Wednesday, March 16, 2011
The Scourge : or, Monthly Expositor of Imposture and Folly. London: Printed by W.N. Jones for M. Jones, 1811.
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Wednesday, January 19, 2011
The Complete Cynic
The Dial a Semi-Monthly Journal of Literary Criticism, Discussion and Information, Chicago, December 16, 1910 calls it “a mirth-provoking collection of distorted proverbs with appropriate illustrations and decorations.”
When an author and a famous resort architect meet in Waikiki, there is no telling what may happen. From The Many Mizners (Addison Mizner, Sears Publishing, 1932): “One day I twisted an old adage to fit the time, and Ethel came back with a quotation from Oliver Herford. We began twisting all the old saws and bringing them up-to-date. We got 365 together and sent them to Elder & Shepard in San Francisco to be printed for our Christmas presents. Elder wrote back and asked us if he could publish it for sale, with a few cuts.” The result was the clever and cheeky The Cynic’s Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1903, thrown together on a whim by Ethel Watts Mumford (the author) and Addison Mizner (the architect) with some added (and unintentional) help from writer, artist, and illustrator Oliver Herford. It became a smash hit and was reincarnated several times over. The Complete Cynic is a fully developed book based on the wit of the original calendar.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Brandeis breaks the thousandth book mark: special four-part entry
Isaac Leeser. Sefer Torat ha-Elohim/The Law of God. First edition. 1845.
Isaac Leeser was a nineteenth-century American Jewish leader and the leader of Philadelphia’s Sephardic synagogue Mikveh Israel. In addition to publishing many textbooks for children and translating the Sephardic prayer book, Leeser founded the first American rabbinical school and the newspaper The Occidental. In 1845 he published the first Jewish translation of the Bible in the United States. Leeser’s work was based primarily on German Jewish translations and on traditional Jewish Bible scholarship, while aiming to make its style as close to the King James translation as possible. The Leeser translation soon became widely accepted and remained the standard Jewish translation until the publication of the Jewish Publication Society translation in 1917. In 1996 the Brandeis University National Women’s Committee (now known as the Brandeis National Committee) donated a copy of Leeser’s 1845 translation of the Five Books of Moses, Torat ha-Elohim / The Law of God, to the Library.
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Clarence Cook. Art and Artists of our Time. 1888.
Art and Artists of our Time is a six-volume set written by the distinguished nineteenth century critic Clarence Cook. Cook (1828-1900), considered to be the first professional art critic in the United States, was editor of the Pre-Raphaelite journal The New Path and longtime art critic for the New York Tribune. The six volumes of Art and Artists of our Time are profusely illustrated with engravings that reproduce the works of the most admired artists of the period (the book was published in 1888) and present a revealing glimpse into contemporary artistic taste, with its emphasis on aesthetics and morality over formalism.
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Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. First edition. 1847.
The first edition of Jane Eyre, published on October 16th, 1847, sold out within a few months, which was unprecedented at the time. A first edition of this book is extremely rare, because most copies of this edition were read to pieces. A second edition was published in January, 1848, and the third edition in April of 1848. The three-volume format was a popular one for novels at the time of publication.
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The Brandeis University Bulletin. Brandeis University. 1948- .
The Brandeis University Bulletin (1948-present) is a rich resource that provides much more than university course offerings. Particularly in the early years of the school's founding, the Bulletin was used as a promotional publication that featured photographs of campus buildings (new and old), campus maps, and even master plans with fold-outs. In addition to documenting the physical campus, bulletins listed university fellows; endowment, scholarship, and loan funds; research grants; student prizes; and faculty and renowned individuals who participated in General Education S, a former course requirement for all seniors at Brandeis.
Click here to view these catalogs on the Internet Archive.
Monday, February 1, 2010
History of Boston Theater Comes to Life
The History of the Boston Theatre is a four-volume set describing and illustrating the productions mounted by theater companies in
Some of the correspondence, programs, portraits, and signatures tipped in to the Brandeis set after it was published indicate that the additional materials might have been added by Wilmot Evans, a prominent
The History of the Boston Theatre is available on the Internet Archive website: http://tinyurl.com/yz3tdpo