Death's Dominion

We were lucky enough to acquire a kind of miraculous survival of the Great Plague: ten of the weekly death tallies issued in London during 1665 as the plague ravaged the city. They list all deaths within the city and their causes. Turning from one week to the next, you can watch the classic epidemic curve play out in hard numbers as they were presented at the time.

The listing is harrowing--from 2,012 plague deaths the week of July 25th, to 6,978 death during the last week of August. When you factor in how many people lied to avoid quarantine, the total death toll is staggering. At the bottom of each weekly list, looking almost like an advertisement, there is a note on the price of bread dictated by the Lord Mayor. Imagine what the scene must have been as the epidemic spread and an increasingly proportion of the city's inhabitants fell ill or died. Basic services broke down. The Lord Mayor's assize of bread was an attempt to regulate the price of a basic human need that was becoming scare in nightmarish cityscape where price gouging threatened the already suffering populous. A penny bought a nine and a half ounce wheaten loaf; white loaves cost an additional half penny.

These broadsides give an immediacy to books like Defoe's Diary of a Plague Year published over fifty years later. To see them, ask for Rare HB1416.L8 D5.

Costumes of the East

One of our favorite genres of book at Rauner is the costume book, which is usually a collection of images that display the various forms of dress that people wear from all over the world. Although the historical accuracy of these images can often be suspect, they are fascinating to explore, if only to get a sense of how American or European culture perceived other races and peoples over a hundred years ago. At Rauner, we have a beautiful first edition of The Oriental Album by Henry Van-Lennep, who was a missionary to Turkey and other parts of the Ottoman empire for twenty years (1840-1860). Although Van-Lennep was born to European merchants in Smyrna, he was educated in the United States, and so he returned here in 1861 to transform the many drawings that he had made of the Turkish people while abroad into a printed book.

The result was The Oriental Album, published in New York in 1862. There are twenty

chromolithographic prints in this oversized album, each purporting to represent a different common figure or type of person in Turkish or Ottoman society. Each image is accompanied by paternalistic, moralizing, and sometimes incorrect descriptions of the individuals that are represented. For example, for the image of the "Turkish Woman (unveiled)," Van-Lennep says that "the custom of ages and the requirements of the Koran have produced in the female sex a strong sense of real shame, which does not allow them to let any part of their faces appear besides their eyes."

Despite the inaccuracies and questionable representations of the Ottoman Empire and its people, Van-Lennep's Oriental Album was one of the few large chromolithographic works created during the 1860s in America and is still considered by some to be the best American costume book created during the 19th century.

To flip through Van-Lennep's book of beautiful images, come to Rauner and ask to see Rare DR432 .V3 1862.