Library Special Collections Blog
A is for the Ahmanson-Murphy Aldine Collection
Books printed in Italy by the great scholar-printer Aldus Manutius, and other members of the Manutius family, beginning in the late 15th century and continuing through most of the 16th century, are called Aldines (or do you say All-dynes?) The Aldine printer’s device, a dolphin and an anchor, often appears on the title page or colophon.
Desiderius Erasmus. Adagia. Venice: Aldine Press, 1520. Title page, bearing the Aldine anchor-and-dolphin device.
UCLA began collecting these treasures of Renaissance printing in 1961, when the Library bought 45 Aldines from the library of San Francisco collector Templeton Crocker, whose grandfather, Charles Crocker, was one of the “big four” who built the Central Pacific Railroad. Over the years, the collection, with ongoing support from the Ahmanson Foundation, grew steadily into one of the world’s premier Aldine collections, and now includes more than 1000 imprints. The collection provides rich research material for scholars studying the printing history and operations of an important Renaissance press, the new Aldine typefaces and formats, and the way these innovations influenced readership, education, and material culture, and inspired an industry of counterfeit publishing in the process. Among the many treasures of the collection are Aldus’s monumental Greek editions of classical texts, printed in several Greek typefaces he designed: the works of Aristotle in 1495--the first printing of a major Greek text in its original language; Theocritus in 1496, Aristophanes on 1498, Herodotus in 1502, Homer in 1504, and Plato in 1513, to name just a few.
Aristotle. Works, vol. 1. Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1495
Perhaps Aldus’s greatest achievement was his introduction of the octavo, a small, light, and portable book format which allowed readers to carry their books with them, and made good literature accessible to the masses. The UCLA collection includes such gems as Aldus’s 1501 Virgil, the first portable book he printed, as well as the first to be printed in his new italic type, based on humanistic manuscripts of the age; Petrarch’s Le cose volgari, from the same year, the first book printed in italic type in a vernacular language, and the first edition of Petrarch in the new small format; and a 1502 edition of Sophocles, the first of the Greek classical texts to be issued in the small format.
Virgil. Vergilius. Venice: Aldine Press, 1501
Although Aldines not already in UCLA’s collection rarely come on the market, the Library was recently able to fill a gap when it had the good fortune to acquire Erasmus’s Adagia, a volume of Latin and Greek proverbs, printed at the Aldine Press in September of 1520. This copy once belonged to Jean Grolier (1479-1565), French statesman, fine binding aficionado, and early collector of Aldines.
Ownership inscription of Jean Grolier of Lyon “and friends” below colophon of the 1520 Adagia.
By Jane Carpenter, Special Collections Cataloger
Power of Provenance
Blog post by Jesse R. Erickson, Library Assistant and Ph.D. student in the Department of Information Studies
Exhibit on view April 5 to April 26 The true power of provenance is that it can connect the biographies of individuals from various walks of life through a shared a love of books and reading. This exhibit of manuscripts once owned by illustrious bibliophiles is intended to shed light on some of those connections. First there was bibliographer and literary scholar Sir Walter W. Greg who lived from 1875 until 1959. With fellow bibliographers Alfred W. Pollard and Ronald Burns McKerrow, Sir Walter cofounded what is now regarded as the Anglo-Saxon tradition of analytical bibliography. Next, there was Stanley Morison, who lived and worked in England from 1889 to 1967. Morison has gone down in printing history as one of the most well-known editors, typographic consultants, and designers to have worked in the trade. The current font known as Times New Roman is based on his revision of the type for The Times, London.
Estelle Doheny with Mr. and Mrs. Schad and Doheny Estate librarian Lucille Miller
The other two personalities featured in the exhibit, Isaac Foot and Carrie Estelle Doheny, were included because of their accomplishments in book collecting. The collections of these two book people differed greatly in both substance and style, but they were both representative of two major currents in collecting practice; namely, quantitatively-driven subject collecting and qualitatively-driven genre collecting. The former was represented in the library of Isaac Foot. Foot, a staunch Protestant who lived from the years of 1880 to 1960, built up a massive personal library which had been numbered at somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 volumes at its peak. A large portion of his collection was centered on the study of political philosophy and liberalism; and he possessed a great number of titles from some of the most renowned political thinkers and literary activists of the ages. Some of his more well-loved political influences included thinkers such as John Milton, Thomas Carlyle, and President Abraham Lincoln. Carrie Estelle Doheny, on the other hand, who would represent the latter style, had a noticeably smaller collection than that of Foot. The aesthetic quality of Doheny’s collection, however, was appreciably richer than the quality of the Foot library in the sense that it primarily contained manuscript and printed works denotative of a sophisticated artistic taste. A devout Catholic and philanthropist, her collection, which was built up during the years following her husband’s death in 1935, included numerous illuminated manuscripts and masterpieces of fine printing. She also collected rare examples of Americana and children’s literature.
A folio from Pseudo Phalaris, Epistolae
In terms of manuscripts once owned by these figures, each seems to have been indicative of his or her collecting styles. There was a thirteenth century manuscript copy of Stephen Langton’s Interpretationes Hebraicorum Nominum which was once in the possession of Sir Walter W. Greg. The fifteenth century Italian copy of Pseudo Phalaris’s Epistolae was previously owned by Stanley Morison and, therefore, was likely to have influenced his thinking on typographic design. Isaac Foot’s onetime copy of a dedicatory preface written by the Flemish humanist Victor Gislain is an item featured in the exhibit that is of particular rarity. This holograph document was discovered bound in the front portion of a sixteenth century printed edition of Prudentius’s Opera Omnia. Also included in the exhibit is a fourteenth century Ordo for the use of Rome which, for only a brief time, was owned by Estelle Doheny. The manuscript features a beautifully illustrated frontispiece on the recto of its first folio. Additionally, there are a number of supplementary archival materials on display. Among them is a photograph of Doheny with former Huntington Library curator of the rare books, Robert Schad, a catalog of a USC exhibit of Doheny treasures printed by the famous Los Angeles-based printed Ward Ritchie, and a letter from author Eden Phillpotts (d. 1960) to Isaac Foot.
Letter from Eden Phillpotts to Isaac Foot dated November 18, 1946
