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Volume 30, Number 4
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| Good Stable Manners |
New York elites were well known for hosting dinners worthy of the ostentatious displays of wealth and consumption of Trimalchio, the freed slave of Petronius’ Satyricon. At a dinner given by C. K. G. Billings in March 1903, known as the “Horseback Dinner,” Sherry’s restaurant in Manhattan refitted its grand ballroom for 36 guests and their horses. The guests ate on horseback on miniature tables attached to the pommels of saddles, and were served by waiters dressed as grooms at a hunting party. Saddle bags equipped with rubber tubes dispensed champagne, and elaborate oat-filled feeding troughs were set out for the horses, which dined after their riders were finished. At another dinner party guests dined near a 30-foot long ornamental pool containing four swans, and discovered black pearls placed in their oysters. At still another party, human goldfish swam in ornamental pools and chorus girls hopped out of pies. The diners occasionally made their identification with and emulation of the elites of the classical world explicit. In a photograph of a dinner given by or for Harrison Grey Fiske in the winter of 1900–01, the black-tuxedoed dinner guests, shown relaxing after dinner with brandy and cigars, are crowned with laurel wreaths signifying their victorious status and privileged positions.
This painted Comanche hide, which dates from the mid nineteenth century, served as a robe for a child. There are very few such robes in existence, and it is a rare example of Comanche clothing in a museum collection east of the Mississippi. Wake Forest has received NEH support for conservation of some of the museum’s artifacts, including this robe.
From The North American Journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied, Volume I, May 1832–April 1833, published by the University of Oklahoma Press, 2008, in which the aristocratic naturalist and ethnographer, who traveled from Boston to the Upper Missouri recording not only the abundant flora and fauna but also the habits and customs of the settlers and native peoples along the way, describes an “outing” in the Poconos in eastern Pennsylvania. Underscores within the excerpt are those of the translators and indicate words that Maximilian wrote in English. Strikethrough type indicates a word Maximilian struck out and restored by the editors. “Ridingeresque” refers in all likelihood to the German painter of wild animal and hunting scenes, Johann Elias Ridinger (1698–1767). The press received NEH support for the Maximilian Journals Project.
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The man was occupied making some repairs on his mill dike. The rain fell steadily. We returned to the habitation of the man, who took his rifle in order to lead us to the trap. From the beginning we went through a dense underbrush of blackberries in the tall forest, climbed over fallen tree trunks, got very wet, and reached the part of the tall forest that was more open near the ground. Here, however, even more fallen trees lying in all directions formed a Ridingeresque wilderness for bears. Tall Canadian pine (hemlock pine) and sturdy beeches of great thickness with equally massive chestnut trees formed a dark forest. There, after again struggling through several areas with blackberries and other bushes, we came down to the place where the bear had been caught two days before.
On a spot somewhat cleared of big trunks, the trap stood between young hemlocks. It was a genuine deadfall made of heavy trunks in such a way that a young bear can be captured in it alive. It consists of two trunks lying on the ground, between which two others, supported by a trigger ... fall ... . The entire trap is concealed on all sides with branches, and all the parts of the trap must retain their bark. The head of the recently caught bear had been placed in the trap as bait. We wanted to have it, and the man therefore took it out and fastened the animal’s lungs in its place. Then we returned, delighted by our excursion into this bear wilderness in the immediate vicinity of human habitations.
| Baskerville Hounded |
As Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton were earning ultra-canonical status from the 1740s through 1760s, other poets also were receiving the honor conferred only by publishers: multiple reprintings. Yet copyright practices hampered the process. At stake were literary properties in authors and titles to which London booksellers laid exclusive claim, ignoring the terms of the 1710 Copyright Act . . . , which protected books then in print for twenty-one years (until 1731), and new publications for fourteen years, with an additional fourteen years if the author were still alive at the end of the first fourteen. Against this interpretation of the law, some booksellers argued that an author enjoyed a common-law right to his work, and this right, if assigned to a bookseller, was held (as by the author to that point) in perpetuity. In short, the situation was confusing, and the powerful London booksellers did their best to deepen the confusion in order to stave off competing editions of their authors, or run them out of the market.
Their stranglehold on literary property is illustrated by the frustrations of John Baskerville. Initially unaffected by copyright constraints, Baskerville undertook an edition of Virgil in 1754, producing proposals and specimen sheets and eventually Bucolica, Georgica et Aeneis itself in 1757. Meanwhile he looked forward to another major project, Milton’s poems. A newcomer to the book trade, he now confronted a bitter truth: “The Booksellers claim an absolute right in Copys of books, as old as even Milton & Shakespeare; the former of which I did design to have printed, but am deterred by Mr. Tonson & Co. threatening me with a bill in Chancery.” He was taken aback to find Milton’s works so jealously guarded more than eighty years after the author’s death. “When Virgil is done,” he wrote self-pityingly, “I can print nothing but another classick . . . which I cannot forbear thinking a grievous hardship after the infinite pains & great expense I have been at.” Though happy to print ancient texts, it galled him to think that extra-legal pressures should confine him to this arena, so he negotiated the “privilege” of printing Milton’s works, two conditions of which evidently were to add the phrase “for J. and R. Tonson” to his Birmingham imprint and to praise Tonson’s generosity and “singular politeness.” He went on to print editions of Congreve and Addison (1761), again with Tonson’s approval and name on the title-page, showing what an untenable position he was in. As far as reprinting classic English authors was concerned, Baskerville was kept in leading strings by the London trade.
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