Rare Books
The handsome volume printed by Benjamin Franklin,
Cicero's Cato Major (1744), translated by James Logan, the colonial politician
and scholar, is an example of fine 18th-century American printing.
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Haverford Rare Books
Supporters of Haverford have given the Library rare books
from the beginning. The first non-Quaker volume, listed in the accession
book as Number 3, is a book by John Selden (1584-1654) entitled Mare
Clausum. First published in Latin in 1636, this is an English translation
which appeared in 1663. While it is about the law of the sea, which could
not be more relevant today, the purpose of the book was to claim the sea
for Great Britain. Unfortunately, some philistine had it rebound in standard
library binding.
All fields of knowledge are included in this collection.
For example, there are two copies of the elephant folio printing of Audubon's
The Quadrupeds of North America (1845-1848), and other volumes
on natural history. Rare scientific works such as the first edition of
Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) and Albert Einstein's
Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie (1916)
are found here as well. Literary works include Herman Melville's Moby
Dick (1851), the first American edition, and Charles Dickens' Pickwick
Papers as it first appeared in parts (1836-37). Volumes on the
west include Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall's Indian Tribes of
North America (1837-1844), a three-volume, illustrated folio set.
Books in the social sciences include Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations
(1776), three variant imprints of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan
(1651) and Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman (1792), the first London edition.
William Pyle Philips Collection
The capstone of the Philips collection of rare books is
the four folios of William Shakespeare's plays, beginning with a beautiful
copy of the first folio (1623). Many of the volumes relate to Shakespeare
and the English Renaissance, but there are also volumes from other cultures,
as well as from science. The first edition of the Royal Version of the
King James Bible (1611) is sometimes called the "only
literary masterpiece ever to have been produced by a committee."
The Philips copy of John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), an
example of the first issue of the first edition, is one of the classics
of English literature. The Foligno printing of Dante Alighieri's Divine
Comedy (1472), written in the vernacular, "is a classic of
world stature."
The revolutionary book published by Nicolaus Copernicus
in 1543 declaring that the sun, not the earth was at the center of the
universe, created a storm in his day. More than a century later Isaac
Newton, in his Principia (1687), announced the universal
law of gravitation. The first English edition of Leo Africanus' Geographical
historie of Africa (1600) was consulted by Shakespeare when he
wrote the play Othello.
The Spanish literary masterpiece, Don Quixote
by Cervantes (1605, 1615), is another example of superb titles from the
non-English world. French classics include Montaigne's Essays
(1603), and Moliere's Les oeuvres (1682). Recently a copy
of the Koran, translated into English in 1649, has been added
to the collection.
There are presently 108 items in the Philips collection,
for William Pyle Philips, class of 1902, left funds to be used to add
"rare books which the college would not otherwise buy." Elsewhere
he specified that such titles should be comparable to the 58 in his original
gift in 1951.
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