Brandeis Special Collections on the Internet Archive — Part I in an Occasional Series
We at Brandeis University Archives & Special Collections are dedicated to the preservation of the materials within our collecting remit. We are equally dedicated to making these materials freely and widely accessible. One of the ways we have been expanding this accessibility is by making many of our materials available online. As a member of the Boston Library Consortium, Brandeis University participates in the Open Content Alliance (OCA) project, which digitizes public-domain works from around the world. These digitized items are then made available on the Internet Archive (IA) (“a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, and more”) where they are beautifully presented, free, and openly accessible to anyone with an internet connection. This occasional series will highlight some of the 1,829 (and growing) valuable, unique, and highly requested research materials owned by Brandeis and scanned through the OCA project.
Recently Digitized Titles
The Scourge : or, Monthly Expositor of Imposture and Folly
London: Printed by W.N. Jones for M. Jones, 1811.
William N. Jones’s iconoclastic journal The Scourge: Monthly Expositor of Literary, Dramatic, Medical, Political, Mercantile and Religious Imposture and Folly (1811–1816) presents a cornucopia of biting satire aimed at every area of British society. What it is perhaps best known for is its presentation of George Cruikshank’s early work. Cruikshank’s hand-colored engravings were folded into the front of each issue (with extras being sold as separate prints). A famed British caricaturist and book illustrator whose many notable works include the illustrations for Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz, The Mudfog Papers, and Oliver Twist, Cruikshank began his long and prolific career as a teenager drawing for The Scourge. The caricatures he created therein were highly radical, political, and informed, and as such move beyond mere decoration to intellectual and historical significance.
View The Scourge on the Internet Archive.
The Complete Cynic: Being Bunches of Wisdom Culled from the Calendars of Olive Herford, Ethel Watts Mumford, Addison Mizner
San Francisco, Calif. : P. Elder & Co., 1910.
The Dial: A Semi-Monthly Journal of Literary Criticism, Discussion and Information, Chicago, December 16, 1910 calls it “a mirth-provoking collection of distorted proverbs with appropriate illustrations and decorations.”
When an author and a famous resort architect meet in Waikiki, there is no telling what may happen. From The Many Mizners (Addison Mizner, Sears Publishing, 1932): “One day I twisted an old adage to fit the time, and Ethel came back with a quotation from Oliver Herford. We began twisting all the old saws and bringing them up-to-date. We got 365 together and sent them to Elder & Shepard in San Francisco to be printed for our Christmas presents. Elder wrote back and asked us if he could publish it for sale, with a few cuts.” The result was the clever and cheeky The Cynic’s Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1903, thrown together on a whim by Ethel Watts Mumford (the author) and Addison Mizner (the architect) with some added (and unintentional) help from writer, artist, and illustrator Oliver Herford. It became a smash hit and was reincarnated several times over. The Complete Cynic is a fully developed book based on the wit of the original calendar.
View The Complete Cynic on the Internet Archive.
November 1, 2015