Illustrated Catalog of Bellhangers' and Locksmiths' Supplies

Illustrated Catalog of Bellhangers' and Locksmiths' Supplies (1889)

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For all your Victorian locksmithing needs.  Nearly half the catalog is taken up with key blanks, page after page of them.  Don't know why I find that amusing.

An Iconography of Don Quixote

Henry Spencer Ashbee - An Iconography of Don Quixote (1895)

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An exhaustive bibliography of illustrations of Don Quixote from the start up to this book's publication.  Ashbee of course is better known for another bibliography - Index Librorum Prohibitorum, three volumes (in English, the title is a joke) documenting centuries of erotic publications.  He amassed a major collection of Cervantes which went to the British Museum who also had to accept, reluctantly, his erotica collection as well (though they found loopholes to destroy chunks of it).  The 1901 DNB notes that after An Iconography's publication  "his dilettanteism grew more and more refined, he was contemplating a most elaborate bibliography of every fragment of printed matter written in the French language by Englishmen."  Ah, somewhere in Borges' infinite library....  (The DNB also wouldn't use "erotica" but instead relied on the rare Greek-derived "kruptadia".)

Whitman, The Poet-Liberator of Woman

Mabel MacCoy Irwin - Whitman, The Poet-Liberator of Woman (1905)

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A self-published tribute to Whitman from an early feminist and minister.  The tone is almost overly effusive - Whitman attracts such writers - but she's mostly on target and this poet was probably the best choice at the time to use in promotion of women's self-determination.

Irwin (1856-1928) was a sometime music teacher who graduated from Tufts Divinity School and became a pastor in a Universalist church.  She traveled and lectured widely and there are records of her delivering sex education talks to public school parents in 1912.  She also promoted birth control and, unfortunately, eugenics though this may have been a late-life development according to one source.

Arnold Bennett reports (in Books and Persons) that she tried to distribute a paper on "strict chastity for both sexes" that the Post Office wouldn't allow to be sent because it referred to sex.  Bennett dryly remarks, "I reckon this anecdote to be the most exquisitely perfect of all anecdotes that I have ever come across in the diverting history of moral censorships."

The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus

Sir Richard F. Burton & Leonard C. Smithers (ed, trans) - The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus (1894)

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Seems like I should have known Burton translated Catullus but turns out that whatever his talents poetry wasn't the most prominent.  (Just take a sample "Yonder pinnacle ye (my guests!) behold / Saith she was erstwhile fleetest-fleet of crafts, / Nor could by swiftness of aught plank that swims, / Be she outstripped, whether paddle-plied, / Or fared she scudding under canvas-sail.")  Or as his early biographer Thomas Wright put it, "for the translating of so delicate, so musical and so gracious a poet as Catullus he was absolutely and entirely unqualified."

This book collects Burton's translation in verse (which he apparently never completed, being "surprised by Death" as his wife put it), a prose translation by Smithers (who published many of the Decadents) that's typically more readable, and the Latin original.  Despite a claim of being literal and unexpurgated it's not quite that - the notorious #16 has words dotted out which Smithers claims was in the manuscript he was given but implies (probably correctly) that may have been the work of Burton's widow.  And too bad that despite Burton's "great stress" on including his famously obsessive annotations those were never written.  ("There is no excursus on the origin of Tree-worship" the introduction apologizes and we readers sigh for what might have been.)

Elements of Trench Warfare & Bayonet Training

William H. Waldron - Elements of Trench Warfare & Bayonet Training (1917)

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This actually collects two different booklets, one on trench war and the other bayonets.  One oddity is that judging by the author's appeal for distribution it's not an official training manual but something he published and then hoped to get into the army's hands.  Still it seems to have sold fairly well and the library stamps on this scanned copy show it checked out several times even in the 1980s and 90s.  Its real use today (other than preparing for the zombie apocalypse) is the detail on mechanics of tactics and construction generally overlooked in historical accounts.

Jiu-jitsu

Harry H. Skinner - Jiu-jitsu (1904)

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An early English-language book on martial arts but since I can find little about the transmission of jiu-jitsu (or about this author either) it's unclear how "early".  The introduction claims the discipline was already being taught at Annapolis and West Point which might be true but is probably exaggerated.  In any case since the text is basically just descriptive the real appeal of the book today is the photos showing attacks involving a man in a hat, almost like John Steed's fighting manual.

Beard-Shaving and the Common Use of the Razor

Beard-Shaving and the Common Use of the Razor (1847)

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Apparently shaving a beard is an "unnatural, irrational, unmanly, ungodly and fatal fashion among Christians" according to this mid-19th century tract.  Best I can follow he (and it's a pretty safe bet that the anonymous author is male), he thinks beard-shaving means men no longer reflect God's image though actually he seems far more concerned by the potential physical damage of razors than more theological speculation.  The notes are much longer than the actual text and contain cranky swipes at Turks, Catholics, Russians and the current state of England (though oddly he seems ok with the French). Oh, he ends with "a word in favor of the mustachio" which distributes heat around the lips and helps when, uh, biting cartridges.  Well, I guess we still need that heat thing.