On a snapshot from the Morgan Library…

This Scrap! is derived from a scrap that's just about exactly ten years old: a list of book titles jotted down from a visit to the Morgan Library in July 2015.

As far as I can remember, this was just a list of any book that caught my eye, for whatever reason! I never ended up looking up the books later, so now I'm finally trying it :)

Let's see what I can find, and which still seem interesting…

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The Morgan Library - cool books I noticed…

26 books, now annotated with notes, full titles, and more!

• Les six livres de pedacion dioscoride
  1. famous book by a Greek physician; "details medicinal plants and their uses", influential in pharmacology and botany
• Histoires extraordinaires - Edgar poe
  1. book of Poe short stories…but the French version…looks like…translated by Baudelaire, cool!
• Fables de fontaine
  1. collection of fables, classics of French lit, 239 total
• Atlas zu winkelmann werke
  1. [didn't find a single book of this title; likely a collection of images related to the work of Joachim Winckelmann, who studied classical antiquity and art history]
• Botanical cabinet
  1. found! with subtitle: "consisting of coloured delineations of plants, from all countries, with a short account of each, directions for management &c. &c."
• Catalogue of a collection of miniatures - e cosway
  1. looks like actually by Richard Cosway? not much on this
• Anatomy of trunks - crew
  1. actually "The comparative anatomy of trunks" and by "Grew" not Crew haha; subtitle: "Together with an Account of Their Vegetation Grounded Thereupon"
• Way to get wealth - markham
  1. self-help, way back! subtitle: "CONTAINING SIX PRINCIPALL VOCATIONS, OR CALLINGS, IN WHICH EVERY GOOD HUSBAND OR HOUSE-WIFE MAY LAWFULLY IMPLOY THEMSELVES"
• Philosophie de neuton - Voltaire
  1. I think this should be "Éléments de la philosophie de Newton" and it helped popularize Newton's theories!
• Epitres etc - Voltaire
  1. full title: "Épitres, stances, et odes de Voltaire"…so epistles and poems, it sounds like
• Useful birds and their protection - Edward h forbush
  1. I love a very direct title haha…sounds like a great book about birds, especially ones that are beneficial to humans; apparently has lots of nice illustrations too
• Livre nouveau de fleurs - danckerts
  1. lives of flowers; thin volume with "9 engraved plates of bouquets of flowers"
• Histoire des plantes - garidel
  1. full title: "Histoire des plantes qui naissent aux environs d'Aix, et dans plusieurs autres endroits de la Provence", so…local botanical history, nice!
• Oeuvres de moliere
  1. collected works of Molière, the French playwright; appears to be a six volume set
• Documents litteraires - Emile Zola
  1. a "collection of critical essays and portraits" by Zola, of course best known for his novels, especially the epic Rougon-Macquart series
• Disquisitiones arithmeticae - gauss
  1. a math textbook, on number theory, by one of the greats…very influential ("paved the path for modern number theory") and written when he was only 21!
• The careless child's alphabet
  1. maybe my favorite title here! sounds like it's intended to help kids learn to write…"The Careless child's alphabet: Designed to fix the learner's attention to the shape of the letters"
• Short histories - t carnan 1782
  1. looks to be this one: "Short histories for the improvement of the mind. Extracted chiefly from the works of Joseph Addison, Esq; Sir Richard Steele, and other eminent writers. With suitable reflections by the editor"
• Choice scraps - e newbery
  1. another nice long title haha: "Choice Scraps, Historical and Biographical, Consisting of Pleasing Stories and Diverting Anecdotes, Most of Them Short to Prevent Their Being Tiresome. ... for Young Minds. Embellished With Copper-plate Cuts"
  2. sounds like a fun anthology for kids?
• Scenes from life and nature
  1. possibly this book, about which I can't find much info: "Lays from the North: Or, Poems on Sacred Subjects and Scenes from Life and Nature"
• The pronouncing instructer
  1. little to be found on this one…the main result that turned up was just in a catalog of the Morgan Library itself!
• The hermit - longueville
  1. a castaway / adventure novel; subtitle: "or, The unparalleled sufferings, and surprising adventures, of Philip Quarll, an Englishman, who was discovered by Mr. Dorrington, a Bristol-merchant, upon an uninhabited island, in the South-sea, where he lived about fifty years, without any human assistance"
• Scenes de la vie...Balzac
  1. collection of short stories; part of Balzac's larger work "La Comédie humaine"…six stories that are "for the most part detailed psychological studies of girls in conflict with parental authority"
• Aphrodite - pierre louys
  1. French erotic novel that was apparently very popular and very scandalous!
• Journal - Stendhal
  1. just learned 'Stendhal' was a pen name…and that he used more than a hundred pseudonyms! his journal and writings include "many comments on masks and the pleasures of 'feeling alive in many versions.'"
• Venus and Adonis - Shakespeare
  1. a narrative poem; "considered likely to be Shakespeare's first publication", cool! originally a quarto pamphlet (I wonder if this one's an original?); a "minor epic"
  2. written in six-line stanzas, 199 stanzas total, can read the full poem here; "although this verse form was known before Shakespeare's use, it is now commonly known as the Venus and Adonis stanza, after this poem"