Archives & Special Collections Digital Library at Brandeis University

The Scourge : or, Monthly Expositor of Imposture and Folly. London: Printed by W.N. Jones for M. Jones, 1811.

2011-03-16T08:08:00.000-07:00

William N. Jones’s iconoclastic journal The Scourge: Monthly Expositor of Literary, Dramatic, Medical, Political, Mercantile and Religious Imposture and Folly (1811-1816) presents a cornucopia of biting satire aimed at every area of British society. What it is perhaps best known for is its presentation of George Cruikshank’s early work. Cruikshank’s hand-colored engravings were folded into the front of each issue (with extras being sold as separate prints). A famed British caricaturist and book illustrator whose many notable works include the illustrations for Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz, The Mudfog Papers, and Oliver Twist, Cruikshank began his long and prolific career as a teenager drawing for The Scourge. The caricatures he created therein were highly radical, political, and informed, and as such move beyond mere decoration to intellectual and historical significance.

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The Complete Cynic

2011-01-19T07:22:00.000-08:00

The Complete Cynic: Being Bunches of Wisdom Culled from the Calendars of Olive Herford, Ethel Watts Mumford, Addison Mizner. San Francisco, Calif. : P. Elder & Co., 1910.

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.

Brandeis breaks the thousandth book mark: special four-part entry

2010-06-29T07:15:00.000-07:00

This special four-part entry marks a milestone reached by Brandeis University: the scanning of our one thousandth publication on the Internet Archive website. The first entry, The Law of God, was the millionth book added to the Brandeis Libraries' collection in 1996. We thought it fitting that this volume would mark our one thousandth contribution to the Internet Archive. The subsequent entries demonstrate the breadth of materials we've selected for digitization.

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.

History of Boston Theater Comes to Life

2010-02-01T08:17:00.000-08:00

The History of the Boston Theatre, 1854-1901. Compiled with the assistance of Quincy Kilby. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908. xv, 550 p. illus., ports. 26 cm.

The History of the Boston Theatre is a four-volume set describing and illustrating the productions mounted by theater companies in Boston, season by season, between 1854 and 1901. The copy in the Brandeis collection, digitized and available on the Internet Archive, is unique: bound in with the existing pages are portraits of actors (many with original inscriptions), theater programs, theater reviews clipped from journals, and hand-written correspondence, making the set even richer for research.

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 Boston banker and politician. The set was given to Brandeis by Mr. and Mrs. Herman A. Mintz; Herman Mintz was a Boston attorney and founding partner of the prominent law firm Mintz Levin. Mr. Mintz had a special interest in Boston theater.

The History of the Boston Theatre is available on the Internet Archive website: http://tinyurl.com/yz3tdpo