Individual Article:
Four recent acquisitions in the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections
The following titles were somewhat capriciously chosen from among the many possible items acquired here lately. But capricious or not, we thought this kind of spotlighting might be a painless way to publicize some areas of our ongoing collection building.
So, no further ado, in chronological order they are:
1. Jan (or Hans) Bol’s very rare little gem of engraved hunting and fishing scenes, Venationis, Piscationis, et Aucupii Yypi (“Hunting, Fishing, and Bird-Catching Figures”), published in Antwerp (probably) in about 1600. Bol (1534-1593) was a Flemish artist and miniaturist whose work also included tapestry designs. The extreme oblong format of these prints suggests they may have been intended as tapestry models or as designs for murals in rural estates and dining rooms. The meticulous engraving after Bol’s designs was done by Phillip Galle, one of the foremost Flemish engravers of the time.
The prints are packed with delightful and informative depictions of contemporary costumes, fish hatcheries, bird trapping devices, realistic townscapes and market scenes, and, more fancifully, some sublime imaginary mountain and sea scenes. One of these, a whaling scene, includes an incongruous (but not unattractive) nude male, drawn in a fine academic manner. Were whalers really so free and easy back then? It’s a question for scholars. In any case Venationis is a fine addition to our growing collection of Dutch and Low Country books of this era, and to the books on fishing, angling, and hunting in our Beck Collection.
2. Three untitled albums of 19th-century albumen photographs of the Holy Land [photos various dates, 1880s-1890s]. A splendid compilation of 209 commercial photographs taken by three of the largest producers of photographs for the tourist trade in the Middle East: the Bonfils clan, based in Beirut; Pascal Sébah, based in Istanbul; and A. Beato, based in Luxor. At the tail end of the era of photographic history prior to the rise of hand-held camera amateur photography, travelers documented their trips by purchasing ready-made prints from commercial vendors. These could be bound by the purchaser (as did the unknown owner of these three albums) in whatever permutation she or he desired. The keen interest in photographs of Middle Eastern sites is confirmed by the enormous numbers of photographs produced for sale. For example, the Bonfils family (the father Felix, the mother Lydie, the son Adrien, all émigrés from France and all sharing the work of photographing, printing, and retailing) produced more than 15,000 different images over a period of 20-odd years. The subjects in these albums include landmarks one would expect -- the Pyramid of Cheops, the Dome of the Rock -- and perhaps, more interestingly, a number of elegantly composed images of street life like “Donkey Boy, Cairo” or this triptych-like shot of an Egyptian barber shop. We are very glad to add these albums to such previously held titles as Francis Frith’s earlier albums of Holy Land photographs, the Egypt and Palestine of 1857, and the famous Holy Land of 1842-1849, containing lithographs after the drawings of David Roberts.
3. Dampf und Elektricität : die Technik im Anfange des XX Jahrhunderts. Berlin: W. Herlet. [c.1900]. This book, which roughly translates as “Steam and Electricity: the Technology at the Beginning of the 20th century,” is interesting from a number of different angles. Start with the impressive, heavily stamped publisher’s trade binding, its heroic allegorical figures exemplars of the excitement and awe still felt at this time about the potentials of steam and, particularly, electric power. Then check out the clever endpaper design, a nice Art Nouveau pattern based on industrial elements. And then inside, in remarkably fine condition considering their delicacy, moveable die-cut illustrations of steam engines (shown here both folded and unfolded), light bulbs, phonographs, and other wonders of the era. This delightful volume augments the books in our Greene Collection of travel and railroad materials and, with its Art Nouveau design elements, fits in well with the McCormick Library’s large holdings of books on early 20th-century European art movements.
4. Guild Book Service ephemera. An assortment of 29 prospectuses, ads, and order forms from this American gay book distributor and publisher, assorted dates from the 1960s. If you were a gay guy in the early half of the sixties and wanted to find books (salubrious or saucy or both) dealing with things homoerotic, you would have had a challenge. There were no gay bookstores and no GLB sections at regular bookshops (and this was essentially true whether you were in Kansas or New York City). The Guild Press of Washington, D.C. was one of the first publishers to enter the market, introducing the so-called "physique magazine" in the 1950s. This type of publication offered soft-core porn of beefy guys and was marketed as an informative aid to like-minded body builders. The magazines were also published under the pretense of advocating a “naturalist” lifestyle based on vaguely “Scandinavian” notions of nudism as a healthy way of living, and showed mostly or fully undressed beefy boys photographed outdoors among trees, doing lawnwork, or cooking dinner at home and serving cocktails to their relaxed group of like-minded nudist friends.
In 1963, supposedly due to clamors from the frustrated gay public, the Guild Press began the Guild Book Service, a mail order book distributing firm. This service used advertisements and order forms to market such diverse books as Percy: The Gay Coloring Book , which is described as containing “Superb illustrations, sophisticated lines and gay wit that marks a new era in the field” (crayons included with purchase) and The Guild Dictionary of Homosexual Terms, advertised as “The First Complete Homosexual Dictionary Ever Offered!!”. One flyer advertising Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal, a “legitimate” piece of literature, shares ad space with the supposedly less virtuous International Nudist Sun. Other “legit” titles included books by Christopher Isherwood, Gore Vidal, John Rechy, and William Burroughs. Low and high culture in these ads are blended and in many ways marketed to highlight their double duty: vice blanketed beneath a cloak of virtue, virtue made alluring with promises of inner vice. It is interesting as well that the service distributed books about homosexuality which it thought laughable. For example, read some of their editorial commentary on the pulp “study” The Homosexual Generation: “For sheer venom, you shouldn’t miss reading this paperback, for author Ken Worthy has some of the most unworthy and malicious things to say about homosexuals your GBS editor has ever encountered in print.” The editor then goes on to point out some of these bits of malice with campy delight and assured contempt. The collection is a nice cultural snapshot of a world in transition, and we are currently trying to obtain a number of the publications they advertise. A note to any GLB-interested scholars here at Northwestern: know of some pre-Stonewall era publications you think the Library should try to obtain? Please drop me a line at s-krafft@northwestern.edu.
Scott Krafft
