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For My People

Margaret Walker, For My People, with lithographs by Elizabeth Catlett (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1992).

In 1942 the writer Margaret Walker, born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1915, received the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for her first book, the poetry collection For My People, and became the first Black woman to win a national writing prize. The poems explore shared African American experiences during the first decades of the twentieth century; they are deliberately presented as “the songs of my people,” as Walker put it.

For this special semicentennial edition of the book, the graphic artist Elizabeth Catlett produced six gorgeous, multi-colored lithographs that imagine the people invoked in specific stanzas. Catlett and Walker were roommates as graduate students at the University of Iowa, where they were not permitted, because of segregation, to live in the dormitories. This collaboration thus commemorates not just the fiftieth anniversary of Walker’s historic accomplishment, but also the long and sustaining friendship of these two ground-breaking artists.

Sponsor this book for $1,600

St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila’s Brother Monk

Gaspar de la Anunciación, Representacion de la Vida del Bienaventurado P. F. Juan de la Cruz, Primer Carmelita Descalço, hand-colored with 79 engravings (Brussels, 1678). 

This illustrated life of San Juan de la Cruz captures the spiritual journey and miracles of the first male Discalced Carmelite and spiritual companion of the rock-star Renaissance nun Santa Teresa de Ávila. It was printed shortly after his beatification and focuses heavily on his interactions with nuns of this newly created religious order of the Counter-Reformation period. The texts and images also imaginatively reproduced important moments in San Juan’s many travels, his foundation of Discalced Carmelite houses across Spain, and several years’ persecution with St. Teresa by the Spanish Inquisition. Among the many detailed and handsomely engraved images is the famous scene of Teresa and Juan simultaneously rising up into the air and levitating side-by-side, uplifted by their seraphic discussion of the mystery of the Holy Trinity; another depicts Juan miraculously exorcizing a demon from a possessed nun in the convent. Only three other copies of this first edition are known, one in the British Library and two (one missing numerous of the engravings) in the National Library of Spain.

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Poems of Hafiz

Divān Hafiz, [Collected Poems] (Persia, before 1883). 

This illuminated manuscript in hand-painted lacquer binding does not simply contain a collection, in a beautiful Arabic manuscript, of the verse of the celebrated fourteenth-century Persian poet Khwāja Šamsu d-Dīn Muḥammad Hāfez-e Šīrāzī, known as Hafiz—it is also an incredible work of art. The poems of Hafiz, many of them ghazals celebrating earthly and divine love, were so well-regarded that many copies of his Divān were created over the centuries after his death.

This gorgeous copy from the nineteenth century comes from the library of the renowned British bookbinder Francis Bedford, and was probably rebound and decorated by him. The lacquer covers feature a lush arrangement of hand-painted pink and yellow flowers on the outside and bouquets of irises on the inside.

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Pank-a-Squith

Pank-a-Squith board game (Germany: Women’s Social and Political Union, 1909).

In 1903, English activist Emmeline Pankhurst formed the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) to advocate for women’s suffrage, and raise hell. The militant group demonstrated at Parliament, went on hunger strikes when arrested, and got in fights with police. To help raise money for the cause, in 1909 the WSPU created and sold this Pank-A-Squith board game, for which board pieces move around championing women’s suffrage and avoiding the bobbies. The game’s name is a portmanteau of Pankhurst and H.H. Asquith, the U.K. prime minister from 1908 to 1916 and the suffragettes’ main foe.

The colors of the WSPU—purple, green, and white—are incorporated into this copy of the board, which is illustrated with scenes that evoke the life of a suffragette. You see her breaking the windows of the Home Office, proudly marching in parades, starting a hunger strike, and zipping about town in an automobile decked out with suffrage flags. The game is played by students during our Vintage Game Nights at the library.

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The Return of Martin Guerre

Jean De Coras, Arrestum sive Placitum Parlamenti Tholosani, continens historiam (In casu matrimoniali) admodum memorabilem (Frankfurt: A. Wechel, 1576).

This sensational sixteenth-century case of imposture had everything—an unhappy marriage, a sudden disappearance and a mysterious return, an accusation of impersonation, a possibly complicit wife, a family and a village divided, two dramatic trials, the sudden appearance of a surprise witness at a moment in the second trial when acquittal seemed imminent, a sudden reversal of fortune, the defendant’s conviction, his public apology (declaring the wife to be an innocent victim), and his execution in front of the home of the man he impersonated. Among the luminaries of the court present at the trial, the learned Jean de Coras was assigned the task of reporter for the proceedings, which meant that he would look closely into the issues and finally prepare a report on all the arguments and make a recommendation for the sentence.

This extremely rare volume is the first Latin edition of Coras’s account of the trial, and has great potential for teaching and translation by our curators, faculty, and students.

Sponsor this book for $2,000

Moï Ver's Poland

Moshé Raviv-Vorobeichic (Moï Ver), POLIN (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibutz Ha-Meuhad, 1945-6).

Joining our collection of works by the important avant-garde photographer and painter Moï Ver (born Moses Vorobeichic, changed later to Moshé Raviv-Vorobeichic)—including all three editions of his visual study of the Jewish ghetto of Vilnius—is this remarkably rare collection of photographs. POLIN (Poland) features ten pages of stunning photographic plates of Jewish life in Poland during the interwar years, preceded by two pages of text in Hebrew. Found in only three other research libraries, the portfolio will be instrumental to the research of JHU Jewish Studies professor Samuel Spinner, who is studying the corpus of Ver/Vorobeichic, and to generations of Hopkins researchers to come.

Sponsor this item for $2,250