Recent acquisitions for the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library are not what everyone would call "new books" -- although (perhaps surprisingly) the most recent of the new acquisitions highlighted below is, in fact, a book published in 2001. This list draws attention to only a very few of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library's recent arrivals. They range in date from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries.

Nowadays, "graffiti" is most frequently associated with marring and disfiguring, especially if someone today adds a graffito an older book or manuscript. However, contemporary graffiti in older books and manuscripts are often a scholar's delight. Why? They provide evidence of how a text was once read and received, topics of major concern to critics and historians alike. Some marginalia are often found in older books. Extensive annotation, however, is not common. So our antennae shot up when we saw a copy of an early seventeenth-century Latin (Vulgate) Bible carefully and copiously annotated -- astonishingly copiously, perhaps almost compulsively annotated -- in a remarkably clear and neat contemporary handwriting covering page after page of this Bible, printed in 1605 by the Plantin Press in Antwerp. The reader's notes cover almost literally every white space -- the tops, outer margins, and bottoms of every page, as one might expect, but also the space between the columns of text, and, sometimes, even the inner, or gutter, margins of the text. As an added bonus, we actually know who the annotator was: Thomas Marwood, a seventeenth-century English physician and a Roman Catholic. Such extensive annotations of this Bible amount, in effect, to a treatise or commentary on it, composed by one man over the many years he studied and pondered it. About both Marwood and his reading of Scripture more begs to be known. This copy of his Bible is the place where such study must begin.

In 1676, a Lutheran minister named Johann Lyser published a defense of polygamy that created a minor furor in Central Europe. The book was burned, its author publicly punished, fined, and driven into exile on pain of execution should he refuse to go. Not surprisingly, Lyser's book prompted vigorous rebuttals. One of them, Johannes Diecmann's Vindiciae legis monogamicae (1678) -- a turgid refutation of Lyser that includes, as a sort of appendix, a separate work on polygamy in the Bible -- has recently arrived at Penn. Its views on 'family values,' as well as on the nature of men and women and the sanctity of Scripture, make Diecmann's book a revealing example of one strand of seventeenth-century thought. Several copies of Lyser's defense of polygamy, which Diecmann writes to refute, are already part of the collections (including editions of 1672 and 1684).

Jean Filleau, a seventeenth century French lawyer and nobleman, made his reputation, in part, by taking on the Jansenists who, somewhat like Calvinists in this respect, believed in the perversity of the human will and man's inability, if not assisted by divine grace, to seek the good on his own. Filleau openly sparred with Blaise Pascal, among others, and in a work recently acquired by the Library took on Pascal's Pensies. Whatever Pascal may be for moderns, he was no here to Filleau, whose Discours sur Les pensies de M. Pascal, oy l'on essaye de faire voir quel estoit son dessein (1672) is an exposi of the 'real' Pascal that views Pascal and his ilk as no different from common heretics.

Losers don't usually get to write the history of the battles they lose. So two recently acquired small volumes illustrative of eighteenth-century arguments about 'modernity' are important reminders that the Enlightenment was not simply a juggernaut that rolled over everything in its path, as its partisans often make it seem. The Sorbonnist Phre Bonhomme wrote the first, Riflexions d'un Franciscain sur les trois volumes de l'Encyclopedie (1754), an opening shot across the bow of the mammoth Encyclopidie that Denis Diderot and his colleagues were in the process of bringing out. The other, an anonymous work entitled Anti Sans-Souci (1760), is a sweeping attack on Frederick II and his embrace of Enlightenment values. Both Diderot and his Encyclopidie and Frederick II epitomized that modernity with which the Enlightenment associated itself; and evidence of contemporary opposition is particularly useful in an era when the Enlightenment's successors have begun to call some of its achievements into question.

French Benedictines in the eighteenth century were renowned for their sturdy erudition. One of them, Dom Charles Joseph de Bivy, wrote a Histoire des inaugurations des rois, empereurs, et autres souverains de l'univers (1776) that is a marvelous tour of coronation ceremonies and rituals in France from the middle ages to the eighteenth century. Bivy's book appeared just as the institution of the monarchy was coming under serious challenge. Accompanied by engravings of historical costumes, it illustrates the embeddedness of the notion of sacred monarchy in a matrix of elaborate ritual and ceremony, costume and fanfare, which the French Revolution would directly assault thirteen years later.

Horwace Walpole, the son of the early eighteenth-century British Prime Minister, was among the instigators of the fashion for 'gothic' fiction in later eighteenth-century English fiction: The Castle of Otranto, from some points of view, is thus a novel with a lot to answer for. Walpole remains best known today for that novel, as well as for the forty-eight -- or is it a gazillion? -- volumes of his correspondence published by a learned and, fortunately, rich enthusiast between 1937 and 1983. Walpole was also the author of the Hieroglyphic Tales, first published in 1785 in an edition of six copies at Walpole's own private press at Strawberry Hill. Republished in 1926 by the London bookseller Elkin Mathews in an edition of some 250 copies, the Hieroglyphic Tales became a bit more widely accessible than the original 1785 edition. That 1926 edition was also printed by Hans (or Giovanni) Mardersteig, whose Officina Bodoni (located in Montagnola, Switzerland, when this book was printed, but later in Verona, Italy) was one of the premier fine presses of the twentieth century. A copy of this edition, recently arrived, helps to fill out a collection of Walpole of considerable (and active) current interest. The most recent edition of Otranto was edited by a Penn faculty member and Walpole is much read and taught around here these days. To have this work in so splendid a modern edition is a welcome benefit to our readers as well as to those who are interested in the arts of the book.

No one at Penn ever set out to 'collect' John Galt, a Scottish writer and contemporary of Sir Walter Scott. However, the catholicity of interest in early British fiction that inspired the collecting of John C. Mendenhall and Godfrey Frank Singer brought many early editions of Galt to Penn as part of the Singer-Mendenhall collection of English novels prior to 1820. Oddly, however, the novel for which Galt is best remembered -- Annals of the Parish (1821) -- has only been available here in many late or scholarly editions. Galt's productive period comes not only before but also just after Singer-Mendenhall's 1820 terminal date, so perhaps its 1821 date made it 'out of scope' for the two collectors? Yet enough of Galt's other works are here to suggest that the first edition of this, his most popular novel, would not be amiss. The copy that arrived early in 2003 is quite lovely. Still in their original boards, the volumes are almost entirely unsophisticated and thus useful to students and scholars interested in what Galt 'looked like' when his books were first issued. In this novel, Galt views change in a small Scottish town over the years of the ministry of the Reverend Micah Balwhidder, his main character, and the book is filled with surprises. During the period of Balwhidder's ministry, late in the eighteenth century, for example, the town experiences the arrival of a newfangled and nefarious drink, tea: 'Before this year, the drinking of tea was little known in the parish, . . . but now it became very rife, yet the commoner sort did not like to let it be known that they were taking to the new luxury.' Was there ever an England, or a Scotland, without tea? Apparently there was. One of the many pleasures of this novel is the reminder that, once upon a time, it was a doubtful substance indeed.

A few years ago the Library acquired the Michael Zinman Collection of Canvassing Books, a large library of American publishers' sample books ferried around the country by book agents going door-to-door looking for subscriptions. Although the collection itself is now pushing at some 4,000 items, it has been difficult to find primary source material on the book agents themselves. Preciously little was written; less survives. A local manuscript dealer, however, did the near impossible and found us part of a manuscript diary of a book and map agent named Wolcott R. Harrison. Harrison traveled the eastern seaboard in the early 1840s. His diary provides a wealth of detail about people and places he visited, the material culture of the day, his relations with publishers, and the ways in which he approached his business. Much of the diary has to do with Philadelphia. Who could ask for more?

Samuel Emmons' The Vegetable Family Physician (1842) appeared at a time when American medicine was fragmented and groping towards professionalization. Competing with a host of schools and approaches to health and well-being, Emmons found in herbs, roots, berries, and greens the cure to what ailed Americans in the earlier nineteenth century. Who knows? -- aside from being a window on the past, his book may have some unexpected relevance today.

English-born Thomas Clark was a Western Union director in New York City in the later nineteenth century. Active in New York's cultural scene, he even tried his hand at dramaturgy. We were fortunate to acquire both a fair and a revised typed copy of his unpublished play, 'A Social Success: A Domestic Comedy in Four Acts.' The play presents an engaging view of New York's Gilded Age. The retinue of characters featured in it range from old money to new, from business to art, and from proper women to restless courtesans.

Five hundred and one copies of A Conrad Memorial Library: The Collection of George T. Keating were published in 1929 by Doubleday, Doran, the American publishers of this major English modernist writer whose native language was Polish and for whom English was not his second but his third language. The book offers preliminary efforts to create a bibliographical guide to a writer whom the contributors recognize for his contributions to twentieth-century literature. It also includes essays and reminiscences about him, the work of Jessie Conrad, his wife, the Philadelphians Christopher Morley and Struthers Burt, the Welsh novelists and brothers T. F., Llewelyn, and John Cowper Powys, Arthur Symons, Ford Madox Ford, Liam O'Flaherty, and several other writers significant in the history of recent English letters. A long-time friend of the Library offered the book to us and we were sure it was already here. It is, after all, one of the building blocks for subsequent Conrad study, and Conrad is a writer who is often taught in many different classes at Penn. But the book turned out not to be here, however. Now it is.

The same long-time friend of the Library also offered us some volumes from a large collection of works by P. G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse was a prolific writer, and a very great many of his works are already at Penn, as one would expect -- but by no means all of them. An as yet un-canonical but nonetheless widely read -- and wildly enjoyable -- twentieth-century writer of matchless comedy, Wodehouse exhibits a very nearly flawless ear for the possibilities for wordplay still available to masters of English prose. Among the several Wodehouse titles that have just arrived is Galahad at Blandings (1965), which opens with two characters sharing a cell 'in one of New York's popular police stations.' Both are burdened by terrific hangovers and one of them looks 'like the poet Shelley after a big night out with Lord Byron.' Things go downhill from there. Jeeves and Bertie Wooster go for another romp in Much Obliged, Jeeves (1971), published when Wodehouse turned 90. And in a 1940 anthology, Wodehouse on Golf, the reader learns the reason for a not 'very large entry for the mixed foursomes competition': 'Men are as a rule idealists, and wish to keep their illusions regarding women intact, and it is difficult for the most broad-minded man to preserve a chivalrous veneration for the sex after a woman has repeatedly sliced into the rough and left him a difficult recovery.' No one could write such stuff today; and, probably, no one would want to. But if any writer can suggest that not everything that enters a rare book collection comes slathered in solemnity, Wodehouse is that writer.

Penn's large collection of Lewis Mumford's papers is one of the Library's principal resources. Critic, urban planner, historian, architect, and visionary, Mumford was a protean figure in twentieth-century intellectual history. It is not often that we have an opportunity to add much to the collection. That is why we were especially pleased to learn that a New England bookseller was finally getting around to disposing of a nice clutch of Mumfordiana he had acquired in the 1970s. Consisting of manuscripts and typescripts of articles for New Yorker and other publications, as well as correspondence with editors, the material provides an intimate glimpse of Mumford in the 1930s and '40s and helps to document an important period in the life of this seminal figure.

Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972), an American heiress from Ohio free to live as unconventionally as she wished, took full advantage of her freedom. And she did indeed get around. She was the friend and lover of, among others, the writer Djuna Barnes, the artist Romaine Brooks, the novelist Colette, the poet Olive Custance (who was later the wife of Oscar Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas), the dancer Isadora Duncan, the writer Radclyffe Hall, the spy Matra Hari, the painter Marie Laurencin, the poet Mina Loy, the writer Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas, and Oscar's niece Dorothy Wilde. Those who visited the salon she kept at her home on Paris's rue Jacob, on the Left Bank, included Rodin, Rilke, Joyce, Valiry, Millay, Maugham, Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Pound, Virgil Thomson, Gide, William Carlos Williams, George Antheil, Janet Flanner, Nancy Cunard, Peggy Guggenheim, Caresse and Harry Crosby, Paul Claudel, Adrienne Monnier, Sylvia Beach, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and Hart Crane. Later in life, her range extended to such people as Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Frangoise Sagan, and Margeurite Yourcenar. Her interaction with this immense cross-section of Anglo-American-French modernists is impressive. But Barney was not only a lover and a saloniste; she was also a writer herself. Quelques portraits-sonnets de femmes, her first book, consisted of French love poems most of them written to former lovers. It was published in Paris in 1900. Now difficult to find, the original was reprinted in a 120-copy full-color facsimile in 1999. Copy no. 69 of this edition has now come to Penn. At the same time, the Library acquired a copy of a second printing of Barney's 1920 Pensies d'une Amazone (Paris 1921). Gay, lesbian, and bisexual literature have long been out of the closet. Acquisitions such as these at least begin the process of making such texts available for readers, study, and use at Penn -- though much more could be done!

Fine printing per se has never been one of the Library's major collecting fields; yet in the normal course of events examples of fine printing come our way every so often for other reasons -- the Officina Bodoni edition of Walpole's Hieroglyphic Tales, for example, mentioned earlier as another recent acquisition. Interest in the work of contemporary poets also insures that now and again quite beautiful volumes of poetry enter the collections. These are volumes we acquire not for their appearance but for their contents. Among the most recent arrivals of this kind is a tiny volume, one of an edition of 136 copies. In the Palm of Space: A Poem was written by Herbert Scott. It appeared as Sutton Hoo Select Number Three, published in Winona, Minnesota, by Sutton Hoo Press in 2001. Scott is a poet and long-time member of the English Department at Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, Michigan ('Kalamazoo, you are wealthy / with spring,' we read in the long poem that constitutes this little book). Scott's own students have begun to populate creative writing programs and publish their own works across the country. This book, with its one long poem, appeared in five different bindings -- almost like Wonder Bread, alleged to build strong bodies seven different ways. All are printed in a handset Lutetia italic typeface with roman capitals. Our copy is one of only nine on a white handmade paper. Larry Yerkes of Iowa City bound it in cloth with marbled paper on the front (upper) cover. The book is a nice piece of contemporary bookmaking. Since we bought it for its contents, it's worth adding that the poem is good, too.

As part of the Library's documentation strategy of collecting important primary source materials relating to Philadelphia's arts and culture scene in the twentieth century, we were recently able to negotiate the acquisition of the archives of the Painted Bride Art Center. For more than thirty years, the Bride has been the primary venue for the alternative arts in the Philadelphia area. The Bride has provided a broad tent for aspiring painters, poets, playwrights, musicians, dancers, and performance artists. Its archives span more than one-hundred linear feet and contain programs, contracts, recordings, correspondence, and business records. The Gladys Kriebel Delmas Foundation of New York has generously funded a project to assist in organizing and cataloging this large and important collection.

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