Oliver Messel

In 1936, MGM created a lavish production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet starring Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard. To design the sets and costumes, the studio called on English artist and premier stage designer Oliver Messel.  He was well down for his masks for Diaghilev’s ballet, and for several revues and musicals in London, and Tony award winning designs for Broadway.  He worked on several movies, other than Romeo and Juliet, earning an Academy Award Nomination for Suddenly Last Summer in 1959.

Dust jacket design.

After the film came out, the New York times selected it as one of the “Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made.”  Later in 1936, a book containing the complete play was published, illustrated with Messel’s costume and set designs.  The Galvin Rare Book Room has a copy signed by Mr. Messel. (Part of the Mark Lutz  Collection.) There are gorgeously drawn costume designs, and ethereal set designs, many in color, right alongside the bard’s lovely poetry.  Worth stopping by to take a look.

It wouldn’t be October without a few ghosts and ghouls creeping around, and various “haunted houses” popping up in shopping malls to frighten us. Not surprisingly, Virginia claims quite a few legitimately haunted houses, and woods, according to Marguerite du Pont Lee. In her book, Virginia Ghosts (Galvin Rare Book Room F 227 .L48), she relates eye witness accounts such as the ghost of Aquia Church, in Stafford County.  A woman was murdered in the church, sometime in the early 1800’s, and her body was hidden in the belfry. Her ghost has been reported by many, walking the aisles of the church at midnight.

On Leigh Street in Downtown Richmond, stands the Hawes homestead. Many reports tell of a small lady dressed in gray gliding along the second floor hall only to disappear through a closed

Aquia Church, Stafford County.

door. And Matthews County contains the Old House haunted woods where from as early as 1798 there have been reports of the ghosts of pirates, murdered royalists, and officers and men of British General Cornwallis’s army, seen roaming through the trees.

Mrs. Lee signed her book, dedicating it to the Marion Garnett Ryland Virginiana Collection in 1932. Underneath her inscription she wrote:

            Spirits from brighter stars draw near

            When camps are lit, and fires burn clear.

            With gentle touch, and loving look

            Bless them for me, my little book.

Come down to the Rare Book Room and take a look and Virginia Ghosts, and some of our other chilling reads. If you dare.

The Galvin Rare Book Room has a copy of the 1855 first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. We were duly proud of this copy and used it in a display some months ago. A resident Whitman scholar, Rob Nelson, director of the Digital Scholarship Lab, saw it and was amazed that we owned one of the 158 known copies still extent. Sometime later, an antiquarian book seller’s catalog listed a copy for sale in excess of $170,000, making our book possibly the most monetarily valuable book in our collection and worth a little extra study.

This edition has been widely studied, especially by Ed Folsom of the University of Iowa. In the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review in 2006, he printed a Census of the 1855 Leaves of Grass. He had collected information from all the known owners of the book looking for information about the various anomalies that make this edition so fascinating. He received answers from owners (including Boatwright) as to which binding they owned, the frontispiece picture, typos contained and changes made.

Leaves of Grass was a self-published work, and Whitman, himself a trained printer, set much of the type. It was printed at his friend Andrew Rome’s print shop in between runs of legal forms. Scholars believe this is the reason the book is so large—the paper on hand and the press were all set for legal forms. Also, Whitman proofread as the pages came off the press, so typos in one book of the same edition, do not appear in others. His miscalculations on how many pages his book would be, caused spacing to change and titles of poems to be dropped as printing continued.

There are some famous anomalies to look for that are quite interesting. During the printing process, Whitman completely changed a line of “Song of Myself” from “The night is for you and me and all” to “The day and night are for you and me and all.” The earlier “night” version appears in 44 of the 158 copies, including Boatwright’s copy. While this difference was intentional, there are others that were not. The last line of “Song of Myself” either has a period or it doesn’t. (Boatwright’s copy does not.) Most scholars believe this is a press error, but some think Whitman was making a statement about open-endedness. Another glaring typo occurs in the final triplicate of the poem, “Failing to fetch me me at first keep encouraged.”

And then there is the most controversial of all, the frontispiece drawing. It is an engraving of a daguerreotype of Whitman, full body, wearing working clothes. There is an enhancement to the portrait that appears in all copies of the very first binding of the book (there are three different bindings of lesser and lesser value). The enhancement is known as the bulge, darker shading at the right of the crotch. Many of the second binding copies do not have this. Boatwright’s copy does, which helps place our copy in the earliest run of the book in June of 1855.

Whitman, the bookmaker, turns out to be almost as fascinating as Whitman, the poet. And, books as objects are equally fascinating.

+Folsom, Ed. “The Census of the 1855 Leaves of Grass: A Preliminary Report.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 24.2 (2006): n. Web. 13 March 2014.