The Director's Column

Peter H. Reill, Director
(no. 40, Fall 2002)

The year ahead promises to be a most exciting one for the Center and the Clark. We are planning the most extensive academic and cultural program in our history, progressing with plans for the renovation of the Clark, and hosting and organizing the Eleventh Quadrennial Congress of the International Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (ISECS), which will meet at UCLA together with the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (ASECS) the first week of August. The ISECS/ASECS meeting will be a major event. It will be only the second time that ISECS has convened in the United States (the first was at Yale in 1979), and the congress promises to be one of the largest in its history. As is the case at all ISECS meetings, English and French will be the official languages, but we have added Spanish as a third in recognition of its special place in Los Angeles culture and life, and to encourage scholars from Spanish-speaking areas to attend. While the three hundred sessions and roundtables proposed will cover all aspects of eighteenth-century studies, the congress’s main focus will be on interpreting the eighteenth century; a large number of discussions will be dedicated to the exploration of two major themes, “the global eighteenth century” and “filming the eighteenth-century.”

The broad cultural program associated with the congress will reflect this focus. Screenings of a selection of films on the eighteenth century will be complemented by panel discussions on the way filmmakers have interpreted the period. The highlight of the film program will be a presentation of Alexandre Volkoff’s 1927 French silent classic Casanova, with an orchestra performing a score especially composed for it by Georges Delerue, the premier musical voice for the films of François Truffaut, Alain Renais, and Jean-Luc Godard. Concerts of eighteenth-century music will take place as well. In commemoration of our country’s roots in the Enlightenment, an original copy of the Declaration of Independence will be on view at UCLA’s Fowler Museum. One afternoon’s session will be held at the Getty Center, and trips to the Clark and the Huntington libraries will be arranged.

Our hosting of the ISECS/ASECS congress reflects our goal to make the Center/Clark one of the major international venues for the study of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To this end, in the week preceding the congress, we will also co-organize and cohost with the Getty and the Huntington, this year’s International Seminar on the Eighteenth Century. This annual seminar brings together junior scholars from around the world to focus upon a specific problem in eighteenth-century studies. Papers, which are submitted before the seminar, serve as the basis for three days of intensive discussion and exchange. This will be the second time that the Center/Clark has cohosted this event; the first proved so successful that its core members have arranged a conference entitled “Eighteenth-Century Colonialisms and Post-Colonial Theories,” to be held at the Clark in June.

Our commitment to international cooperation has also led us in other directions. We are beginning a joint research program with the University of Paris IV (the Sorbonne). The project, “Naturalized Texts,” examines texts produced in one country and then adopted in others as their own, sometimes acquiring different meanings and forms as they are absorbed in each country’s cultural and intellectual heritage. This collaboration will begin with a roundtable discussion at the ISECS/ASECS congress to be followed by conferences at the Clark and in Paris. Our other academic exchange programs are blossoming as well. We are arranging two conferences with the Cini Foundation of Venice this year. The first, on the Italian philosopher and historian Giambattista Vico, will take place in Venice. The second, on early modern Italian Jewish culture, takes place at the Clark in April. This four-day event, cosponsored by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation of New York, the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles, and the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies, will include a concert of early modern Italian Jewish music. Finally, we will be welcoming, along with our normal complement of research fellows, junior exchange scholars from Göttingen, Pisa, and Zürich.

The ISECS/ASECS congress will cap a very busy year. Our yearlong core program, Braudel Revisited: The Mediterranean World, 1600–1800, is described below. We are also presenting programs on themes such as “Rousseau and the Visual,” “Factions and Fictions in Early Modern Europe,” “Monarchists and Monarchisms in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” and “The Intersection of Politics and German Literature, 1750–2000.” We will present seven chamber music concerts, four in our regular series Chamber Music at the Clark, one fund-raiser, and two in association with the Italian Cultural Institute. The Clark will offer poetry readings in its series Poetry Afternoons at the Clark, as well as several special exhibits. We hope that those of you who are interested in such events will join us in the usual stimulating and congenial atmosphere of the Clark, whether it be at a conference, concert, lecture, or cultural program.

 


Return to the listing of contents (no. 40).



Braudel Revisited: The Mediterranean World, 1600–1800

Gabriel Piterberg, Teofilo Ruiz, Geoffrey Symcox,
Center & Clark Professors, 2002–03

(no. 40, Fall 2002)

In a way, Fernand Braudel’s work La Méditerranée et le monde Méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (1949) established the early modern Mediterranean as a historical subject. The Center and Clark core program for this year considers the scholarship stimulated by Braudel’s enterprise by pursuing four broad goals: an evaluation of Braudel’s work in and of itself; an extension of its methodological scope beyond the “hard” socioeconomic topics and materials that shaped Braudel’s thinking, to encompass the historical questions and sources of more recent times; an expansion of Braudel’s temporal framework beyond the sixteenth century into the eve of modernity; and a use of the Mediterranean as a conceptual framework that will collapse the constructed boundaries between East and West, and between Islam and Christendom. In this way program participants will think about the Mediterranean in the early modern period simultaneously with and beyond Braudel.

What does it mean to think with and beyond Braudel? A few examples come to mind as useful illustrations. One concerns what historians call the “crisis of the seventeenth century,” caused by the price revolution of the sixteenth century and its attendant social, political, and cultural consequences. For a long time the prevailing explanation for the price revolution throughout Eurasia was monetary: the flow of large quantities of precious metals from the Americas via the Iberian Peninsula into Europe and Asia. In the past quarter century, the rigidly monetary explanatory cluster has been demolished, and alternative theses have been put forward, although they lack the paradigmatic uniformity of their predecessor. Paradoxically, much of the authority enjoyed by the monetary theory among historians was owed to the unequivocal blessing that Braudel had bestowed upon it in his 1949 magnum opus. How should we understand the fact that Braudel, the historian most clearly identified with the notion of a longue durée rooted in ecological and demographic phenomena, accepted uncritically in 1949 a purely monetary thesis? The discussion of this possible paradox and the research to which it has given rise is the gist of what we mean by thinking with and beyond Braudel.

Another example can be drawn from Braudel’s treatment of the eastern Mediterranean, the region occupied by the Ottoman Empire during early modern times. Braudel broke important new ground in placing the Mediterranean at the center of more than western Europe, but he could not move beyond seeing the eastern and western Mediterranean as distinct sociocultural regions. He did not read Ottoman Turkish and thus had to rely on the works of other historians for his information about the Ottoman Empire. These secondary sources analyzed the region through the lens of “Orientalism,” then the dominant Western European way of looking at all lands east of the Adriatic. From this perspective, the Ottoman Empire was “the Other” in its very essence, on account of its Islamic religion and culture, and its history from the sixteenth century onward was one of irreversible decline. Since the 1970s, researchers have been finding and publishing materials that thoroughly discredit the Orientalist approach. Today, scholars see in the Ottoman Empire a political entity of fascinating cultural complexity, whose long centuries of history and vast geographical extent make reducing its essence to Islamism impossible. And while they uncover these complexities, they find new commonalities linking east with west, not the least of which derive from the fact of a shared sea, the Mediterranean. How different might Braudel’s pronouncements on the Ottomans and his view of the nature of Mediterranean integration have been, had he had at his disposal the recent findings of Ottoman scholars, whatever their national origins?

A further way to think with and beyond Braudel is to look at the domain of culture, which he barely touched. His investigative framework started with geographical and environmental factors, which he believed dictate the basic structures of an “immobile history”; then it turned to social and economic factors, subject to change over time and responsible for mid-range “conjunctural history.” His analytical schema did include politics, which he tacked on to his framework awkwardly in the final section of his book, but he made little effort to include culture, either elite or popular. This, we should remember parenthetically, in a book that covered the era of the high Renaissance and the Reformation. It was this methodology that made La Méditerranée et le monde Méditerranéen à l’epoque de Philippe II one of the seminal texts for the paradigm of social and economic history that dominated the profession for nearly three decades until cultural history, today’s favored paradigm, began to take over in the late 1970s.

The challenge of cultural history prompts a couple of reflections: First, why did Braudel find no room in his giant opus for more than a fleeting mention of culture? Why this fixation on social and economic history to the exclusion of other approaches? And second, how has the emergence of cultural history altered our perspective both on Braudel’s great work and on the world it described? Our program examines these problems from several different angles. Presenting a thematic overview of Braudel’s work, the introductory conference will lay the groundwork for subsequent discussions, which will re-examine the classic Braudelian paradigm in the light of more recent work and address the challenge of expanding that paradigm. We will look at the connections between religion, a topic conspicuous by its absence from the Braudelian synthesis, and social movements, to which he devoted close attention; we will assess the significance of cultural exchanges across the Mediterranean, a subject that Braudel helped put on the map; and finally we will address the domains of aural and visual culture, which he neglected. In this way we hope to build on Braudel’s legacy, to achieve a richer historical synthesis and a deeper understanding of the subject he established as a realm of enquiry in its own right: the Mediterranean in the early modern period.

Our program consists of five conferences:

26 October. “Braudel Revisited.”
Prominent historians of the early modern Mediterranean consider central themes of Braudel’s work and one of them, a student of Braudel’s, reminisces about him as a teacher and director of research.

6–7 December. “Economy and Society in the Early Modern Mediterranean.”
This conference asks whether the various regions of the Mediterranean underwent similar economic and social processes, and whether these processes are related to the formation of the early modern dynastic states.

31 January–1 February. “Religion, Conflict, and Popular Culture.”
The millenarian, heterodox, and radical movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the persecutions and conflicts accompanying them, comprise the concerns of this conference. It expands Braudel’s pioneering discussion of these topics and addresses the new methodological and critical approaches to the study of violence, religion, and radical millenarianism.

11–12 April. “Cultural Transmission in the Mediterranean World.”
Complementing in a way the preceding conference, this meeting asks whether the Mediterranean may be seen as an integrated space, not only in terms of its material and political history, but also with respect to cultural production and exchange.

30–31 May. “Aural and Visual Cultures in the Mediterranean.”
Braudel did not study the rich cultural production of the early modern Mediterranean world in the areas of literature, music and opera, and the visual arts. The concluding program seeks to extend his synthesis temporally and conceptually by examining these fields of enquiry, and perhaps to offer some hypothesis as to why he chose not to include them in his great work.

 


Return to the listing of contents (no. 40).




Expanding the French Holdings

Bruce Whiteman, Clark Head Librarian
(no. 40, Fall 2002)

One of the old French biographical dictionaries, Nouvelle biographie générale, characterizes Louis Antoine Caraccioli (1719–1803) not as “un ecrivain” but, less generously, as “un littérateur,” a word which, while there is no exact English equivalent, suggests little more than a scribbler: a person who ranks his own writing rather higher than the rest of the world does, one might say. Though he died poor, Caraccioli, for all his close ties to French high society during the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI, managed to survive the Revolution, and the broad thematic range of his works makes him interesting to scholars of manners and many other subjects. He is best known among book people for his two publications printed with colored inks: Le livre à la mode (1759), acquired by the Clark in 1999, and Le livre de quatre couleurs (1760). But the list of his works is much longer (“trop fécond” complains the ungenerous Nouvelle biographie générale), and many of them are of interest. The Clark has owned translations of one or two Caraccioli texts for many years, but until last year owned only one of his works in the original French, De la gaieté (1767—how characteristic a title for its time!). Last year we acquired several more of his texts in French, as part of a growing effort to collect a number of eighteenth-century French authors: La jouissance de soi-même and the second edition published in Liège of Le véritable mentor (both 1759), L’agriculture simplifiée and Les adieux de la Maréchale de *** à ses enfants (both 1769), Lettres à Monsieur Caraccioli (1776, written by Carracioli despite the title), as well as Le langage de la réligion (1763) and one more English translation, this of Le langage de la raison (The Language of Reason, 1802).

The Clark is acquiring works by other eighteenth-century French scientists, philosophers, and literary writers as well. Although Rousseau bulks perhaps too dauntingly large to collect comprehensively, several interesting Rousseau items were bought this past year, most unusually a twenty-six-leaf manuscript relating to the history of the education of women. This is one of a number of manuscripts that Rousseau created while working as a sort of research assistant for Madame Dupin, from whose papers (dispersed as long ago as the 1950s) the Clark’s piece comes. J.-M.-A. Servan’s Réflexions sur Les Confessions de J. J. Rousseau (1783), a sammelband containing Rousseau’s Discours qui a remporté le prix à l’Académie de Dijon (1750) as well as five related items, Jacques-Vincent Delacroix’s Eloge de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1778), and J-J Brechter’s Briefe über den Aemil des Herrn Rousseau (1773) add to the Clark’s holdings of this major French writer. Rousseau was influenced by Morelly (whose first name and dates remain undiscovered), and the Clark acquired Morelly’s important Code de la nature (1755) this year to add to our copy of his imaginary narrative Naufrage des isles flottantes (1753), acquired a year ago. Of related interest, at least in their emphasis on the relationship between nature and human nature, are the 1748 Essai sur les passions by Montenault (whose first name is also unknown) and the Essai sur le méchanisme des passions (1751) by Jean Baptiste Joseph Lallement.

The Clark has extensive holdings of Sir Isaac Newton, and it has seemed sensible to begin to collect some of the French scientific materialists who came after him, in addition to French translations of Newton’s works and original works in French about him. Several works by Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759) have come to the Clark in recent years, and to these have been added lately his Discours sur la parallaxe de la lune (1741) and the first edition of the Dissertation sur le nègre blanc (1744), an important anthropological work. The most famous work by Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–51) is L’homme-machine, of which the first and other early editions can be found on campus. The Clark now owns his scarce Histoire naturelle de l’ame [sic] (1745) and, perhaps most excitingly of all, proof copies of two other works, Politique du médecin de Machiavel (1746?) and Essai sur l’esprit et sur les beaux esprits (1746). These are said to be the only known surviving proof copies of any work by La Mettrie. The corrections are in a proofreader’s hand and are quite extensive.

Other French books acquired by the Clark this past year include a beautiful large-paper copy of Jacques Amyot’s translation of Daphnis and Chloe published in 1745, a presentation copy of Paul Verlaine’s Elégies (1893), Castel de St-Pierre’s rare Discours sur la polysynodie (1718), Le Marquis de St-Simon’s Essai de traduction littérale (1771, in a lovely large-paper copy), Ange Goudar’s L’espion François à Londres (1780), Samuel de Constant’s Camille, où lettres de deux filles de ce siècle (1785, an original novel dressed up as a translation from the English), and a book of racy stories and poems, published anonymously, called Le facécieux reveille-matin des esprits mélancholiques (1654). Two early books deal with instinct, Pierre Chanet’s De l’instinct et de la connaissance des animaux (1646) and Ignace Gaston Pardies’s Discours de la connoissance des bestes (1672). Charles Perrault’s stunning book of engravings of the fountains at Versailles, Labyrinte de Versailles (ca. 1682), has text in four languages—English, Dutch, German, and French. Belin de la Libordière’s Voyage dans le boudoir de Pauline (1800) and Antoine Caillot’s Voyage autour de ma bibliothèque (1809) both use the trope of a voyage in works of autobiography and fiction—Caillot subtitles his book “roman bibliographique.” Nicolas Bricaire de la Dixmerie’s L’isle taciturne et l’isle enjouée, ou voyage du génie Alaciel dans ces deux isles (1759) is another imaginary voyage, this one dedicated to comparing England and France. Béat Louis de Muralt’s Lettres sur les Anglois et les François (1725), by contrast, is an early and influential comparison of the two nations, and helped to make English culture and society better known in France.


Return to the listing of contents (no. 40).



Rare Volumes on the Orangist Revolution
Margaret C. Jacob, UCLA

(no. 40, Fall 2002)

Between the Glorious Revolutionin England (1688–89) and the famous late-eighteenth-century revolutions in the American colonies and in France, a less-known revolution took place in the Low Countries in 1747–48. Under the threat of a French invasion, the Dutch revolted against their oligarchic regents and installed a new stadholder in the person of William IV, the head of the Frisian branch of the House of Orange. The Clark has acquired a splendidly rare and interesting six-volume collection, complete with engravings, that chronicles (in the form of a popular dialogue) the discontent that persisted in the Republic into the mid-1750s. Dichtkundig Praal-Tooneel van Neerlands wonderen (Embden, 1753–54) was published anonymously. The imprint may be false, as the German city of Embden, which had been a publishing center for radical Calvinist works a century earlier, had no reputation for illicit publishing in the eighteenth century. There was good reason for the subterfuge. The Orangist Revolution followed the pattern of early modern revolutions: first a split within the ruling elite, in this case fueled by British interests and their support for William IV (whose wife was the daughter of the English king); and then a more radical and popularly-based movement, known in Dutch as de doelistenbeweging—after De Doelen, the hotel in Amsterdam where the movement was started. The doelisten wanted genuine reform, not just the restoration of the stadholder and his pro-British policies. They wanted elected officials, reform of public services, and, not least, encouragement of the arts, sciences, and manufacturing. The movement was crushed by 1749; one of its leaders, Jean Rousset de Missy, was exiled; another leader, Daniel Raap, remained a thorn in the side of the Orangist government until 1754, when he was hanged. That is the context for this anonymous dialogue. The tone of much of the text is alternatively angry and nostalgic. It claims that the doelisten had important answers to which no one listened, and it calls Daniel Raap the people’s hero. There is an incipient democratic impulse present in the text, and in that sense it looks forward to the revolution that erupted in the Republic in 1787. The Clark’s acquisition gives it an item not in the collections of the Royal Library in The Hague, and the title complements the growing strength of Dutch studies at UCLA.


Return to the listing of contents (no. 40).




John Dunton's The Informer's Doom
Jeanne Clegg, University of Aquila

(no. 40, Fall 2002)

[Professor Clegg was a Short-Term Fellow at the Clark in early 2001. Her research on the representation of spies and informers in early modern literature is part of a larger project on witnessing and evidence in relation to the eighteenth-century novel.]

The Informer’s Doom: Or, an Amazing and Seasonable Letter from Utopia, Directed to the Man in the Moon (1683), by book seller, hack writer, and pioneering journalist John Dunton (1659–1733), illustrates a talent for titles more intriguing in themselves than accurate as indicators of content or form. This thickly-illustrated tract is neither a utopia nor a letter but a dramatized account of a series of allegorical trials of “the bitter Enemies, that disturb and molest . . . the Christian World”; and the “Doom” it pronounces is not exclusively, or even principally, that of “the Informer.”

In two passages, however, informers play key roles. At the trial of “Mr. Implacable a Justice of the Peace” so many witnesses testify to his atheistical opinions and persecution of “faithful Minister[s]” that there is no need to call Spy, the “one that he set to watch Sincere Christians, for fear that they should serve God.” This places Implacable among the more zealous enforcers of the Restoration laws against “seditious conventicles” and suggests that Dunton had absorbed more than a knowledge of the book trade from Thomas Parkhurst, the Presbyterian bookseller with whom he had served his apprenticeship. It also connects The Informer’s Doom to the spate of 1670s and 1680s pamphlets in which Dissenters protested against the prevalent and pernicious use of informers against them. The woodcut illustration of the Spy, which shows a naked, torch-bearing figure covered in eyes even to the buttocks, vividly conveys fear and hatred, as does the sequel to the hanging of Implacable, whose dead body is opened to reveal “in his belly twelve Informers,” and “in his heart” two constables and “Mr. Envy-good the chief Informer in Utopia.” Envy-good himself is accused of preferring to “inform against a good Preacher than a Bawdy-house, a Drunkard, or a Swearer.” The implication that the latter are legitimate targets for informers looks forward to the 1690s, when the Societies for the Reformation of Manners began vigorously inciting the public to denounce drunkards, fornicators, and blasphemers. Envy-good, however, is no reforming informer for, as his name implies, he is inspired by hate: “I am impenetrable, I care for no man … whomever I mischief, whoever I wrong, to me it is musick. . . .”

Dunton’s second informer, on the other hand, is motivated by greed. When the racketeering Sir John Fraud, “an Upstart, come out of Italy” who has “insinuated…[him]self into all the Trades, Estates and Professions,” is arrested, a Grand Jury must be empaneled. One by one representatives of all ranks and trades come forward, only to be interrogated by judge and prosecutor, who are keen to detect the corrupting influence of Fraud. This device provides Dunton with an excuse for cataloguing the tricks of the London trades. Here he cannot resist inserting a bit of puff for “a Bookseller, a reputed very honest man indeed, and of Gentile Profession,” and he makes clear his other favorites, among them shepherds, ropemakers, smiths, and poets. The legal professions fare less well. When an informer comes forward the judge addresses him with suspicion—”you, Master informer, you that look like a Civil Citizen, or some hansom pettifogger of the Law”—and orders his bag to be searched. Sure enough, the lining reveals hundreds of writs for the arrest of innocent men, his means for extorting money from the many who, rather than undergo the risk and expense of a trial, will pay to be left to “sit at home in quiet.”

Among seventeenth-century rogue pamphlets are many denouncing such abuses, and the Informer’s Doom clearly relates to this minor tradition. The curious prominence Dunton gives to informers in his title suggests that he was cashing in on the currently heightened interest in and loathing for this category among the much harassed Dissenters. At the same time, his suggestion that informers would be well employed against whores, drunkards, and blasphemers anticipates the emergence, in the collective imagination of the eighteenth century, of the new figure of the informer as truly public-spirited “Civil Citizen.”


Return to the listing of contents (no. 40).




Will Cheney, Typesticker, 1907–2002

Ryan Hildebrand, University of California, Irvine

(no. 40, Fall 2002)

[Mr. Hildebrand, Special Collections and Archives Cataloguer at Irvine, worked at the Clark for the past two years, while he was a graduate student at UCLA. He became familiar with the Cheney archive then and prepared a bibliography of Cheney’s ephemera as part of his work for the MLIS degree.]

We announce with sadness the passing away last July of Los Angeles printer William Murray Cheney. Will Cheney, as he was known to the printing community, was a self-styled “typesticker,” one in love with and obsessed by type. “I just love type in my hands, putting words into metal,” he said in an interview. “Setting type is much more fascinating to me than printing . . . [the printed product is] usually a disappointment.”

Yet Cheney’s interests and talents ranged far beyond those of sticking type. Though he is best known for his miniature books and cantankerous sense of humor, he was also an author, amateur linguist, and lighthearted forger. His own writings comprise a good portion of his printing. Some of his more memorable titles are A Voyage to Trolland (1933), Pamphlet on the Four Basic Dialects of Pig Latin (1950), Arguments for Inconciseness (1954), A Treatise on Pocket Knives (1964), and Fleecestreet’s Greek in a Nutshell (1972). Cheney published these books under various imprints, such as the Auk Press and The Press in the Gatehouse, and various pseudonyms, among them Alta Superba Fountain, Judge Jason Augustus Fleecestreet, and Brigadier General Cyclops Stonebone. He also undertook a large amount of job-work, producing books and ephemeral items for Los Angeles book dealers, including Dawson’s Book Shop and Zeitlin and Ver Brugge, as well as for private clients and friends.

Like many Los Angeles printers, Cheney had a special relationship with the Clark. In 1962, he began his tenure as “printer in the gatehouse” at the Library, then directed by Lawrence Clark Powell, whom he had known for many years. Powell was one of Cheney’s earliest admirers, and his most consistent patron. He remembered Cheney’s move to the Clark in this way: “When his telephone-booth-sized print shop on La Cienega was marked for destruction, two of Cheney’s oldest patrons, Glen Dawson and Jake Zeitlin, asked the university to rescue Cheney. The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library offered him sanctuary from the angelic maelstrom, and installed him in the gatehouse as printer to the library.” The arrangement was casual, and it seems that UCLA and the Clark managed to “install” Cheney without any (surviving) paperwork. According to Cheney, “the idea was that I could do—well, no specific amount, but I was to do work for them, and no money would change hands one way or another. . . . I’d do what they wanted, and they didn’t charge me any rent.” The agreement allowed Cheney to continue with both his commercial work and his own private work.

Cheney’s stay in the Clark’s gatehouse until 1974 was his longest residence anywhere as a printer. In his twelve years here, he produced a wide range of ephemeral materials for the Library, from readers’ cards to invitations. While he modestly downplayed the importance of his work, those who knew good typography appreciated it. His leaflet invitation for A Symposium on the Life and Works of Eric Gill received one of the highest forms of typographic praise imaginable in the form of a note from Beatrice Warde, who expresses her delight “with that lovely little invitation-program. . . . It’s a typographic gem, and I shall beg for extra copies for my friends.”

Cheney continued to print into the early 1980s. His output ceased after 1983, when he wrote and printed his Autobiography of W. M. C. at the request of Glen Dawson. With his passing, Los Angeles has lost one of its most unique pressmen, as well as its last link to the heyday of Los Angeles printing.


Return to the listing of contents (no. 40).



Images reproduced in this on-line issue:

Illustrations are identified in order of appearance. When not otherwise credited, images are from materials in the Clark Library collection.  All rights are reserved.

[Director's Column]Folded plate preceding the title page to Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, A Voyage into the Levant (London, 1718), vol. 1.

[Braudel Revisited] Seventeenth- and twentieth-century renderings of the port of Barcelona: Nicolas de Fer, Introduction à la fortification (Paris, 169_?); courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. François Louis Schmied, Peau-Brune: de St. Nazaire à la Ciotat (Lyon, 1931).

[Braudel Revisited] A bridge in Valencia, in Schmied, Peau-Brune.

[Expanding French Holdings] Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s manuscript notes for a projected history of the education of women by Mme. Dupin.

[Expanding French Holdings] Proof leaves from Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Politique du médecin de Machiavel (Amsterdam, 1746 ?).

[Volumes on Orangist Revolution] Folded plate from Dichtkundig Praal-Tooneel van Neerlands wonderen (Embden, 1753–54), vol. 2. The motto on the flag proclaims “Orange Freedom.”

[John Dunton's The Informer's Doom] “A Spy set a work by Mr. Implacable." Woodcut from The Informer’s Doom (London, 1683). Reproduced by permission of the British Library [The Informer's Doom Wing D2629]. The reproduction, in any form, of this image without the written consent of the British Library is prohibited.

—[Will Cheney, Typesticker] A map of Trolland, in William M. Cheney, A Voyage to Trolland, 1933.

[Will Cheney, Typesticker] Some of Will Cheney's miniature books. From left: Lawrence Clark Powell, The Sea As Seen by El Sea Powell (1962); Cheney, Types in the Cases of William M. Cheney (1961); Cheney, An Offhand Display of the Types in Our Basement (1949).



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