Library News for the Faculty

Recent Acquisitions Throughout the Library

Arts Library

Every year since 1988 Peter Norton has sent out a greeting card during the holidays to a fortunate group of friends, artists, museum curators, art critics, and others. Fortunately for art scholars and artists, the Arts Library has been on the list of recipients.

The Norton greeting cards are not card-like by any standard definition. Each year Norton commissions an artist to create an edition of 2,500 to 5,000 unnumbered pieces. The past year's project, created by American artist Peter Coffin, comes in what looks like an ordinary photo album. The album opens to reveal a pop-up collage of photographs that expands into a spiral, with each photograph linked by an image of a rainbow. Previous Norton Family Christmas Projects have included a music box, a glass bowl, and a dollhouse.

Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library

The Biomedical Library has added both electronic and print resources to its reference collection. Antimicrobe.org offers online reference information about infectious diseases. It features the content of the two-volume Antimicrobial Therapy and Vaccines and the HIV Clinical Manual, with Empiric being added as its content is finalized.

The four-volume set Health Psychology (Sage Publications, 2006) features a collection of both classic and key papers in the field. Its eighty papers are divided into volumes on theoretical models and frameworks; concepts; methods and measurement; and applications in health, illness, and health care.

Micro- and nanotechnology are changing the face of medicine, and the four-volume set BioMEMS and Biomedical Nanotechnology (Springer, 2006) is the first comprehensive reference source covering all aspects of research in the diagnostic and therapeutic applications of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS), microfabrication, and nanotechnology.

Evolution of Nervous Systems: A Comprehensive Reference (Academic Press, 2007) assembles for the first time current state-of-the-art knowledge on how nervous systems evolved throughout the animal kingdom. The four volumes are divided into theories, development, invertebrates; non-mammalian vertebrates; mammals; and primates.

The Biomedical Library History and Special Collections has also added several interesting items. Abregé de l'anatomye des principalles parties du corps humain piece tres utile et necessaire au public (Paris, 1672), an extremely rare anatomical broadside, depicts four large human figures: a skeleton, muscle man derived from Vesalius, male, and female (pictured right). The latter two are "dissected figures" with layers of flaps, each of which can be lifted to display underlying elements. Broadsides of this type were intended to instruct medical and/or surgery students and perhaps barber surgeons. It could also have been used to instruct the general public about anatomy, which was of considerable interest to educated people in the seventeenth century.

Recueil alphabetique de prognostics dangereux 7 mortels sur les différentes maladies de L'homme (Paris, 1736) by Elie Col De Villars is an alphabetical dictionary of diseases with their prognoses, designed for those attending the dying. So that priests would know when to administer the sacraments, the more serious diseases are marked with one maltese cross for dangerous and two maltese crosses for critical. Guidance for the appropriate religious rites is given in the final section.

Traité de'Ostéologie, traduit de l'anglois de M. Monro... Oùl'on a agouti des planches en taille-douce, qui représentent au natureel tous les Os de l'adulte & du foetus, avec leurs explication...Par M. Suë (Paris, 1759) by Alexander Monro, the first French edition of one of the great anatomical atlases, contains finely executed plates illustrating whole skeletons or single bones, which are mainly life-sized.

Richard C. Rudolph East Asian Library

Gudian wenxian yanjiu jikan [ or Selected research series of Chinese classics] (Taipei: Hua Mulan wenhua chuban she [Hua Mulan Cultural Publishing House], 2005-) contains major research monographs from the last century covering twenty-nine subjects in fields including Chinese history and culture, philosophy and religions, classic literature,and bibliography. So far, ninety volumes in three series have been published.

Hunan mingren jiapu congkan [ or Genealogical series of Hunan Nobles] (Beijing: Quan guo tu shu guan wen xian suo wei fu zhi zhong xin [Reprographic Service Center of Nationwide Libraries], 2002) is a forty-four-volume collection of photographic reprints of historical genealogies in Hunan Province, an influential region in late Qing history and modern Chinese history.

The thirty-volume set Han-Il kwangye saryo chipsong [ or Collection of historical resources on Korean-Japanese relationship] (Soul Tukpyolsi: Kyongin Munhwasa, 2004) contains nearly twenty thousand historical documents on the relationship between Korea and Japan, from old Korean classics to the Choson dynasty (1392-1910) annals; the vast majority are from the period 1392-1863. The collection includes reproductions of original scripts as well as Korean translations.

Charles E. Young Research Library

Through the California Digital Library, the UCLA Library has purchased online access to the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers for 1801-1900. Among the richest and most detailed primary sources for nineteenth-century history, these papers are fundamental to an understanding of current legislation, policy-making, and politics.

The Research Library Department of Special Collections has enhanced its holdings of women's travel literature with the acquisition of four first editions by eminent nineteenth-century lady travelers.

Sunshine and Storm in the East (London, 1880) is Lady Anna Brassey's account of her family's journey in their private yacht to Cyprus and Constantinople. The book also features a cover design by Gustave Doré (pictured left), large colored maps, and vignettes engraved after photographs by Lady Brassey. Our Visit to Hindostan, Kashmir, and Ladakh (London, 1879) is the first travel book by Harriet Aynsley, a scholarly traveler with a special interest in the local legends and symbolism of India. This is the only copy in Southern California.

Accounts of the Middle East by two very different writers are found in Travels in the Holy Land (London, 1862) by the renowned Swedish author and feminist Fredrika Bremer and Cradle Lands (London, 1867) by Lady Elizabeth Herbert. Lady Herbert's midlife conversion to Catholicism was a spiritual event that permeates her travel book and provides a contrast with Bremer's colorful, more outspoken observations.

The department has also added several titles to its Los Angeles and California fiction collections.

The story in B.F. Austin's Christ or Barabbas: A Psychic Novel (Los Angeles, 1921) revolves around a Christ-like figure whose ministry mixes spiritualism, Biblical teachings, and the poetry of his namesake Walt Whitman, and his love affair with a waitress in an Italian restaurant. Trials, murders, and doctrine disguised as dialogue place this book in the realm of political fiction and provide a glimpse into a turbulent period in L.A. history.

Named by formal resolution as the "Poet Laureate of the Lumber Industry," Adeline Merriam Conner incorporated California lore, uplifting sentiments, and exhortations to good salesmanship in her verse. The department has acquired a first edition of Old Trails and New, a book of poetry probably intended as a gift for lumber salesman and workers in lumber mills.

The Luttrell Psalter, one of the British Library's greatest treasures, is an illuminated manuscript made in the fourteenth century for the wealthy landowner Sir Geoffrey Lutrell (1276-1345). In more than six hundred pages, it provides a unique glimpse into medieval life with its depictions of people at work and play, faithful reproductions of fashions and furnishings, and fanciful renderings of imaginary animals and grotesque figures. The department has acquired a facsimile edition, which also contains a scholarly commentary that puts the work in its historical context, details its history, and gives an exhaustive description of the illustrations.

Through the generous support of the Ahmanson Foundation, the department purchased Pietro Bembo's Gli Asolani (Bologna, 1516), an unusual example of early Italian printing. The book, which describes a wedding feast during which guests discuss whether love is good or bad, established Bembo as one of his generations's preeminent philosophers. This first edition is prized because it contains a dedication to the notorious Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of Pope Alexander VI and sister of Cesare Borgia, and was printed with type the publisher had cut for the workshop of Aldus Manutius but took with him after a falling-out with Manutius.

Inisita Dworkin, a well-known flamenco dancer and wife of Bob Dworkin, donated her husband's archives to the department. Dworkin created "Meet the Author," a radio program broadcast during World War II to provide the soldiers with an introduction to contemporary authors. The program gained widespread popularity and after the war evolved into a Sunday-night television spot. The archives include text transcripts of interviews with approximately ninety authors, photographs, monographs signed by the authors, and sixteen-inch LP recordings of the interviews.