Simon Beattie

This is the first edition of the libretto, by Eugenio Giunti, for the theatricals which took place in Munich to celebrate the recent marriage of Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II (‘the Musical King’, Mozart’s patron) and Maria Josepha of Bavaria.  The music was by Pietro Pompeo Sales, Kapellmeister to the Prince-Bishop of Augsburg, and the cast featured Regina Mingotti, the ‘perfect mistress of her art’ (Burney), as Venus and the tenor Domenico Panzacchi, ‘a great favourite with the Munich audiences’ (New Grove), as Jupiter.

The binding fascinated me.  I have never seen music printer’s waste used on in this way.  Recycling medieval manuscripts in binding, yes; printed music, no.  Neither had any librarian I mentioned it to.  As to the piece itself?  Moveable type at this time suggests someone like Breitkopf in Leipzig, but a couple of features (the quaver rests are slightly different, Breitkopf only used directs if a line was broken mid-bar) point elsewhere.  If you recognise it, please let me know!

This is the very rare edition of Ossian produced by Goethe (still only 23) and his friend, Johann Heinrich Merck, in Frankfurt in 1777.  The following year Goethe published Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, perhaps the greatest Ossian reader of all, and the success of Macpherson’s work in Germany was assured.  As Henry Crabb Robinson remarked to Goethe in 1829: ‘The taste for Ossian is to be ascribed to you in a great measure. It was Werther that set the fashion’ (Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, ed. Sadler, II, 432).

Impetus for producing the book was simply that copies of the original English text were so hard to come by in Germany.  Michael Denis had had to use Cesarotti’s Italian version as the basis for his German translation (the first complete translation into any language, 1768–9), and Herder had been relying on second-hand sources for years before in 1771 he borrowed a copy which Goethe had found in his father’s library.  It was this copy (the 1765 London edition) which Goethe subsequently used for his edition with Merck, designing the engraved title-page himself (his first piece of book design).

2764 guests, at a cost of £13,188 2s. 1d. (over £600,000 in today’s money), this is Victorian event management at its peak.  Alexander II was visiting his daughter, Maria (styled here ‘Her Imperial and Royal Highness’, always a bone of contention with the British royal family), who had married Queen Victoria’s son, Alfred, at the Winter Palace in St Petersburg a few months before.  Illustrated here is an admittance card to the event, a menu, and the official Report in relation to the Entertainment of His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of All the Russias, in the Guildhall of the City of London, on Monday, the 18th of May, 1874.  Presented to the Court of Common Council, 16th July, 1874, submitted by the Czar Entertainment Committee.  The Report makes fascinating reading.  It details who was invited—royalty, ambassadors, politicians, clergy, those representing the City of London (Livery Companies, bankers, merchants, brokers), etc., plus over 20 newspaper editors (and a reporter from the ‘Russian Mirror’), the illustrator Gustave Doré, and the composer Charles Gounod, who was resident in London at the time—and reproduces ‘various documents, showing the form of procedure and ceremony adopted at the Reception, and the general regulations observed on the occasion’, including the two menus served (one for the Royal Table, another for everyone else), both provided by W. G. Jennings of The Albion, Aldersgate Street (his bill was £2629 19s. 9d.), and the music performed, by the Band of the Grenadier Guards in the Pavilion of the Guildhall, and by members of the Orpheus Glee Union in the Library.  Among the expenses are those for printing: £336 6s. 6d. all told.

The week before last I was in New York.  Last week I was back in England, and now it’s off to Paris on Thursday.  This children’s book has similar Anglo-American-French connections.  It’s the first edition in French (1826) of The Adventures of Congo in Search of his Master; an American Tale by the children’s writer Eliza Farrar.  When it was first published in London in 1823 it was really quite a small book; the French edition is a much more luxurious affair.

‘The hero of these adventures was a young black American, not a slave but the free servant of an enlightened family living by choice in Philadelphia, “the capital of a State where no species of slavery is allowed.”  Affectionately brought up by the Stewart family, whom his father served, first as an indentured servant removed from conditions of starvation in the West Indies and thenceforth in paid employment, Congo was to accompany the youthful Charles Stewart on European travels.  A shipwreck in mid-Atlantic abruptly separated servant from master, though both were miraculously saved.  In the face of seemingly insurmountable difficulties, Congo was sustained by a strong religious faith, while honesty, industry, and a happy disposition earned him friendly help in his endeavours.  The story moves swiftly, with few digressions, and the incidents are told with vivid detail’ (Catherine de Saint-Rat, ‘In search of the author of The Adventures of Congo’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 72 (1978), 353–4).  The majority of the action takes place in Ireland and Wales, which the author knew herself, before Congo and Stewart are finally reunited in London.

The daughter of Nantucket Quakers, Eliza Farrar (1791–1870) was born in Dunkirk, where the family business was whaling.  After the fall of Robespierre, they left France and set up again at Milford Haven in south Wales.  Eliza first went to America in 1819, and nine years later married the Harvard mathematics professor, John Farrar.  As well as The Adventures of Congo, she wrote The Young Lady’s Friend (Boston, 1836), which saw a number of editions.

With the subject of knife crime constantly in the news, I thought I’d post this, a German translation of George II’s 1731 proclamation against carrying knives and other weapons, which shows that such problems are nothing new.  I’ve not seen this kind of thing before, but I presume British edicts at the time were regularly sent to Germany, having been endorsed by the head of the German Chancery in London (at the time, Johann Philipp von Hattorf), for printing and distribution.  According to a manuscript note on the verso, this example was sent to Salzhausen, around ten miles west of Lüneburg.

As I’m in New York this week, I thought I’d post a suitable book: the first edition in Russian of City Stories told by City Children as they go exploring New York (1928), ‘told from time to time to Miss [Florence E.] Matthews by her seven-year-olds at the Lincoln School’.  The talented young translator, Mikhail Gershenzon (1900–1942), also translated the Uncle Remus stories, Robin Hood, and Washington Irving into Russian.

I love Pyotr Alyarkrinsky’s illustrations.  But what particularly attracted me by the book was the fact that these stories, written by New York children, were then also read by their Soviet peers.  How different the lives of those children turned out.

Here are some shots of a complete run of Sonorama (44 issues, 1958–62),  an innovative French monthly news magazine which offered its readers an extra, aural dimension to the articles and features through the use of flexi-discs bound into the magazine itself.  Each issue contained six different flexi-discs (from May 1961 onwards, more).  By folding the magazine back on itself and placing it on a record player, readers would have been able to listen to political speeches, interviews, or music.

The magazine documents the early years of the Fifth Republic, and the question of Algeria obviously dominates the series.  Aside from politics, one can read about (or listen to) Edith Piaf, Brigitte Bardot, Sacha Distel, Maurice Chevalier, and the eternal Johnny Halliday; Albert Camus (his new play Les Possédés, followed by his death only months later), Jean Cocteau, Marcel Pagnol, André Malraux, and Jean-Paul Belmondo.  Away from the francophone world, there are features on Sophia Loren, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Ella Fitzgerald, and Maria Callas.

One story covered is the election of a new American President:  ‘His name is Kennedy.  He has everything Americans dream about: a tan, a degree from Harvard, a ravishing wife, two beautiful children, a huge fortune, and the ability to succeed in everything he does.  He is 43 years old, 23 less than Khrushchev.’

Sheikh Mansur was a Chechen resistance fighter who waged a six-year campaign against Catherine the Great’s forces before his capture in 1791, calling upon fellow Muslims to join him in jihad.  ‘He was the first to preach and lead … the Holy War against the infidel Russians in the Caucasus …  Dropped, as it were, from the clouds full grown, a warrior, preacher and prophet and, in spite of [his] many failures … he drew after him now one, now another, of the the fierce tribes of the mountain and the forest …  He it was who first taught them that in religious reform lay the one chance of preserving their cherished liberty and independence’ (Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, p. 47).

Italian interest in Sheikh Mansur began in December 1785, with a piece in the Florentine Gazzetta universale on his defeat of Russian troops; by June the following year, the paper was announcing that ‘the celebrated Sheikh Mansur’s code for the reform of the Quran has been brought all the way from the Caucasus to Italy, and promptly translated from Arabic into our language.  The pamphlet is unique of its kind, and, in addition to the reform, contains some terrible prophecies by this new sectarian …  Some copies are available in Florence from Anton Giuseppe Pagani for the price of one paolo’ (quoted in Venturi, p. 96).

‘The pamphlet foretold a “great revolution” which was to be universal and egalitarian.  It was to take place in the year 1812, and in order to prepare the way for it, a “reform of the Quran” was necessary.  The reform would involve numerous changes.  No taxes would be levied on land …  A “general assembly” would set up a rapid and efficient legal system.  Slavery would be abolished …  The punishment of exile would also be abolished …  “You will also abolish tolls” …  “Lastly, you will destroy the big cities, which, like so many whirlpools, swallow up the provincial towns.”  Big cities were “the very portrait of contradiction”, “a receptacle for opulence and excessive misery”.  There was an “eternal struggle” between them.  “The peoples of many nations are sacrificed for the benefit of Constantinople, Paris, London, Rome, Smyrna and other large and populous cities which, like a diamond truly surrounded by dung, are a compound of spirit and stupidity, beauty and extravagance, greatness and depravity …  Where there is abundance, even excess of everything, there you will see numerous wretches dying of hunger; where the wisest laws are in force, all is disorder, and obstacles everywhere, impediments and difficulties lie in the way of true public good; and while on the one hand nothing is encouraged but ostentation, lust, pride, and the satisfaction of the most unbridled passions, on the other hand we see nothing but nakedness, humiliation, despair, oppression and slavery”’ (Franco Venturi, ‘The legend of Boetti Sheikh Mansur’, Central Asian Studies, vol. X, no. 1–2, pp. 96–7).

The Italian original, La Riforma dell’ Alcorano e le profezie dell’ aggiornante, dell’ illuminato, e del vigilante profeta Seich-Mansur, from which this very rare German translation was made, appears to exist in only one or two copies.  A modern reprint was published in 1992.

Published in Stockholm in 1889, this is a first edition of the childhood reminiscences of Sonya Kovalevsky (Sof’ia Kovalevskaia in Russian, 1850–1891), ‘the greatest woman mathematician prior to the twentieth century’ and the first woman to hold a university chair in modern Europe.

Kovalevsky wrote this account of her childhood in Russia, translated from her original manuscript into Swedish, as fiction, with Sonya and her sister Anya becoming the Rajevski sisters.  (When Kovalevsky translated the work back into Russian, she turned it into a first-person narrative.)  But it is all true: ‘her education by a governess of English extraction; the life at Palibino (their country estate); the subsequent move to St Petersburg; the family social circle, which included Dostoevsky …  The story ends with her fourteenth year.  At that time the temporary wallpaper in one of the children’s rooms at Palibino consisted of the pages of a text from her father’s schooldays, namely, Ostrogradsky’s lithographed lecture notes on differential and integral calculus’ (DSB).

Dostoevsky took a shine to Sonya’s elder sister, a promising writing talent, in the 1860s, publishing some of her stories in Epokha, and features prominently towards the end of the book.  Their father was mistrustful (‘Dostoevsky …  What do we know about him?  Nothing, except that he is a journalist, and has been in prison to boot.  That is a first-class recommendation, I must say!’), but Dostoevsky used to visit them about three or four times a week.  ‘Sometimes he would narrate the contents of novels he intended to write; sometimes scenes and circumstances from his own life …  He felt an aversion to his own work, and was ashamed of it.  Perhaps there is no author who does not go through this psychological drubbing some time or other, but Dostoevsky, with his nervous and suspicious nature, suffered from it probably in an unusual degree.’

These extraordinary engravings are the last words written by Louis XVI (his will, Christmas Day, 1792) and his wife, Marie-Antoinette (a letter to her sister-in-law, 6 October 1793), turned into silhouettes, probably in the 1830s.  I’ll admit it took me a while to find out some information on the engraver, Alphonse Pélicier, who is listed in none of the usual biographical dictionaries of artists and engravers.  The reason?  Because he was a map engraver.  Such a project as this called for particular skills: someone who was good at engraving words, not images.  Quite why they were produced, however, eludes me, unless it was some kind of celebration for Louis-Phillippe and the Bourbon dynasty.