Rare Book Monthly
Book Catalogue Reviews - December - 2004 Issue
Part III of the H.P. Kraus Library From Oak Knoll
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Gaylord Albaugh produced a major bibliography of American religious periodicals on behalf of the American Antiquarian Society in 1994. The two-volume book's title is History and Annotated Bibliography of American Religious Periodicals and Newspapers Established from 1730 through 1830....This is a thorough accounting of the material, and includes listings chronologically by year of founding, by geographical origin, and by religious type. It is one of the few resources available for tracking down some of this obscure material. Item 1374. $125.
Item 2182 is a list of banned books, Index Librorum Prohibitorum, promulgated under the name of Pope Pius XII in 1948. In the days prior to Vatican II, the Church tended to wield a more heavy hand in such matters. Among those books prohibited were the Common Book of Prayer (Anglican), the complete works of Emile Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre, and much of the work of Rene Descartes, Victor Hugo, Voltaire and Immanuel Kant. As one forced to read him in my college days, I can attest that Pope Pius must have been a genius to have understood enough of Kant's writing to know whether it was controversial. Certainly all of us students, regardless of faith, would have supported the Pope's decision to ban the reading of Kant. $65.
America's best-known 19th century songwriter was Stephen Foster. Many of his tunes are still popular today. Among the most famous are Oh! Susanna, De Camptown Races, Swanee River (Old Folks at Home), My Old Kentucky Home, Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair, and Beautiful Dreamer. In a sense he was the first American composer in that his themes were distinctively American, not imitations of European music. Sadly, while achieving reasonable success during the 1850s, fortune turned against him, and he died in a New York hospital alone and with little money in 1863, at the age of 37, with a wife and child still in his hometown of Pittsburgh. While Foster may have lacked a wealthy patron in life, he had one in death in Josiah Lilly. Lilly founded the Lilly Library in Indiana which houses, along with books and manuscripts, an enormous collection of sheet music. From 1931-1940, Lilly published the Foster Hall Bulletin, dedicated to Stephen Foster. Item 1942 is a complete run of this publication. The Bulletin speaks of Lilly's formation of his Foster collection, which unlike his other material, is now housed at the University of Pittsburgh rather than the Lilly Library. $125.
Item 2372 is an interesting piece in the puzzle of perhaps the greatest forgeries the book world has ever seen. It is the Catalogue of the Library of the Late John Henry Wrenn, five volumes published by the University of Texas in 1920. UT had purchased Wrenn's magnificent collection, and the introduction to the volumes published to describe it came from the man who helped form the collection, Thomas J. Wise. Uh oh. Wise helped Wrenn build his collection, which he liberally laced with the forgeries for which Wise is best known. Many of those forgeries found their way into this catalogue. Wrenn died in ignorance, but Wise lived to see his deception revealed. Today, Wise's forgeries, which were very good, are a valuable part of the Wrenn Library at UT, and at least this much can be said for his claims: the books he sold Wrenn truly were first editions. $1,450.
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