Canterbury Tales (Of A New Zealand Variety)

The University of Canterbury and Canterbury Museum have joined forces to create a collaborative exhibition called 'Canterbury Tales', which explores the early history of the Canterbury Region and its settlers though books and documents. The physical exhibition closes early next month, but an informative on-line version is available and certainly worth the visit.

Lead curators were Chris Jones, Senior Lecturer in Medieval History, University of Canterbury, and Sarah Murray, Curator of Canterbury Social History, Canterbury Museum.

This seems the perfect opportunity to also promote 'Canterbury's King James Bible', the digital version of an exhibition curated by Chris Jones and Bronwyn Matthews, Special Collections Librarian, as part of the 2011 King James Bible quadricentennial. The site contains a wealth of information on the history of the Bible in English and the research into the Canterbury copy of the 1611 KJB, which is one of just two copies of the 'Great He' printing in Australasia. The other is held by the Heritage Collections, Dunedin City Library.

Major Ornament Study Digitized And Freely Available

[The following was posted to Exlibris-l by Shef Rogers, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Otago]

Samuel Richardson by Mason Chamberlin

The Department of English at the University of Otago and Dr. Keith Maslen are delighted to announce that Keith's book, Samuel Richardson of London Printer: A Study of his Printing based on Ornament Use and Business Accounts (Dunedin, 2001; ISBN: 0-473-07760-4), has been deposited in the OURArchive as a freely available PDF.

The book is released along with a free PDF of Dr. Maslen's recent supplementary study identifying further works printed using Richardson ornaments, "Samuel Richardson of London, Printer: Further Extending the Canon," published last month in Script & Print: Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand.

Both items are published under a Creative Commons Attribution–Non-Commercial–No Derivatives license. Any queries, additions or other thoughts will be gladly received by Dr. Maslen (contact details).

A few (c. 5) printed copies of the book remain available for purchase via the English Department at Otago. An order form and details are to be found on the web.

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My congratulations to Keith and the University of Otago for making these resources freely and widely available.

'An Unknown Vision of Middle-Earth'

Paul Tankard, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Otago, has published a piece in the Times Literary Supplement on previously unknown illustrations by Mary Fairburn for J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

Read the full article.

Announcement on the University of Otago website.

Interview with Paul Tankard on Radio New Zealand.

Congratulations, Paul!

Exhibition: Dunedin and Antarctic Exploration

Next Stop Antarctica: Dunedin's Role in Polar Exploration

Reed Gallery, Third Floor, Dunedin City Library

6 September to 2 December 2012

2012 is the centennial year marking the death of Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912) and his party during the ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition. The mission was the second of Scott’s Antarctic ventures to depart from Port Chalmers, New Zealand, following his Discovery Expedition in 1901–1904. These expeditions were neither the first nor the last such undertakings to launch from Port Chalmers. Indeed, the aptly named ship Antarctic, which carried the first men to claim setting foot on the Antarctic mainland, departed from the port town on Dunedin's south east coast in 1894. To this very day, Dunedin, of which Port Chalmers is now a part, has maintained a connection to the exploration of the Antarctic. ‘Next Stop Antarctica’ explores and celebrates the first half of this nearly 118-year history with Scott at its centre.

The Antarctic has long been a region of interest for intrepid explorers, and so the exhibition begins with a brief look at the voyages made by such men as James Cook, Jules Dumont d’Urville and Sir James Clark Ross, and ends with the United States missions to Antarctica codenamed ‘Operation Deep Freeze’ in the mid-1950s.

On display are more than sixty items from five local institutions. Exhibits include first editions of printed books, including a presentation copy of The South Polar Times given by Sir Ernest Shackleton to the Arctic explorer Sir Allen Young, handwritten and typed letters, issues of Little America Times and the Antarctic News Bulletin, photographs, artefacts (most notably Scott’s typewriter), and memorabilia relating to the American explorer Richard Evelyn Byrd.

An on-line version of the exhibition is available.

Terra Nova in Port Chalmers, 29 November 1910
Photo: Otago Witness

'Omnibus Christi fidelibus': A Sixteenth-Century Deed Uncovered

In my previous post, I mentioned coming across a sixteenth-century document amongst the Reed provenance files. These files generally consist of pages from book dealer catalogues (occasionally with Reed's pencilled marks), old exhibition labels, notes made by Reed or a local academic on a particular item in the collection, and correspondence. It was with some surprise, then, when I opened the folder on the library's copy of a 1551 Bible, that I found a folded piece of parchment with two wax seal remnants tucked into an envelope among the papers inside.

The document turned out to be a deed written primarily in Latin and dated 2 September 1544. Some research on the manuscript had evidently been done, as a typed transcription of the text was found with it. Full of standard legal phrasing, the deed relates to property granted by Henry VIII ('under the great seal of England') to Roger and Robert Taverner in late August. According to the text, the brothers conveyed to one John Merifelde (also spelt 'Meryfeld'), 'porter de le Mercers, London', a tenement situated in Fenchurch Street in the parish of All Saints Staining. 'Mercers' presumably refers to the Worshipful Company of Mercers, formed in 1394 and the oldest of the 'Great Twelve City Livery Companies'. The text continues that the location in Fenchurch Street was once the Monastery of Grace, near the Tower of London, which was disbanded during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In response to my email about the deed, David Pearson described it as 'part of that huge jigsaw of parcelling up of the spoils of ex-monastic properties, with which many up and coming City men made their fortunes and established their families'.

The deed entitled Merifelde to the tenement and 'all and severally the cellars, basements, shops, rooms, stables, outhouses, entries, passages, gardens, easements and other amenities ... pertaining to the same'. The text ends: 'In witness whereof we have attached to this present deed our seals on the second day of September in the 36th year of the reign of Henry VIII by the Grace of God of England, France and Ireland, King Defender of the Faith, and in the land of France, England and Ireland Supreme Head' [punctuation is mine]. Roger Taverner's seal, of which just a fragment remains, bears a cipher or monogram. Robert's seal is nearly intact and is that of a man's head.

Who were the Taverners?

Roger Taverner (d. 1572) was an MP, surveyor for the Court of Augmentations, and a writer of tracts on economics. His brother Robert (ca. 1523‒1556) was elected a junior MP for a Cornish borough during the last Parliament of Henry VIII. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, they were two of four sons of John Taverner (ca. 1457‒1545) of North Elmham, Norfolk, and his first wife, Alice. One of his kinsmen was the composer and organist John Taverner (ca. 1490‒1545).

Transactions involving land appears to have been a common practice of the Taverner brothers. According to the History of Parliament website: 

'The first glimpse of [Robert] Taverner is in June 1544 when he acquired property in several counties from augmentations for just over £600. In the following ten months in conjunction with two of his brothers he bought land worth over £4,200, much of which they soon alienated, and he continued to make joint purchases with these two brothers in the closing years of Henry VIII’s life and throughout the reigns of Edward VI and Mary until his death'.

[From The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1509‒1558, edited by S. T. Bindoff and published in 1982]

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The two men were the younger brothers of Richard Taverner (ca. 1505‒1575), clerk of the signet and evangelical reformer. Taverner is perhaps best known for his revision of the Matthew Bible (Antwerp, 1537). Taverner's Bible was first published in London in 1539, though replaced that same year by the 'Great Bible', which was considered a superior revision of the earlier Matthew Bible. The 1551 edition held by Dunedin City Library* was the eighth and final edition of Taverner's Bible, known for the infamous note at I Peter 3:7 on marital relationships: 'And if she be not obediente and healpeful unto hym: endevour to beate the fere of God inter her heade, that thereby she maye be compelled to learne her dutye and do it'. The note was not part of Taverner's translation, but is attributed to Bishop Edmund Becke who revised the 1551 edition.

Some of the deed's provenance is known. Written on the verso is 'Phillipps Ms 28218', which places the document in the vast nineteenth-century collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792‒1872). The next piece of evidence is a letter on file dated 24 July 1937, written by J. C. Pearson of Cleveland, Ohio, whom I've identified as John Calder Pearson, a member of the Rowfant Club of bibliophiles and author of The Rowfant Candlesticks (1959). The letter was addressed to the Honourable William Burgoyne Taverner, who served as mayor of Dunedin (1927‒1929) and as a member of New Zealand Parliament (1929‒1931). 'You will no doubt know', wrote Pearson, 'whether you are descended from this Taverner family ... If you would like the document as a relic of the name and family in England nearly 400 years ago, I offer it for sale for three guineas or $15'.

It is possible that Pearson acquired the deed in one of two Phillipps sales. According to A. N. L. Munby's The Dispersal of the Phillipps Library (Cambridge, 1960; fifth volume in the Phillipps Studies series), Sotheby's held two auctions of manuscripts from the Phillipps collection on 24‒25 June 1935 and 29‒30 June 1936 (Munby 86). Either is close enough in date to Pearson's July 1937 letter to be a potential point of sale.**

The Taverner-Merifelde deed, however, did not warrant sale as an individual lot, and it seems clear that the manuscript was likely sold as part of a large bundle. As Munby wrote: 'The sales of 1936 and 1938 need not detain us long. Both contained many lots of English deeds, which sold for very modest prices; one may instance xxi [the 29‒30 June 1936 sale], [lot] 512, one hundred and forty-four court-rolls on vellum ... extending from 20 Edward III to 25 Elizabeth, fetched £21 or about three shillings a roll' (91).

However Pearson acquired the deed, his suggested ancestry of W. B. Taverner was correct. He was indeed a descendant of the sixteenth-century Taverners, which made purchasing a document related to his ancestors an irresistible prospect. A second letter by Pearson confirms that the deed was bought by Taverner in December 1938. It was presented to the Dunedin Public Library by Taverner's family after his death in 1953.

The deed, and the associated correspondence, have now been removed from the 1551 Taverner Bible provenance file for cataloguing. In light of this find, a systematic check of each folder in the provenance files sequence is in order. I will add a follow-up post should anything else turn up during my search. Stay tuned.

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* The Byble that is to say, al the holy Scripture conteined in the olde & new Testament ... London: Ihon Day dwelling over Aldersgate, 1551; ESTC S107008; Herbert 93. Provenance: From the library of Charles Vere Dashwood, Esq. (b. 1745), of Stanford, Nottinghamshire. The Bible was purchased by the Dunedin Public Library from Thomas Thorp, London, sometime between October 1950 and July 1951.

** Sir Thomas Phillipps's collection numbered more than 100,000 printed books and manuscripts, which took over a century to disperse after his death. For more information, see A. N. L. Munby's Portrait of an Obsession or the relevant pages in Nicholas Basbanes's A Gentle Madness.

Katherine Mansfield in the News

I initially planned to write this week about a sixteenth-century document I happened upon in the A. H. Reed provenance files. This weekend, however, is shaping up to be a rather hectic one, so I will instead keep it short by noting some recent news regarding one of New Zealand's most celebrated literary figures, Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), to go along with the discovery of a lost Mansfield story reported on The Fine Books Blog and elsewhere late last month.

~ Katherine Mansfield Treasure Trove Comes to the Turnbull
The Alexander Turnbull Library has recently acquired a substantial Mansfield archive previously owned by the family of her second husband John Middleton Murry (1889–1957). Dr Fiona Oliver, Curator of New Zealand and Pacific Publications, believes the collection to be 'the last known collection of Mansfield material in private hands'.

For more information, follow this link.

~ Katherine Mansfield Texts Added to the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre
The Journal of Katherine Mansfield and the second volume of The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, both edited by Murry, are now available on-line through the NZETC.

Mansfield, 1913

Early Printing for Te Wiki o te Reo Maori

Today (Wednesday) marks the mid point of Maori Language Week (Te Wiki o te Reo Maori). The theme this year is arohatia te reo (to cherish the language). As such, this week's post highlights six of the taonga (treasure, anything prized) among the early books printed partly or fully in the Maori language found in the Heritage Collections, Dunedin City Library.

Besides offical government publications, the majority of early printed material in New Zealand was produced by missionary societies, and therefore consisted of language aids and religious texts. I have selected three of each, which are described below. But first, typophiles (and bibliophiles generally) might be interested in the unique way that William Colenso (1811–1899), the missionary printer who printed the first substantial book in New Zealand, arranged his type cases:*

Reproduced from D. F. McKenzie's Oral Culture, Literacy & Print
in Early New Zealand (Wellington, 1985)

'For as the Maori language', wrote Colenso, 'contained only 13 letters (half the number in the English alphabet), I contrived my cases so, as to have both Roman and Italic characters in the one pair of cases.... Such an arrangement proved to be a very good one while my compositing was confined to the Maori language only; but when I had any English copy to compose it was altogether the reverse!... Fortunately, this occurred but rarely' (quoted in McKenzie, p. 25).

Grammars & Dictionary

Samuel Lee and Thomas Kendall. A Grammar and Vocabulary of the Language of New Zealand. London: Church Missionary Society, 1820.

As a missionary to New Zealand, Thomas Kendall (1778–1832) was in an ideal position to gather information on the Maori language. With the Rev. Samuel Lee (1783–1852), professor of Arabic and later of Hebrew at Cambridge, he compiled the first book that attempted to lay down the fixed principles of the language in 1815. Five years later this was expanded to include a 100-page vocabulary.

The 1820 edition of the grammar was issued in two versions, one printed on fine paper and the other on coarse paper. The fine paper version was mainly for circulation in England to spark interest in the work of the Church Missionary Society. The coarse paper version was printed for the Society’s schools in New Zealand and 500 copies were published.

Robert Maunsell. Grammar of the New Zealand Language. Auckland: Printed and Published by J. Moore, 1842.

This grammar was written by Robert Maunsell (1810–1894) in 1841–1842, encouraged by the support of prominent figures including the Governor’s private secretary (James Coates), Sir William Martin (ca. 1807–1880), the first Chief Justice of New Zealand, and George Augustus Selwyn (1809–1878), first Anglican Bishop of New Zealand. This support resulted in the work being printed in Auckland by the printer contracted to the government, rather than by the Church Mission Press at Paihia. Freed from the influence of the Northern District, which controlled mission printing and translating, Maunsell took tentative steps at reforming Maori orthography and adopting (in preference to the northern Ngapuhi dialect) the conventions of the Waikato dialect, which was widely understood and had retained its purity. 

3,000 copies were printed at Maunsell’s expense and issued in four parts.

William Williams. A Dictionary of the New Zealand Language and a Concise Grammar. Paihia: Church Missionary Society, 1844.

Although some early dictionaries were just simple word lists, Colenso and the missionary-linguist William Williams (1800–1878) wrote full definitions in English for head words, provided clear indications of noun and verbal usages and gave sample sentences for most.

In his Books in Maori, Phil Parkinson notes that work began on the first Maori dictionary in 1837, when Colenso printed a 12-page section that was never published (Parkinson 217). 'When the Committee of Missionaries renewed its decision to print the grammar', Parkinson continues, 'Colenso wrote to the CMS on 26 July 1842 of his concerns about its lack of usefulness to Maori and the "hindrance" of having to do such "un-missionary work"'. Colenso suggested it would be better printed in England, but his fellow missionary printer (and successor), John Telford, disagreed, and was set the task of printing the dictionary.

The dictionary was compiled by William Williams and printed in an edition quantity of 550 copies. Williams's dictionary proved so popular that subsequent editions appeared in 1852, 1871, 1892, and several in the twentieth century (Parkinson 217).

The copy in the Dunedin City Library is inscribed by Bishop Selwyn.

The Bible in Maori

Ko te tahi wahi o Te Kawenata Hou o Ihu Karaiti te Ariki, to tatou Kai wakaora: me nga upoko e waru o te pukapuka o Kenehi: ka oti nei te wakamaori ki te reo o Nu Tirani. Hirini [Sydney]: Kua oti te ta e Te Tipene raua ko Te Toki, 1833.

The third published translation of any biblical scripture into Maori and among the ten earliest printed works in the Maori language. In 1814 the Church Missionary Society founded its New Zealand Mission. James Shepherd, one of its missionaries, began to translate portions of the Bible into Maori, approximately ten years later. While visiting Sydney in 1827, another missionary, Richard Davis, arranged for the New South Wales Auxiliary of the British and Foreign Bible Society to print 400 copies of a thirty-one-page volume of extracts. A second volume appeared in 1830, and expanded to 170 pages in 1833. The second and third volumes were also printed in Sydney, under the direction of the missionary William Yate (1802–1877) who, in 1830, produced Ke te katekihama III, a six-page edition of the third catechism in Maori and the first work printed on New Zealand soil.

Beginning of the Gospel of John

Ko te Kawenata Hou o to tatou Ariki te Kai Wakaroa a Ihu Karaiti. Paihia: He mea ta i Perehi o nga Mihanere o te Hahi o Ingarani, 1837.

On 17 February 1835, William Colenso produced his first piece of printing in New Zealand: a 16-page translation of the Epistles of Paul to the Philippians and to the Ephesians. Two years later, he finished the much more ambitious project of printing the first complete New Testament in Maori, which was translated primarily by William Williams.

The first copies of an edition of 5,000 were issued after binding the following year (Parkinson 44). According to the New Zealand Dictionary of Biography, 'Maori demand was high: a Maori leader in Kaitaia sent a messenger for a copy, bearing the only gold sovereign Colenso had seen in the country'.

Beginning of the Book of Genesis

Ko te Paipera Tapu, ara, Ko te Kawenata Tawhito me te Kawenata Hou: He mea whakamaori mai no nga reo i oroko-tuhituhia ai. Ranana [London]: He mea ta ki te Perehi a W. M. Watts, ma te Komiti ta Paipera mo Ingarangi mo te Ao Katoa, 1868.

Ko te Paipera Tapu is the first complete Maori Bible. The initial request for a complete Bible in the Maori language was made by the Church Missionary Society in 1862. The work is based on Maunsell’s translation of the Old Testament and William Williams’s version of the New Testament. It was revised by George Maunsell, Elizabeth Colenso (1821–1904), and Bishop Selwyn, who saw the Bible through the press for the British and Foreign Bible Society (Parkinson 716).

Copies arrived in New Zealand from England in 1869. The Bible was made available in three different bindings: red sheep, speckled calf, and red morocco.

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For further reading:

P. G. Parkinson. Books in Maori, 1815-1900: An Annotated Bibliography = Nga Pukapuka Reo Maori, 1815-1900. Auckland: Reed Publishing, 2004.

H. W. Williams. A Bibliography of Printed Maori. Wellington: A. R. Shearer, Government Printer, 1975; first published in 1924 and supplemented in 1928.

D. F. McKenzie. Oral Culture, Literacy & Print in Early New Zealand: The Treaty of Waitangi. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1985.

J. McRae. 'From Maori Oral Traditions to Print' in Book & Print in New Zealand: A Guide to Print Culture in Aotearoa edited by Penny Griffith, Ross Harvey and Keith Maslen. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1997.

J. McRae, 'Maori Oral Tradition Meets the Book'; D. Keenan, 'Aversion to Print? Maori Resistance to the Written Word'; and P. Lineham, 'Tampering with the Sacred Text: The Second Edition of the Maori Bible' in A Book in the Hand: Essays on the History of the Book in New Zealand edited by Penny Griffith, Peter Hughes and Alan Loney. Wellington: Auckland University Press, 2000.

Peter Wells. The Hungry Heart: Journeys with William Colenso. Auckland: Vintage, 2011.

* Colenso's cases are also reproduced on the Alembic Press website, which includes case layouts for Scottish, Vietnamese, Irish, and a host of other languages.