Watt was written ‘in dribs and drabs’ in Roussillon (south-eastern France) during WWII, while Beckett was hiding from the Gestapo. Long thought unpublishable, Watt emerged in 1953, in a hideous magenta cover and riddled with typographical errors, from the Olympia Press. Other ‘unusual’ books from Olympia included Fanny Hill, The Debauched Hospodar, de Sade’s Justine and Nabokov’s Lolita. This 1958 Traveller’s Companion retains the original errors, which took scholars sixty years to correct. Watt, travelling by train to the abode of Mr Knott, encounters Mr Dum Spiro, editor of Crux (‘the popular Catholic monthly’). Spiro ponders the rat that swallows a consecrated wafer: what happens to the Real Body? He cites theological authorities, but Watt, listening to voices that constitute an imperfect paradigm (challenge: find the anomaly), understands little. Many readers (including J.M. Coetzee) consider Watt their favourite Beckett text. The ugly duckling has turned into that rara avis, a black swan.
(Chosen by Chris Ackerley, Emeritus Professor, Department of English and Linguistics, Otago)]]>
Samuel Beckett]]> Books]]>
(Chosen by Professor David Skegg, Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, Otago)]]> Onofrio Panvinio]]> Books]]> (Chosen by Dr John Holmes, Hon. Clinical Senior Lecturer, Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, Otago)]]> Lewis M. Allen]]> Books]]> The Force of Truth: An Oratorio and Phoebe: A Pastoral Opera as printed by Samuel Richardson. The provenance of this book, Esmond de Beer, is a reminder of Dunedin’s very generous son.
(Chosen by Dr Keith Maslen, retired lecturer, Department of English and Linguistics, Otago)

 

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John Hoadly]]> Books]]>
(Chosen by Dr Christopher de Hamel, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, England)]]> ___]]> Manuscripts]]> (Chosen by Moira White, Curator, Humanities, Otago Museum, Dunedin)]]> ___]]> Books]]> Te Ora mo te Maori (1884). My research suggests that this book became a ‘bible’ for health reformers such as Sir Apirana Ngata and Rēweti Kōhere. In effect, Pope provided a guide to new ways of living in the changing environment that Māori faced. This book was embraced as a guide by members of the Young Māori Party, the Kotahitanga (the Maori Parliament) in the late 19th century, and by the religious leader Tahupōtiki Wiremu Rātana in 1918.
(Chosen by Professor Barbara Brookes, Department of History and Art History, Otago)]]>
James H. Pope]]> Books]]>
Baxterianae). Matthew Sylvester (c.1636-1708) was Baxter’s literary executor, and he compiled Baxter’s autobiographical narrative of some 645,000 words. Reliquiae Baxterianae challenged the prevailing view that the Puritans were to blame for England’s Civil War. I am part of a team of editors who are now preparing a critical edition of Reliquiae Baxterianae. While I cannot miss the element of self-justification, Baxter’s account of 17th century England is one that historians should take very seriously indeed. Baxter claims that he and his colleagues should not be blamed; I think he is basically right.
(Chosen by Associate Professor Tim Cooper, Department of Theology and Religion, Otago)]]>
Matthew Sylvester]]> Books]]>
Le Lutrin (1672–1683), this book always provides an impressive example of the talents of hand-press typesetters and highlights the complex bibliographical codes already established among early modern readers. And it derives its comic force from making fun of scholarly pretensions, something that always pleases students.
(Chosen by Dr Shef Rogers, Department of English and Linguistics, Otago)]]>
Alexander Pope]]> Books]]>
Survey of Persian Art edited by Arthur Upham Pope and Phyllis Ackerman on the open shelves of the University Library. These volumes of text and images comprehensively cover architecture, ceramics, metal work, carpets and textiles, calligraphy, and the art of the book. For me, the valuable inclusion by Phyllis Ackerman of detailed drawings of the complex structures of woven textiles and carpets have been particularly helpful. These books are now housed in Special Collections.
(Chosen by Margery Blackman)]]>
Arthur Upham Pope]]> Books]]>
Le Festin de Pierre but now known by its original sub-title, Dom Juan, was first performed in Paris in 1665. Accused of impiety and blasphemy, it was soon withdrawn from the company’s repertoire, and when first published, in 1682, the text was so heavily censored that in three crucial scenes it was unfaithful to Molière’s original intentions. Meanwhile, an Amsterdam publisher had acquired a copy of the play as it must have been first performed, and issued it in 1683. Publishers and translators elsewhere soon preferred it to the Paris edition, and modern scholars have followed them in recognising the Amsterdam edition as the basis of any serious study of the play. Special Collections’ copy of this play is bound with other individually published Molière plays. The volume was presented to the library by Dr Esmond de Beer in 1973.
(Chosen by Dr Roger Collins)]]>
Molière]]> Books]]>
(Chosen by Dr Elaine Webster, Director, Summer School, Otago)]]> [Auguste Racinet]]]> Books]]> (Chosen by Dr Elaine Webster, Director, Summer School, Otago)]]> Auguste Racinet]]> Books]]> History of St Paul’s Cathedral in London was one of my personal discoveries when I began investigating Otago’s Special Collections. Although the work was catalogued, reference to the significant topographical artist, Wenceslaus Hollar, one of my favourite printmakers, was missing. The site where St. Paul’s now stands has a long history; a church has supposedly been on site since 604. Dugdale’s work is an important book on many levels. It was part of a growing antiquarian movement that recorded and preserved information on the medieval past. Produced during Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, when so many churches were threatened by puritan zealotry, it marked a nostalgia for a royalist past. The book includes details of the cathedral in 1658, before its destruction in the Great Fire of London in 1666. It is also important because it is the first book on a particular building to contain so many illustrations of architectural views and monuments. It was ‘crowdfunded’ with subscribers paying for individual prints.
(Chosen by Dr Judith Collard, Department of History and Art History, Otago)]]>
William Dugdale]]> Books]]>
Erebus, for what was the last ever sail-only voyage of discovery. Hooker’s role was to collect and describe the plant and algae species encountered as they sailed south through the Atlantic to the Southern Ocean to confirm the existence of Antarctica. Today, a botanist taking this journey would arrive home with memory cards full of digital images of plants with scientific names. Back then, Hooker was faced with largely undescribed and unfamiliar plants. The Flora of Antarctica is a monumental achievement. It still underpins the scientific names in use today, and for me its most impressive feature is the manner in which Hooker’s detailed observations capture the biology of the plants he discovered. His illustrations are exquisitely beautiful, and they are also botanically accurate to the tiniest detail. Importantly, Hooker’s Flora of Antarctica is a reminder that the discipline of accurate objective observation is a requirement of scientific understanding.
(Chosen by Dr Janice Lord, Department of Botany, Otago)]]>
Joseph Dalton Hooker]]> Books]]>
Mirabilia was the most influential guide for medieval travellers to Rome. This 1511 printing is the oldest edition in the Collection; another is dated 1550. I used these, along with other guidebooks, for a course on the Classical Tradition that I taught from the late 1980s to the 2000s. The Mirabilia presents both true and inaccurate identifications of ancient monuments in Rome. One example is the ‘Horse of Constantine’ in the Lateran, which is in fact an equestrian statue of the emperor Marcus Aurelius (it now stands on the Capitol in Rome). The Mirabilia has it as a statue of a squire who saved Rome from an attack. The horse’s forelock is mistaken for an owl, which provided a warning against the said attack.
(Chosen by Professor Robert Hannah, Waikato University)]]>
___]]> Books]]>
(Chosen by Ralph Lawrence, designer, Dunedin)]]> [Alan Hopgood]]]> Book cover]]> (Chosen by Ralph Lawrence, designer, Dunedin)]]> [Alan Hopgood]]]> Book covers]]> (Chosen by Ralph Lawrence, designer, Dunedin)]]> Larry Kent [Don Haring]]]> Book covers]]> Laster und Leidenschaft; others included Lynd Ward’s Gods’ Man: A Novel in Woodcuts (1929) and Wild Pilgrimage (1932). More examples are being added as opportunity arises.
(Chosen by Gary Blackman)]]>
Frans Masereel]]> Books]]>
(Chosen by Dr James Beattie, History, Waikato University)]]> Basil Hall Chamberlain]]> Books]]> New Zealand Verse, the first multi-author anthology of English-language ‘New Zealand’ poetry. The publication represented a growing need for the colonists to show themselves worthy as a burgeoning nation with its own values and customs.
In the introduction, the editors declare a ‘conviction’ that certain New Zealand poetry volumes ‘contain verse which at least comes well up to the level of modern minor poetry ... It may be admitted from the outset that there is nothing very great to be disclosed herein; the poetical element that a new land contains must always at first be small and of little power.’
While writing a thesis on ‘New Zealand poetic reality’, I often delved into New Zealand Verse to inspect it as an artefact of its time. There are no contributions in te Reo, but Maori subjects do feature, a flavour of idiosyncrasy designed to increase the collection’s marketability in the eyes of its overseas publisher. Quaint as it may now appear, New Zealand Verse is not without value. Poems like H.L. Twisleton’s ‘The Whare’ obliquely express the searching loneliness of often talented settlers, probing for subject matter to exercise their usually modest creative ambitions.
(Chosen by Dr Richard Reeve, Dunedin poet and lawyer)]]>
W.F. Alexander and A.E. Currie]]> Books]]>
Return to My Native Land was in London, 1980. I had been researching John Berger for an MA thesis. Although impressed by Césaire’s poetry, I didn’t grasp the significance of this translation for Berger’s work. Revolutionary claims in the Translators’ Note seemed excessive and naive. Last year, when asked to write an essay on non-Western approaches to Berger, I was delighted to find this edition of Return to My Native Land in the Brasch Collection. I finally realized that Berger’s statements about Black Liberation as a form of revolutionary freedom provide a context for understanding his donation of half his Booker Prize money to the British Black Panthers. They are also central to his theories about the revolutionary nature of Cubism and the theme of revolutionary freedom in his novel G. (1972). Now, these claims seem utopian, not naive.
(Chosen by Dr Rochelle Simmons, Department of English and Linguistics, Otago)]]>
Aimé Césaire (Translated from the French by John Berger and Anne Bostock)]]> Books]]>
Design Review was the country’s first journal of its type, which lasted for only six years, from 1948 to 1954. I first encountered it in the library of the Auckland Institute and Museum in the early 1980s where I was employed to work on an index of New Zealand designers and craftspeople. I learnt that the magazine was a project of the Architecture Centre, set up by Wellington students of the Auckland School of Architecture and various influential architects and artists including Ernst Plischke and E. Mervyn Thompson. Charles Brasch collected the Design Review; he had a good eye for such things. My PhD research focuses on the search for sophistication in architecture through travel between 1880 and 1950. Design Review is a window into the thinking of young design professionals of that time.
(Chosen by Michael Findlay, Professional Practice Fellow, Design, Division of Sciences, Otago)]]>
Architectural Centre]]> Periodicals]]>
Architectural Centre]]> Periodicals]]>