La Prose du Transsibérien, a poem about his trip in 1905 on the newly opened Trans-Siberian Express railway. The original 1913 edition – a Modernist masterpiece – was six feet in length, and according to legend, if the entire edition of 150 copies were laid end to end, they would be as tall as the Eiffel Tower.]]> Blaise Cendrars]]> Books]]> Paradise Lost, the epic poem on the ‘Creation’ and ‘Mankind’s Fall’. Samuel Prowett paid the British artist John Martin (1789-1854) 2000 guineas to produce 24 engravings to complement Milton’s famed text; he received a further 1500 guineas for a second smaller set of 24. The images he created are dramatic. Published in 1827, the two-volume book, and the prints (many sold separately) were a commercial success. This rare edition sits in the de Beer Collection, among many other outsized editions such as 16th century herbals, the voyages of Captain Cook, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, and the musical works of Handel. There is variety indeed.]]> John Milton]]> Books]]> Rev. William Arderne Shoults Collection is not just a collection of ecclesiastical volumes: sermons, church tracts, missals and breviaries, and the history of hymns. It contains books and manuscripts on many other subjects, a somewhat quirky collection on science, travel, philology, classical and modern literature. One such item is Mateo Alemán’s The Rogue, a very early picaresque but moralising novel depicting the life and adventures of Guzman de Alfarache, a street urchin. This is a variant copy of the first English language edition, printed in 1623 for Edward Blount (1562–1632), the London publisher associated with the Jaggards of the First Folio of Shakespeare fame (1623). Like his fellow Spanish countryman Cervantes, Alemán’s book was pirated, yielding very little money for him while alive.]]> Mateo Alemán]]> Books]]> Decoy Doll, a formulaic tale by Cleve F. Adams (1895-1949), a prolific pulp writer, who outdid Raymond Chandler with his brooding and corruptible Private Investigator. This title is one of the 900 or so Australian pulp fiction publications that form the Pulp Fiction Collection in Special Collections. The covers are often lurid – ‘high-octane’; the titles grab your attention (Nude in a Boat, No Blonde is an Island, or If the Coffin Fits), and the story lines are something else: awkward dialogue, simple plots, and improbable coincidences. There is a lot of ‘cleaning up the streets and righting wrongs’.]]> Cleve F. Adams]]> Books]]> The Puppet Masters was originally serialised in Galaxy Science Fiction (September, October, November 1951) and first published in book form the same year. In the story, Heinlein has American agents battling alien slug-like creatures who are able to control minds. Set in 2007, it was written against the paranoiac backdrop of the Cold War and the Red Scare in the United States. This volume is a UK printing of 1954 and is part of the Science Fiction Collection in Special Collections.]]> Robert A. Heinlein]]> Books]]> Johannes Marchesinus]]> Books]]> de Beer Collection were gifted to the University Library by Willi Fels. This delicate Italian manuscript is a Book of Hours, a religious work that contains a selection of short Offices, prayers and devotions, and a liturgical calendar. Books of Hours are the most numerous survivors of medieval manuscripts; almost every good household owned one. The text of this mid-fifteenth century (c.1450) work is all hand-written on fine vellum (treated calf skin). The blue and red rubrication is present, and the leaf displayed has a sliver of real gold in one initial.]]> Catholic Church]]> Manuscripts]]> Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando), printed in Venice in 1556. This chivalric romance is set in the time of Charlemagne’s Christian knights warring against the Saracen army. The poem contains 46 cantos and he used ottava rima, the famed ‘abababcc’ rhyming scheme. Not only was the work immensely successful, but this particular edition represents one of the high points of 16th century Italian illustrated books.]]> Ludovico Ariosto]]> Books]]> Scenes of Clerical Life was George Eliot’s first published work of fiction, and the first to contain her famous pseudonym. This stereotyped edition is from a ‘Novels of’ series published by Blackwood and Sons about 1880. It was owned by Fels, and has his signature at the front. Interestingly, this copy was passed on to his grandson Charles Brasch, who was the family genealogist. It contains his annotations and notes.]]> George Eliot]]> Books]]> de Beer Collection.]]> ___]]> Photographic prints]]> Poems and Ballads (1866) was his first collection of work and it contains elements of the above topics. It was popular and controversial. For some reason, Fels collected Swinburne first editions, owning some 18 titles. The plain unpretentious book label in this first Hotten edition records Fels’s gift to the University Library.]]> Algernon Charles Swinburne]]> Books]]> Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894) his first on his adopted country. Perhaps Fels, the connoisseur collector, met Hearn while in Tokyo.]]> Lafcadio Hearn]]> Books]]> Shoults Collection was placed on permanent loan with the University of Otago Library by the Board of Selwyn College. The collection numbers about 4200 volumes, the majority being pre-1801 imprints. It is rich in history, theology, science and travel, and includes fine examples of Greek and Roman classics, as well as a cache of Middle Eastern books and manuscripts. Among the treasures are 28 incunabula (pre-1501 printed books), including a single volume of a commentary on the Bible by Nicholas de Lyra (1481). It is bound in a scarce Rood and Hunt blind-stamped binding reinforced with fragments of indulgences printed by William Caxton, England’s first printer. It is the oldest known English binding in New Zealand.]]> ___]]> Photographic prints]]> Shoults Collection contains many volumes of small pamphlets bound together and given the generic title ‘Church Tracts’. Shoults was a curate who worked in four slum parishes of London: Walworth, Bunhill Row, Shoreditch, and Lombard Street. He favoured services that were ritualistic, such as a daily Eucharist, incense, altar lights, and colourful vestments. This was all part of a 19th century movement to rejuvenate and revitalise the Church of England. Alexander Heriot Mackonochie (1825-1887) was one of the leading members of the broader Catholic revival, and for carrying out ritualist practices at St Alban’s, Holborn, he was prosecuted and banned from preaching. Here is a third edition copy of his Meditation.]]> Edited by A.H. Mackonochie]]> Books]]> Davide Perseguitato by Virgilio Malvezzi (1595–1654), an Italian historian and essayist, not only contains the text of David Persecuted, but also a portion of a 15th century Italian Antiphonal. Here the rubricated vellum fragment has been used for the entire binding. The texts on the front and back covers are chants for Palm Sunday. There are 25 other examples of this fragment recycling in the Shoults Collection.]]> Virgilio Malvezzi]]> Book covers]]> Shoults Collection contains books that were not only owned by her, but also by her father, John Connell Ogle (1813-1871), a landscape and maritime painter. Ogle was a member of the Liverpool Water-colour Society, and former professor of drawing at the University, Corfu, which was the Ionian Academy, established by Frederick North, 5th Earl of Guilford (1766–1827), in 1824. This ‘biography’ on Malta and Gozo, an island of the Maltese archipelago, is by George Percy Badger (1815–1888), an Anglican missionary, whose expertise lay in churches of the East. The book was printed in Malta, and is signed and dated by Ogle, 1839.]]> George Percy Badger]]> Books]]> Shoults Collection contains 105 copies of these editions; a respectable number for any library. Many had engraved title-pages, like this second edition of Helvetiorum Respublica (1627), a reprint of works on Switzerland that initiated from Josias Simmler’s De Republica Helvetiorum (1576).]]> ___]]> Books]]> Ship York in the Shoults Collection is but one example, obtained outside his collecting fields of religious books, early printed books, and Elzevirs. This East Indiaman vessel made five voyages for the British East India Company between 1773 and 1787. On this particular journey to Madras and China in 1780, she was under command of Captain Arthur Blanshard.]]> Ship York]]> Books]]> incipit (beginning), De modo confitendi et De puritate conscientiae was penned by Matthew of Kraków (c. 1335–1410), a 14th century scholar-priest. This German printing of both works was done by the mysterious ‘Printer of the Gesta Christi’ in 1472.]]> Matthew of Kraków]]> Incunabula]]> Landfall, New Zealand’s premier literary magazine. He was a patron of the arts, offering support and encouragement to many artists and writers. He was also a fine poet, producing six volumes of verse. He translated volumes of Russian, German and Indian poetry, and wrote a memoir, published posthumously in 1980 as Indirections: A Memoir 1909-1947. He died on 20 May 1973. The Brasch Collection of 7,500 volumes is housed at Special Collections, University of Otago Library.]]> Evelyn Page]]> Painting]]> The Land and the People and Other Poems, his first volume of verse in an edition of 100 copies. Brasch had once written: ‘It was New Zealand I discovered, not England, because New Zealand lived in me as no other country could live, part of myself as I was part of it, the world I breathed and wore from birth, my seeing and my language’ (Indirections). The Land and the People (II), and its sequences, are part of his personal scrutiny.]]> Charles Brasch]]> Books]]> Letters to a Young Poet. From this edition, he translated passages for the second issue of Phoenix, perhaps the earliest translations of this writer to appear in English. Brasch was enthusiastic about the Letters, noting: ‘Yes they were addressed to me!’ The influence lasted, for Brasch collected and read other Rilke titles, including this Leonard and Virginia Woolf published edition of 1936.]]> Rainer Maria Rilke]]> Books]]> [Hermann Ranke]]]> Books]]> Collected Poems. The influence was profound: ‘Here was the work of a living poet which sounded like sea surge in my ears and haunted me no less than that of any of the great dead.’ In 1939, Yeats died as did Brasch’s sister Lesley. He wrote gloomily: ‘It was the worst time I had ever known.’ Yeats was always a constant. In 1927, he bought this copy of Yeats’s Red Hanrahan, a reprint from the original in 1897. Reading it, he was able to soak up Irish history and culture told in Yeats’s own inimitable style.]]> William Butler Yeats]]> Books]]> Landfall in 1966, Brasch embarked on a rigorous study of Russian. Within the Brasch Collection there is almost 7 linear metres of Russian literature, including works by Gorki, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Blok, Solzhenitsyn, and Pasternak. Typical of his own scholarly thoroughness, Brasch began translating some of their works. He tackled Boris Pasternak, of Dr Zhivago fame. Indeed, Brasch felt so confident in his language skills that he scribbled in Alec Brown’s translation of Pasternak’s Safe Conduct (1959) ‘an appalling translation’ and ‘crude & bad!’ Stefan Schimanski’s first English translation of Pasternak’s Collected Prose passed the Brasch test; there are no marks within.]]> Boris Leonidovich Pasternak]]> Books]]>