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]]> McGlashan Collection.]]> ___]]> Books]]> de Beer Collection.]]> ___]]> Photographic prints]]> 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]]> ___]]> Portraits]]> Brasch Collection totals some 160 linear metres of books. This includes 22 boxes full of ephemeral booklets, pamphlets and keepsakes. Brasch’s pictorial collection – housed at the Hocken Library – numbered 461 art pieces. Artists represented in that collection included Esmond Atkinson, R.S. Carson, Evelyn Page, Ralph Hotere, Janet Paul, Doris Lusk, and Colin McCahon. Brasch was a staunch friend of McCahon. From one of Brasch’s pamphlet boxes is a scarce hand list of a McCahon exhibition that ran from July 1947 to September 1948 in the Dunedin Public Library. It begins: ‘Colin McCahon’s paintings startle and even shock us at first sight because he does not paint the world as we are accustomed to see it and think of it every day.’ It is signed ‘C.B’, that is, Charles Brasch.]]> [Colin McCahon]]]> Pamphlets]]> [Colin McCahon]]]> Pamphlets]]> [Hermann Ranke]]]> 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]]> Monro Collection consists of about 400 printed medical books and manuscripts owned in turn, and added to, by a father (primus 1697-1767), son (secundus 1733-1817), and grandson (tertius 1773-1859) – all of whom were called Alexander Monro. They were all medical doctors, and held the Chair of Anatomy at Edinburgh University. In 1929, the collection was transferred to the Otago Medical School, a gift facilitated by the grandson of Alexander Monro tertius, Dr Charles Monro Hector (d. 1935), a resident of New Zealand. This volume was written by Monro primus, and the published work has been interleaved so manuscript notes could be added by the author.]]> Alexander Monro]]> Books]]> tertius (1773-1859) held the Chair of Anatomy at Edinburgh University for about 50 years, initially in tandem with his father, Monro secundus. Tertius’s reputation as a teacher was not great, which was perhaps an unfair assessment. However, Charles Darwin was a student of his, and lamented Monro’s ‘dull’ teaching style, and dirty habit. This volume contains various publications bound together. The plate showing a child with hydrocephaly accompanies one of Monro tertius’s many publications. Interestingly, during his career, he dissected the corpse of the ‘body snatcher’, William Burke (1792-1829), and afterwards wrote a letter in Burke’s blood.]]> Alexander Monro, Jun.]]> Books]]> 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]]> secundus and tertius. One of his students, Sir Astley Cooper (1768-1841) described him as a ‘good anatomist’ but a ‘horrid lecturer’. The front pastedown of this volume contains an inscription which reads ‘Alexr Monro MD/ Craiglockhart/James Monro/a present from his Papa 1822’. James (1806-1870) and his brother, David (1813-77) both became doctors. David emigrated to New Zealand in 1841, which is how the Monro Collection came to be housed here in Dunedin.]]> Andrew Fyfe]]> Books]]> de Beer Collection contains manuscripts and printed books, totalling some 8000 volumes. Apart from the Evelyn and Locke publications, there is a large collection of 16th to 18th century travel books to Italy and Rome. These reflect de Beer’s interest in the European ‘Grand Tour’, something that both Evelyn and Locke undertook. De Beer’s enthusiasm for things Italian was infectious. Indeed, it spread to his cousin Charles Brasch, who also had a strong fondness for Italy. Baldassarre Orsini (1732-1810) was an architect and historian of Italian art. Here is an engraving of the surrounds by Tufillo Bridge, opposite the chapter by Orsini describing the old parish church in the district of Santa Maria Intervineas, near Ascoli Piceno, Italy.]]> Baldassarre Orsini]]> Books]]> 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]]> 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]]> Scientific Expedition Reports in about 2013. They are rich in colourful plates and photographs, scientific descriptions, anthropological and geographical observations, and general insights into expeditionary life. From the Arctic to the Antarctic, from Uganda to Patagonia, the earliest of the reports dates from Dumont D’Urville’s expedition in the Astrolabe 1826-29, and the latest are from the University of Canterbury Snares Islands Expeditions beginning in the 1960s. This volume contains the findings of the voyage of HMS Alert, captained by George Strong Nares (1831-1915), which was an expedition to explore the waters in and around Patagonia, Polynesia and the Mascarene Island group in the Indian Ocean near Madagascar. This plate features detailed drawings of some ‘Alcyonarians’ or corals.]]> British Museum]]> Books]]> Hogg Collection contains about 100 volumes; some manuscript material, mainly letters; and ephemera. The collection includes Hogg’s own publications, other books owned by Hogg (with some proprietorial inscriptions), and acquisitions made by the Special Collections Librarian. This book, by Hogg’s great-great-grandson, Bruce Gilkison, recounts his re-creation of Hogg’s Highland travels in the early 1800s. In recent years, the life and works of James Hogg have experienced a resurgence of interest, and Special Collections is lucky enough to have some unique items associated with the Ettrick Shepherd.]]> Bruce Gilkison]]> 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]]> 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]]> 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]]> Diamond Jenness]]> Books]]> Erotica and Folio Society Collections to Special Collections. There are over 1000 volumes, and at this stage, about three-quarters of them have been catalogued. This volume, on display, highlights Eastern erotica.]]> Edited and introduced by Charles Fowkes]]> Books]]> 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]]> eros, and over the centuries many familiar literary names have taken up the pen to write their own version of the genre: Sappho (6th cent. BC), Catullus (1st cent. BC), Peter Abelard (1079-1142), François Rabelais (1494-1553), Aphra Behn (1640-89), Robert Burns (1759-96), George Sand (1804-76), Colette (1873-1954), and William S. Burroughs (1914-97), to name a few. The image on the front of this anthology is from a painting by English artist, John William Waterhouse (1849-1917), and depicts the Greek and Roman legend of Hylas being enraptured by the water nymphs.]]> Edited by Derek Parker]]> Books]]>