Yale Law Library - Rare Books Blog : Provenance

A trophy of the War of 1812

Mike Widener — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 20:55:00 GMT

Earlier this week -- August 19, to be exact -- was the 200th anniversary of one of the U.S. Navy's most famous battles, the victory of the U.S.S. Constitution over the H.M.S. Guerriere in the War of 1812.

A trophy from that battle resides in the Yale Law Library's Rare Book Collection. The trophy is the 11-volume collected works of the German jurist Johann Gottlieb Heineccius, published in Naples 1759-1777. The note at right, written on the flyleaf of Volume 1 by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story (1779-1845), gives the extraordinary story. Here is a transcription of Justice Story's note:

"These volumes were ordered by J. Story from Italy. On their passage to the U.S. they were captured by the British Frigate Guerrière & afterwards recaptured in the memorable engagement with the American Frigate Constitution commanded by Capt. Hull -- 19 of August 1812. By the politeness of Capt. Hull I received them on his victorious return to the U.S."

Below this note, Story copied a brief passage from Sir James Mackintosh's Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations (London, 1799): "It is hardly necessary to take any notice of the text-book of Heineccius, the best writer of elementary books with whom I am acquanited on any subject." Heineccius was a law professor at Halle and a prolific author, described by the Oxford Companion to Law (1980) as "a great expositor who tried to treat law as a rational discipline and not merely an empirical art."

The title page of the volume, shown below, shows that the set of Heineccius was once in the collection of the Harvard Law Library, where Story was law professor from 1829 until his death in 1845. The set was among the many duplicates that the Harvard Law Library sold off in the late 19th century. My guess is that Story's inscription was overlooked when the set was put up for sale. Happy accident for Yale!

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

Early Law Books and Their Readers, Part 2

Mike Widener — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 18:54:00 GMT

In my previous post I sought help identifying a signature that is found in many of the books that came from the library of the German legal historian Konrad von Maurer (1823-1902). Von Maurer's law books were acquired in 1904 by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and later came to our Rare Book Collection. I have an answer, not from my colleagues at the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) 2012 annual meeting in Boston where I showed the images, but via Facebook. My friend the legal historian Mark Weiner forwarded my query to his European colleagues. One of them, Professor Dr. Peter Gröschler (Chair for Civil Law and Roman Law, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz), explained that the signature is an old German style of script and that it reads "Maurer". Since the earliest examples of this signature date from 1823, the year Konrad von Maurer was born, the signature is probably that of his father, Georg Ludwig von Maurer (1790-1872), himself a legal historian and statesman.

This reinforces one of the points I made at my AALL presentation, namely that crowdsourcing via social media is a powerful and useful tool for solving provenance questions. My thanks to Mark Weiner and Professor Gröschler for their help.

All of the examples I showed at AALL are in a Flickr gallery, "Connecting Roman Law Books."

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

Early Law Books and Their Readers

Mike Widener — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 02:41:00 GMT

On July 23, I am giving a brief presentation, "Early Law Books and Their Readers: Examples from the Yale Law Library," at the American Association of Law Libraries 2012 annual meeting in Boston. It is part of a session, "Connecting Roman Law Books: Commentaries, Marginalia, Bookplates and More," offered by the Roman Law Interest Group, part of the Foreign, Comparative & International Law Special Interest Section, and organized by my colleague Lucia Diamond, Senior Librarian at the Robbins Collection, University of California-Berkeley School of Law.

The images I am showing can also be seen in a Flickr gallery, "Connecting Roman Law Books."

As part of my presentation, I am asking for help in reading and identifying the signature shown below. It appears in dozens of the books that once were part of the library of Konrad von Maurer (1823-1902), a professor of law at the University of Munich who was a leading scholar of early Germanic and Nordic law. Von Maurer's law books were acquired in 1904 by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York; since 2006 the majority of them have come to the Yale Law Library, with some going to the Jacob Burns Law Library, George Washington University. The dates on these signatures begin in the early 1820s and end around 1860; see the Flickr gallery for more examples. It would seem that von Maurer acquired this individual's library en bloc. I'll be grateful for any clues.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

Johann Peter von Ludewig

Mike Widener — Tue, 22 May 2012 02:41:00 GMT

In the previous post I discussed a book by Johann Peter von Ludewig (1668-1743), one of the leading German jurists and historians of the early 18th century. I would be remiss if I did not mention that our Rare Book Collection includes a book from Ludewig's personal library.The book is De nobilitate, de principibus, de ducibus, de comitibus, de baronibus, de militibus, equitibus (Amsterdam & Leiden, 1686) by Antonius Matthaeus, a treatise on the nobility and church government of the Netherlands.

The volume bears Ludewig's enormous bookplate, commemorating an honor conferred upon him by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, and it also has Ludewig's autograph on the verso of the title page.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

Russian Imperial Provenance

Mike Widener — Sat, 12 May 2012 15:29:00 GMT

The Lillian Goldman Law Library is one of the few U.S. libraries that owns a set of the Complete Collected Laws of the Russian Empire (Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii). We now know that our set is an Imperial set, one that came from a palace of the Tsars.

Tatjana Lorkovic, Curator of Slavic and East European Collections, Yale University Library, provides a detailed account of the set's acquisition in her recent article, "The Past as Prologue: Building Yale University Library’s Slavic and East European Collection from the Beginning of the Twentieth Century until Today; Part One: 1896-1956," SOLANUS: International Journal for the Study of the Printed and Written Word in Russia and East-Central Europe, New Series, vol. 22 (2011), pp. 43-62. In summary, it came about as follows.

In 1927 Professor George Vernadsky, a Russian emigre, was hired by Yale to teach Russian history, and also to help the library develop its Russian holdings. Vernadsky reported that the most significant gap in Yale's collection was a set of the Complete Collected Laws of the Russian Empire (Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii), a 232-volume set. Vernadsky found a set for sale and warned that it could be Yale's last chance to acquire a complete set. The hefty price tag was initially an obstacle, but Law Librarian Frederick C. Hicks (1875-1956) stepped forward and committed the Law Library to the purchase. The set was purchased from a New York dealer, Simeon J. Bolan, who specialized in Russian books.

The 1920s-30s were the Golden Age for accessioning choice items of Russian origin as the Soviet State sold off unwanted early books in order to earn desperately needed foreign currency and finance ambitious economic plans.

The set is bound in a stunning bright green morocco with the Imperial arms in gold stamped on the front cover as a super libros (see the image below). The Imperial arms are sufficient to indicate Imperial provenance, but precisely to whom did the set belong? The answer lies in at the base of the spine, where the Russian text identifies the origin of the set as the Elagin Palace (see the image at right).

The Elagin Palace, located on the Elagin Island in St. Petersburg, became the summer home of the Empress Maria Fedorovna (1759-1828), mother of Emperor Alexander I (1777-1825). The original building was commissioned by I. P. Elagin, a St. Petersburg merchant, who is believed to have retained Giacomo Quarenghi (1744-1817), the most noted architect of his day in Russia and a pre-eminent practitioner of the Palladian style, to design the edifice. Emperor Alexander purchased the Palace to ease the burdens of travel for his mother, who found the trip to the outlying palaces at Tsarskoe selo to be too strenuous. Carlo di Giovanni Rossi (1775-1849) was retained to redesign and enlarge the estate. After the death of Maria Fedorovna, Elagin Palace declined into a summer residence for the Imperial family and gradually a place of diversion for Russian prime ministers, among them S. Witte (1849-1915) and P. A. Stolypin (1862-1911). The buildings sustained heavy damage during the Second World War. After restoration the palace became and remains a museum devoted to porcelain, glass, and some folk arts. The island is a popular park these days and has been used in Soviet films as a backdrop.

Although Empress Maria Fedorovna had a bookplate (represented in the Yale bookplate collection), the Collected Laws of the Russian Empire was published shortly after her death and therefore represented a “Palace set” rather than a personal copy.

W. E. Butler, Dickinson School of Law, Pennsylvania State University
Mike Widener, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School

New Flickr gallery: Bookplates

Mike Widener — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 02:52:00 GMT

The latest addition to the Rare Book Collection's Flickr galleries is a set dedicated to bookplates. The Bookplates set is a project of Drew Adan, Library Services Assistant in our Collections & Access department. He will be adding more images of bookplates in the coming weeks and months.

The set includes bookplates of the famous, such as the bookplate of Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780), author of Commentaries of the Laws of England, the most influential book in the history of Anglo-American common law. His bookplate is in a copy of John Locke's Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (4th ed.; London 1700), which we recently acquired for our Blackstone Collection:

We will also seek help in identifying bookplates, such as this colorful one found in the Summa aurea of Hostiensis (Lyon 1556):

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

Provenance Puzzle #3 solved!

Mike Widener — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 23:10:00 GMT

Another provenance puzzle solved! I was intrigued by the inscription on the title page of Charles du Moulin's Consilia quatuor (Paris, 1552), because I had remembered seeing the same inscription on a law dictionary I had purchased when I was at the Tarlton Law Library, University of Texas at Austin: Jakob Spiegel's Lexicon Iuris Civilis (1554).

The colleague who took my place at Tarlton, Elizabeth Haluska-Rausch (Rare Books Librarian and Archivist) was kind enough to decipher the inscription, and provided considerable detail on the book's early owner.

The inscription reads "Bibliotheca Slakoverdensis Scholarum Piarum", i.e. the library of the Piarist college in Schlackenwerth, the modern day Ostrov, Czech Republic. The Piarists are a monastic order dedicated to education. The order's official name is Order of Poor Clerks Regular of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools (Ordo Clericorum Regularium Pauperum Matris Dei Scholarum Piarum).

In an email to me, Elizabeth explained that the order "was founded by Saint Joseph Calasanz, and recognized by Pope Paul V in 1617. In 1622, Gregory XV approved the Constitutions, and conferred the privileges of the mendicant orders upon the order. In 1666, Anna Magdalena Duchess von Sachsen-Lauenburg founded a Piarist college in what was then Schlackenwerth. The complex was consecrated in 1674. The community disbanded in 1876. Major donations to the library included the collection of Princess Maria Piccolomini. In 1910 the library was sold by the last owner – the municipality of Ostrov - to a Viennese second-hand bookshop. There are still quite a few books from this library for sale. For more information, see Wenzl Sommer, Kurze Geschichte der Stadt Schlackenwerth in Verbindung mit dem Piaristen-collegium: Nebst Anhang: Der grosse Brand am 9. Mai 1866 (Selbstverlag des Verfassers, 1866), available in Google Books."

Thanks to Elizabeth Haluska-Rausch for solving this puzzle for me. An image of Tarlton's Lexicon Iuris Civilis, with the inscription "Bibliotheca Slakoverdensis Scholarum Piarum", can be seen on Tarlton's website, announcing their current exhibit, "Rare Law Dictionaries at Tarlton Law Library." If you're in the Austin area, this exhibit is well worth a visit.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

Provenance puzzle #2 -- solved!

Mike Widener — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 02:39:00 GMT

I have two people to thank for independently solving my Provenance Puzzle #2: my friend the San Antonio tax attorney and bibliophile Farley Katz, and Christopher Frey of Antiquariat Inlibris Gilhofer in Vienna.

The armorial stamp, shown at left, is of the Austrian nobleman Joseph Anton von der Halden (1665-1728) from Vorarlberg, who was created Baron in 1686. The letters around the border of the stamp, "I A E V D H F Z A H Z A V O", stand for "Ioseph Anton Eusebius von der Halden Freiherr zu Authenried Herr zu Anhofen und Ochsenbrunn."

This stamp is found on fourteen folio volumes that came to the Lillian Goldman Law Library as part of the Roman-Canon Law Collection of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. They are all bound in stamped pigskin over wooden boards with rounded spines.

Farley Katz provided his solution via the wonderful Can You Help? website sponsored by the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) and operated by Dr. David Shaw. It enables users to post images and descriptive information for bookplates, armorial stamps, and other provenance evidence that they cannot identify, in the hopes that others can provide answers. It's crowd-sourcing for provenance research. Farley's solution to Provenance Puzzle #2 can be found here.

Christopher Frey provided an additional source for von der Halden: Alexander Schneder, "Die Von der Halden in Vorarlberg. Eine genealogische Studie", in Jahrbuch der Heraldisch-Genealogischen Gesellschaft 'Adler', Jg. 1951/54, Folge 3, vol. 3 (Vienna 1954), p. 30-43.

Quoting from Frey's email to me: "We once had a set with these exact armorial stamps - Leibniz's Codex juris gentium diplomaticus (Hannover, 1693), which later ended up in the library of King Ernst August I of Hanover (1771-1851). King George V of Hanover later presented the set to the historian Onno Klopp, who followed the King into exile to Vienna. The set then turned up in the library of the Vienna Discalced Augustinians, from where we acquired it." It turns out that Frey's firm sold this set to our next-door neighbors, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Additional help came from Susan L'Engle of the Vatican Film Library, St. Louis University, and from Klaus Graf.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

Lewis Morris Collection joins Libraries of Early America

Mike Widener — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 21:31:00 GMT

Our Lewis Morris Collection is now part of the Libraries of Early America project on LibraryThing.com. As described by Jeremy Dibbell of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the coordinator of the Libraries of Early America Project, "Using the book-cataloging website LibraryThing.com, scholars from institutions around the country (including Monticello, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Boston Athenaeum, the Boston Public Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society and others) have begun the process of creating digital catalogs of early American book collections - the project covers anyone who lived in America and collected primarily before 1825."

LibraryThing provides powerful tools for analyzing Morris's library. The tag cloud, drawn from the subject headings in our catalog records, shows the subject strengths within the Morris Collection. You can also see how Morris's library compares with other libraries, both early and modern. In addition, there is a biographical sketch and portrait of Morris.

Lewis Morris III (1726-1798), a 1746 graduate of Yale, was a prominent New York lawyer and statesman and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. His law library, consisting of 113 titles in 104 volumes, was donated to the Yale Law Library in 1960 by three of Lewis Morris' descendents: A. Newbold Morris (Yale Law School Class of 1928), Stephanus Van Cortlandt Morris, and George L. Kingsland Morris. Over half the books in the collection are also inscribed by Morris' grandfather, Lewis Morris I (1671-1746), who was chief justice of New York (1715-1733) and governor of New Jersey (1738-1746).

Libraries of Early America will soon add another of our collections, the John Worthington Collection. Worthington (1719-1800) was a wealthy and influential lawyer practicing in 18th-century Springfield, Mass., who served for many years as king's attorney of western Massachusetts and high sheriff of Hampshire County.

Thanks to Jeremy Dibbell and his Libraries of Early America collaborators!

Links:

Lewis Morris Collection, Libraries of Early America.
Libraries of Early America project, LibraryThing.com.
Biographies of Lewis Morris III from the National Park Service and Wikipedia.
Biographies of Lewis Morris I from Wikipedia, and in the Guide to the Lewis Morris Papers, New Jersey Historical Society. See also Eugene R. Sheridan, Lewis Morris, 1671-1746: A Study in Early American Politics (Syracuse University Press, 1981).

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

Provenance puzzle #1 -- solved!

Mike Widener — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 13:24:00 GMT

A hearty thanks to Stephen Ferguson, Curator of Rare Books at the Princeton University Library, for providing the answer to my Provenance puzzle #1. The stamp is a portrait of Augustus, Elector of Saxony (1526-1586). Stephen used Google Books to find a reference to the stamp in Konrad Haebler's Rollen- und plattenstempel des XVI. jahrhunderts (Leipzig: O. Harrassowitz, 1928-1929), vol. 2, pp. 79-81.

See the Wikipedia article on Augustus of Saxony, where you will learn that Augustus, a Lutheran, played an important and influential role as a peacemaker in the religious conflicts of the early German Reformation.

The stamp is on the front cover of our copy of Practica eximia atque omnium aliarum praestantissima by Giovanni Pietro Ferrari (Frankfurt: Sigmund Feyerabend, 1581), part of the Roman-Canon Law Collection of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.

Additional images of the covers are in my Flickr gallery in the "Provenance markings" set.

Finally, check out Stephen Ferguson's excellent blog, Rare Book Collections @ Princeton, a favorite of mine.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

Provenance puzzle #2

Mike Widener — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:38:00 GMT

This armorial stamp graces the front and back covers of several tall folios from the Roman-Canon Law Collection of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.I have no idea what library this stamp is from, but I have a couple of clues. The binding style (stamped pigskin over boards, with rounded backs) is typically German. Several knowledgeable folks say that the initials also suggest a German library.If you can shed any light or provide any suggestions, please let me know.On my Flickr gallery, in the "Provenance Markings" set, I have posted an image that shows more of the cover and the tooling. Following are the titles bearing this stamp (click on the title to see the full record in our online catalog, MORRIS):

Luca da Penne, Lectura ... Super tribus libris codicis (Lyon, 1538) [with] Martin Sanchez, Arbor dividui et individui (s.l., 1538). (The volume shown here).

Alessandro Tartagni, In Digestum vetus lecturae [with] Lecturae in Digestum novum (Lyon, 1567).

Alessandro Tartagni, In codicem Iustinianeum commentariorum tomus primus et secundus [with] In infortiatum commentaria (Lyon,1567).

Primum volumen[-volumen xvii] tractatuum ex variis iuris interpretibus collectorum (Lyon, 1549; 18 vols. in 11).

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian
Lillian Goldman Law Library

Provenance puzzle #1

Mike Widener — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 21:17:00 GMT

This rubbing is from the front cover of one of the volumes from the Roman-Canon Law Collection of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. I would be grateful if someone could help me identify this portrait and/or the coat of arms on the back cover (see below), to learn who was the book's original owner.

The text below the portrait reads: "VIRTVTES * ANIMI * MAIESTAS / EXPLICATORIS * AVGVSTI * VVLTVS / INSPICE * NVMEN * HABENT".

The book itself is Practica eximia atque omnium aliarum praestantissima by Giovanni Pietro Ferrari (Frankfurt: Sigmund Feyerabend, 1581). The book is bound in stamped pigskin over pasteboard, and appears to be a German binding. Additional images of the covers are in my Flickr gallery in the "Provenance" set.

Although the online resources available at the Provenance Information page provided by the Consortium of European Research Libraries didn't answer my question, I highly recommend them for others with questions like mine.

Thanks to Brian Mendez for the rubbings and Joanne Kittredge for the scans.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian
Lillian Goldman Law Library