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Tobacco box carved from the wood of Haworth Church.
West Yorkshire, circa 1880.
Oak tobacco box, “Haworth Church” label affixed to interior of lid. $1500.
From 1820 until 1861, the Reverend Patrick Brontë occupied the parsonage at
Haworth, where he raised six children, including the novelists Charlotte, Emily,
and Anne. Although he outlived them all, Patrick Brontë survived to see Haworth
become a site of literary pilgrimage, as readers from around the world came to pay
tribute to the authors of
Jane Eyre
,
Wuthering Heights
, and
The Tenant of Wildfell
Hall
. In 1879, the old church was torn down, and the salvaged wood made into
keepsakes like this one, testifying to the Victorian passion for the Brontës.
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Sarah Harriet Burney; [Charlotte Broome]. Traits of Nature.
London: Henry
Colburn, 1813. Five octavo volumes, original boards covered in silk, manuscript labels.
Ownership signatures of Charlotte Broome. $950.
Early edition of Sarah Burney’s third novel, published one year after the first, a
family copy in a homemade binding. Sarah grew up in the shadow of her half-sister,
the novelist Fanny Burney, and five other close-knit half-siblings. The plot of
Traits of Nature
follows the isolated heroine’s alienation from her divided family:
“amongst a multitude of eager speakers to be the only being to whom no one
addresses a word.” This copy belonged to Sarah’s half-sister Charlotte. The boards
have been neatly but inexpertly covered in silk, with handwritten labels pasted to
the spines: very possibly Charlotte’s own work. A poignant association copy of the
novel Sarah Burney considered her best, with notable parallels to her own
precarious family position.
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Consuelo Godinho. Alphabeto Aboim. Composto, Desenhado, e Gravado pela
Calligrapha Consuelo Godinho.
Portugal, circa 1885. Oblong broadsheet volume,
original cloth boards. Color lithographic title page with mounted sepia photograph of
Godinho, as issued; 26 full-page color lithographic plates, printed recto only. $2200.
First edition of this dreamlike alphabet by Portuguese calligrapher Consuelo
Godinho, her only published work, featuring a photograph of the young artist
mounted to the title page. Godinho came from a renowned family of Lisbon
calligraphers: her grandfather, Manoel Nunes Godinho, earned the title of
“Calligrapho da Casa Real,” and her father, brothers, and sisters all produced
manuscripts prized by collectors.
AlphabetoAboim
features a full-page lithograph
for each letter of the alphabet, with a large illuminated initial set in the center of a
colorful patterned field, heightened in gilt. Godinho’s subjects are both classical
and allegorical. Some are easy to guess: the helmeted soldier brandishing a sword
inside the letter G symbolizes
Guerra
(war); the odalisque sleeping in the curve of
the N represents
Nudez
(nudity); the ship about to capsize inside the T stands for
Tempestade
(storm). More surprising is the modern woman sitting in the shadow of
the I, her hand on a piece of factory machinery, with a locomotive and smokestack
in the background:
Industria
(industry). A flamboyant
Kakatua
(cockatoo) perches
on the K, a letter that rarely appears in Portuguese. Bibliographer Henrique de
Campos Ferreira Lima offers a speculative key to Godinho’s alphabet, but frankly
throws up his hands at the meaning of her illuminatedW, featuring a man in what
appears to be a fur loincloth: “não decifrámos” (“we can’t tell”). See Lima,
Subsídios
para um Dicionário Bio-bibliográfico dos Calígrafos Portugueses
, 38. No copies located in
North America. A scarce and whimsical illuminated alphabet.
