AntiquarianBookNews.com

Dear ABN readers,

Based on the warm support that I received, I decided that I will keep going with ABN. For now, I won’t change anything on the site. I will keep gathering all the news about the antiquarian and rare book news that I find. But feel free to give me any suggestion that you may have about the future of ABN.

Hervé

Dear ABN readers,

My name is Hervé, I am 31 years old, I am French and I live in Paris. I am not a book collector yet but I am very passionate about rare books. I created this site a year ago to serve the antiquarian and rare book community. At the time, I thought this community needed a place on the Internet to gather all the news about antiquarian and rare books. I am a Software Engineer, so I built this site to do so.

The principle is very simple. The site gathers news related to the community via RSS feeds. I am not going to talk about technical details here. But this site always posts articles publicly available on the Internet and displays them on the front page. The post title is always redirecting readers to the article source so I am not adapting the content to myself. My site is a nice benefit to the linked sites because they are getting some good traffic from it. I am always trying to select useful articles for the community, this task is not easy because I am still learning a lot about the community, but I am trying.

Here is my problem now. There is someone working for a famous book dealer who is trying to shut down my site. I won’t say his name because I don’t want to do any advertising to him. Last month, he contacted me asking me to display his articles on my website. He was jealous because I was posting links to other useful sites but not his website. I refused to post links to his articles. This man became crazy and he started accusing this site of plagiarism and criticized me for putting ebay links. The ebay links are there so I can pay for the site hosting and not to make any money. This man is doing everything as he cans to shut down my site. I guess he has nothing less more important to do. He even contacted Google so now the site is not indexed anymore on Google. This is the reason why I am writing this post.

In fact, I am surprised that after removing ABN from the Google Index, this site still has some good traffic and readers are coming back very often. So today I am offering this site to the community. This site won’t receive any more traffic from Google so only you will decide what I should do with this site. So let’s open a discussion about what the antiquarian community need.

I want you to write, as a comment of this post, your thoughts about the community and what should I do with this site. Should I close it? Should I keep posting links to news on other websites? Should I stop displaying Ebay Sales? Should I do something very different?  I don’t know, you decide, I am open to any comments. So please feel free to open your mind. This site is yours.

Hervé

Historian Edward Renehan has entered a guilty plea in the charge against him for stealing a Theodore Roosevelt letter from the TRA, Newsday reports. Admitting “I took a letter from the association and subsequently endeavored to sell that item,” Renehan pleaded guilty to the most serious charge, third-degree grand larceny (as prosecutors had said they would demand).

Nassau County court judge John Kase said Renehan’s sentence on this plea will run concurrently with the federal sentence he’ll receive in August for stealing Washington and Lincoln letters, also from the TRA. He’ll face 24-30 months in prison total. The county sentence will be handed down on 15 September.

TRA president James Bruns said of the plea “We’re pleased that this step of the process is over, and we’re awaiting the sentencing. We hope that in the interim, he turns over the additional property that we believe he has.” He told the paper that the association is still trying to determine how best to secure those further items they believe Renehan took. Renehan’s lawyer calls the idea that Renehan has more things “spurious,” and said that he believes Renehan’s sentence should include only probation and restitution.

Posting at Library Preservation, Kevin Drieger has some late updates from the Iowa flood zone. As of yesterday morning, officials at the main library at the University of Iowa reported “up to two inches of water is in the basement including the Special Collections storage area and the bookstacks storage area.” The materials had been removed from this area earlier, so “No collections are wet or appear to be in danger of getting wet.” The University is working to determine the best method for removing the water.

Kevin provides images and links to some places that weren’t as lucky: the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in Cedar Rapids, and the art library at the University of Iowa. The Czech & Slovak Museum reportedly was able to remove at least portions of its collections out of the building prior to the floodwaters’ arrival, and hopefully the art library was able to do the same.

At first blush, Jacob Hoefnagel’s book of fifty two engravings of insects, flowers and small animals from 1592 is anything but archetypal in its depiction of nature. The highly contrived arrangements are at times more like the scene of an infestation following a wedding banquet than an accurate portrayal of natural history specimens.

But for the era in which they were published, Hoefnagel’s depictions were - for those plants and animals not simply imagined or embellished - an important step towards the recording of flora and fauna in proper perspective and as a fair representation of reality. The book proved influential for still life artists in the 17th century and indeed, Maria Sybilla Merian (from the other day) is thought to have ‘borrowed’ the stag beetle illustration seen above for one of her exceptional watercolour sketches.

This suite of Hoefnagel engravings was published by Christoph Weigel in Frankfurt and is based on the paintings of Jacob’s father, Joris (Georg) Hoefnagel, a renowned Flemish manuscript illuminator. The final image above - ‘Allegory of Winter’ (1589) from Le Louvre - is one of the original Joris Hoefnagel works which gave rise to the engraved series.

The plates are accompanied by didactic biblical, classical and contemporary humanist epigrams and mottoes - connecting the series to the emblemata genre* - and there is said to be religious symbolism attached to the way in which some of the individual elements are organised in the illustrations.

It seems fairly obvious that at least some of the engraved plates above have been cut out and remounted. Some of the marginal handwriting noting species name and the like can be seen to disappear under the border of the illustrations at times.

The full title of the work is: ‘Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii Jacobus F. genio duce ab ipso scalpta omnibus philomusis amice D. ac perbenigne communicat’
[roughly: Archetype and verses by G Hoefnagel, his father, are presented, engraved in copper under the guidance of his genius and communicated in friendship to all lovers of the Muses by his son Jacob]

• ‘Archetypa Studiaque Patris’ (1592) was posted online this week by the Universities of Strasbourg Digital Library {click ‘See digitalized document’ and then click the folder icon at top left on the page that loads to see thumbnail images}
• This post at Giornale Nuovo is highly recommended and features a selection of images - mostly different to those above - from a modern reprint of the work. Mr H has provided background commentary on the artists which I have not sought to repeat here. Although some of the links are broken (a couple are below), the links in the last paragraph are definitely worth following.
• The Internet Archive version of this page provides some analysis of ‘Archetypa Studiaque Patris’.
• Updated link to the Joris Hoefnagel biography at the Getty Museum - note the images in the margin.
• A couple of used 1994 reprints are available at Amazon.

I’ll have more on today’s Christie’s phenomenal sale of the Richard Green Library in the morning, but I must note the whopping price paid for the first edition copy of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543). Presale estimates had suggested the book might go for up to $1.2 million, but after premiums the lot went for $2,210,500.

This copy, one of the widest-margined copies still in existence, was once owned by Frenchman Nicolas-Joseph Foucault (1643-1721), described in the Christie’s catalogue as an “archeologist [sic], early bibliophile, lawyer, politician and administrator.” After Foucault, the copy’s provenance went like this, according to the catalogue: “Myron Prinzmetal (1908-1987), cardiologist, purchased this copy in 1957 from F. Thomas Heller, New York, who had acquired it from Librarie Thomas-Scheler, Paris, listed by Scheler in his Catalogue nouvelle serie no. 1 (1957); sold by Zeitlin & VerBrugge to Richard Green in 1975.”

The sale total nearly doubled the $6 million presale estimate. I’ll have more highlights (and there are quite a few more highlights) in the morning.