In December of 2015, just before we left for winter break, the Buddy Taub Foundation (Dennis and Jill Roach, directors) donated $75,000 to Colorado College Special Collections. The foundation slated the money for a particular purchase: a small collection of extremely rare Bauhaus materials.

The collection is made up of a handful of rather amazing items. First, the three-page Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses in Weimar, German architect Walter Gropius’s 1919 manifesto for the Bauhaus movement. It is illustrated with the famous “Kathedrale” woodcut by Lyonel Feininger (image at right). This particular copy was a gift from Gropius to his student and colleague Chester Nagel. Fewer than ten copies of this fragile document are known to have survived.

Second, a test print of the “Kathedrale” woodcut, somewhat smaller than the print used for the cover of the Programm. This, too, was a gift from Gropius to Nagel. There’s a similar test print at the Museum of Modern Art.

Third, a copy of Satzungen Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, the 1922 handbook for Weimar Bauhaus school, printed soon after the school’s adoption of Gropius’s maxim “Kunst und Technik – eine neue Einheit” (“Art and technology, a new unity”). One of only three known copies in the world.

Fourth, a pair of original Gropius designs in pencil. One is the name of his daughter, “Manon Gropius,” in shaded block letters; the other is a series of architectural sketches.

(Side note: printer of the Press at Colorado College Aaron Cohick tells us of an interesting Colorado/Bauhaus connection: Bauhaus artist Herbert Bayer moved to Aspen after he left Germany; he had solo shows at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in 1947 and 1962.)

The Buddy Taub Foundation’s mission is to make funds available to museums and research libraries for the purchase of desirable materials they would not otherwise be able to afford. The Foundation hand-picks the institutions and items for purchase. Past recipients include the Pierpont Morgan, Huntington, and Lilly libraries, among others. Colorado College is thrilled to be in such illustrious company!

After spending the incredible $10,000 gift from the Woman’s Educational Society, we here at Special Collections decided we weren’t quite finished acquiring important books related to women’s history.

Members of the faculty of CC’s Feminist and Gender Studies program had directed us to Duke University’s Project Vox, which in turn called our attention to Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet (1706-1749), an important and influential scientist. We were able to purchase two editions of Émilie du Châtelet’s Institutions de Physique: the first edition, in French, from 1740, which was published anonymously; and an Italian translation, with attribution, published in 1743.

If you’re not fluent in French or Italian but you’d like to know more about du Châtelet, you might try David Bodanis’s 2006 book Passionate Minds, which is subtitled “the great love affair of the Enlightenment, featuring the scientist Emilie Du Châtelet, the poet Voltaire, sword fights, book burnings, assorted kings, seditious verse, and the birth of the modern world.” It’s available at the CC library.

This is the fifth and final report on how we spent the $10,000 gift we received from the Woman’s Educational Society:

Irwin P. Beadle.  Beadle’s Dime Book of Etiquette: A Practical Guide to Good Breeding. New York: Beadle & Adams, [ca. 1890]. Revised and enlarged edition. A manual for behaving properly in society, useful for understanding the history of gender. We learn that “some men have a mania for Greek and Latin quotations; this is a peculiarity to be avoided. Nothing is more wearisome than pedantry.” Ladies, on the other hand, should “always maintain a dignity of character, and never condescend to trifle” in conversation.

Robinson, William Davis. Memoirs of the Mexican Revolution: Including a Narrative of the Expedition of General Xavier Mina. Philadelphia: Lydia R. Bailey, 1820. First edition, edges untrimmed. Lydia R. Bailey (1779-1869) was the first woman printer in Philadelphia, inheriting her husband’s floundering press in 1808. (She was followed soon after by Jane Aitken (1810) and Ann Cochran (1812). Under Bailey’s management, the press thrived for five decades. At its peak, it employed forty workers and was one of the largest printing establishments in the city. (For more information, see Loena M. Hudak’s Early American Women Printers and Publishers, Scarecrow Press, 1978.)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Concerning Children. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1900. This is the fourth book by Gilman, best known for her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” and her novel Herland. In it, she argues that mothers and children would both benefit from group childcare centers. The decorative binding, signed “MLP,” is by Marion Louise Peabody.

THANK YOU, W.E.S.!!!

We continue our report on how we spent the $10,000 gift we received from the Woman’s Educational Society, celebrating several more works of literature by women authors.

Louisa May Alcott. Jo’s Boys. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1886. First edition, first state (text block measures 1 1/16 inches), in brown cloth. Following up on Little Women and Little Men, this is Alcott’s final book featuring Jo March.

Jane Austen. Persuasion. Westport, Connecticut: The Limited Editions Club, 1977. With an introduction by Louis Auchincloss and illustrations by Tony Buonpastore. Designed by Robert L. Dothard and printed at the Stinehour Press. Copy 1009 of 1600 signed by the artist.

Emily Dickinson. Poems: Second Series. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1892. First Edition, early printing. (Special Collections owns the preeminent collection of the papers of Dickinson’s childhood friend, the writer Helen Hunt Jackson. Until now, however, we have never owned any 19th century editions of Dickinson’s collections of poetry.)

Edith Wharton. The Age of Innocence. Avon, Connecticut: The Limited Editions Club, 1973. With an introduction by R.W.B. Lewis and illustrations by Lawrence Beall Smith.  Designed by Philip Grushkin and printed at the Press of the Archer. Copy 389 of 2000 signed by the artist.

Laura Ingalls Wilder. On the Banks of Plum Creek. Illustrated by Helen Sewell and Mildred Boyle. New York: Harper & Brothers, c. 1937. Ninth edition, in dust jacket.

We continue our report on how we spent the $10,000 gift we received from the Woman’s Educational Society, celebrating several works of literature by women authors. (More in the next post.)

Charlotte Brontë (publishing as Currer Bell). Shirley. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1849. First edition. “Triple decker” (three volume set), beautifully re-bound in half leather.

bell hooks. And There We Wept. Los Angeles: Published by Gloria Watkins / Golemics, 1978. This unpaginated poetry chapbook is bell hooks’s first book. Her next book, Ain’t I a Woman, addresses problems of race and class within feminism.

Ann Radcliffe. The Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance. London: G.G. and J. Robinson, 1794. Second edition, in four volumes. (This second edition appeared the same year as the first.) Bound in half-calf over marbled boards. Radcliffe is widely considered to be the mother of the Gothic novel, and Jane Austen references Udolpho repeatedly in her Gothic satire, Northanger Abbey.

Alice Walker. The Color Purple. Illustrated by Brad Teare. Norwalk, Connecticut: Easton Press, 2000. Originally published in 1982, Walker’s novel has been made into a film, a Broadway musical, and this “collector’s edition,” part of the subscription series “Great Books of the 20th Century.” We look forward to comparing this edition (green with gilt) with the first edition (in jacket).

The Moss Rose. New York: Leavitt & Allen, [ca. 1855]. Gift book containing Mary Shelley’s “Sisters of Albano” along with stories and poems by many other women authors. Decorative binding, all edges gilt.

We continue our report on how we spent the $10,000 gift we received from the Woman’s Educational Society, celebrating three foundational feminist works newly acquired for Special Collections:

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage. History of Woman Suffrage. Rochester, New York: Charles Mann, 1887. Three volumes (volume 1: 1848-1861; volume 2: 1861-1876; volume 3: 1876-1885). A comprehensive overview of the woman suffrage movement by those who led it.

Virginia Woolf. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929. In dust jacket designed by Vanessa Bell. First American edition, simultaneous with British edition.  

Betty Friedan. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1963. First edition, in jacket. Friedan researches and describes what she calls “the problem that has no name” — the dissatisfaction and depression of materially-comfortable American housewives in the 1950s.

The Woman’s Educational Society of Colorado College has a long history of supporting Special Collections. In the 1960s and 70s, the WES provided furnishings for our reading room; we still use these shelves and drawers even now, though some of them have become a bit stubborn and difficult with age (dare I say … like all of us?).

This year, the WES decided to make a different kind of long-term gift to Special Collections: $10,000 for the department to spend “for the purpose of enhancing the college curriculum by acquiring significant books and documents that focus on women’s history and women’s contributions to society.”

I shall be reporting over the next few weeks on acquisitions made with this generous gift, starting with an important 16th century edition of a book on women’s health:

Magnus Albertus (attrib.). De Secretis Mulierum Libellus… [The Secrets of Women.] Lugduni [Lyon, France]: Ioannes Quadratus, 1580. Small leatherbound book in Latin on topics such as menstruation, sexual reproduction, and pregnancy. Extremely rare: this is one of only three known copies in U.S. libraries and fewer than ten worldwide. A portion of Helen Rodnite Lemay’s 1992 English translation of the text is available from Google Books. 21st century readers beware: you won’t find a lot of reliable medical information in this book, which is based on 13th and 14th century manuscripts attributed to Magnus Albertus but probably actually produced by multiple (male) authors.

We also purchased a much more common (and affordable) book on the same topic:

Aristotle (pseud.).  The works of Aristotle, the famous philosopher, in four parts. Containing. I. His complete masterpiece; displaying the secrets of nature in the generation of man … 2. His experienced midwife; absolutely necessary for surgeons, midwives, nurses and child bearing women. 3. His book of problems, containing various questions and answers, relative to the state of man’s body. 4. His last legacy; unfolding the secrets of nature respecting the generation of man. New-England: Printed for the publishers, 1831. Colloquially known as “Aristotle’s Masterpiece” (so one could request it in a bookshop without embarrassment), versions of this text were first published in the late 16th century. Nevertheless, the book contains even more misinformation than The Secrets of Women, with illustrations that only compound the problem. Apparently, for example, if a woman thinks bad thoughts while she is pregnant, her baby may be born covered in fur.

Special Collections has been receiving a number of unusual and wonderful books from the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, which donated its library to Colorado College last year. Special Collections Cataloger Amy Brooks draws our attention to one of these recent acquisitions, several 1932 issues of The USSR in Construction, a monthly magazine. You can read all about it here and see images here.

According to Alexandre Antique Prints, Maps & Books, Toronto, Canada, 2015, “…the real beauty of these magazines was not in ideology but in artistic design. [Alexander] Rodchenko and [Maxim] Gorki were avant-garde specialists and their methods of printing and layout are legendary. The magazine has lived on to become a fascinating example of Soviet propaganda; Stalin’s attempt to show the world that his rebuild was sustainable.”