For the final project of my Rare Book Curatorship class, I have been given two imaginary budgets—one large budget of $50,000 to $100,000, and a small budget of $1,000 to $1,500—with which to create two useful and thematically-focused collections from rare books currently on the market. For my large budget, I decided to create a collection of books highlighting the history and reception of literary translations into English. For each book on my list, I will write a detailed explanation of how I think this book would be valuable to a collection like the one envisioned, and how the specific book I’ve chosen relates to the principles of book collecting discussed in John Carter’s 1948 book, Taste and Technique in Book Collecting.

(To be clear, I am not actually buying these books, but if you have a $50,000 – $100,000 budget to spend, you could!)

The Historie of the World. Commonly called The Natvrall Historie of C. Plinivs Secvndvs (1601)

Translator: Philemon Holland

Original Language: Latin

Price: $17,500

Sold By: Whitmore Rare Books

Listed on: ABAA.com, AbeBooks, Biblio, and seller’s website

Why I Would Purchase This Book:

T

homas Fuller, in an often-quoted line from his Worthies, described Philemon Holland as “the translator-general of his age,” and adds “our Holland had the true knack of translating.” A physician and schoolmaster from Coventry, Holland began in his middle age to translate and “over the four years 1600–1603, [he] published 4,332 folio pages of translations of the very highest quality,” including Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, Pliny’s Historia Naturalis, and Plutarch’s Moralia (ODNB, “Philemon Holland.”) Holland claimed—to heap wonders on top of wonders—to have written his translation of Plutarch’s Moralia with a single quill pen, which a noblewoman subsequently acquired and had encased in silver. Holland’s son Henry penned the following lines about his father’s immaculate pen:

This booke I wrote with one poore pen, made of a grey goosse quill :
A pen I found it, us’d before, a pen I leave it still.

However unlikely this story, what is undeniable is that Holland’s industriousness (and, by all accounts, exceptionally boring personal life) brought works by classical Greek and Latin authors such as Livy, Pliny the Elder, Suetonius, and Plutarch for the first time to Anglophone readers such as William Shakespeare. (A summary of the debts English literature owes to Pliny, from Shakespeare and Donne to Byron, Keats, and Shelley, is given by Paul Turner in his introduction to Selections from The history of the world [1962]. Turner notes that Holland completed his translation of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis in less than a year, despite its text running to over two million words!)

According to Paul Turner, Pliny’s Latin is “bare and graceless” and “slovenly,” and Pliny is “one of the few great authors who actually improve in translation—that is, when translated by a man like Philemon Holland.” Holland’s is a very free style of translation, but few commentators go so far as to call it bad; Turner, for instance, says, “what he adds is vitality, grace, and wit: he is particularly good at giving epigrammatic form to conceits barely suggested, or clumsily expressed in the Latin.” Holland’s “insertions expand and clarify, rather than change the original.” In his chapter on “Ancient History” translation in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 2: 1550-1660, Robin Sowerby shows how Hollands additions “all serve to make the picture full and vivid”:

Here in this very place (souldiers) must we stand to it and make resistance as if we were fighting under Rome walls. Let every man think that he is not onely to defend and ward his own bodie; but to protect his wife and little children: and let every one regard and take care not for his private affaires and domesticall charge, but eftoones consider this, That even now the Senate and people of Rome beholdeth and seeth our hardie deeds, and look how our force and valour now speedeth and sheweth itself, such from henceforth will the state and fortune be of that citie and Empire of Rome.

(Holland 1600: 416; bold added by Sowerby)

Though Holland has a persistent tendency to “double” Livy’s phrases, Sowerby says that on the whole, “Roman history as mediated in Holland’s emphatic and abundant style is made truly vivid.”

Taste and Technique in this Book Selection:

After going back and forth over which of Philemon Holland’s translations to purchase (and at what price point), I have concluded that this $17,500 copy of Holland’s translation of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis being sold by Whitmore Rare Books is the best choice, however expensive. The book was not only the most popular of Holland’s translations, it is one of only two works (together with Camden’s Britannia) translated by Holland to be included in Printing and the Mind of Man (1967), where the book is described as “more than a natural history: it is an encyclopaedia of the ancient world.” Students from the sciences will enjoy the story of the indefatigable Pliny, who rode around in a sedan chair so that he could be constantly writing and dictating notes to his assistants during every spare moment of the day; and who died of asphyxiation when he got too close to the erupting Mt. Vesuvius while researching the causes of volcanoes. The wide range of entertaining subject matter in the text will offer something fascinating for students from many disciplines.

In Chapter VII of John Carter’s Taste and Technique for Book Collectors, Carter explains that two of the values that are important to book collectors are (a) the provenance of a book, and (b) presentation or association copies. The prestige, we are to understand, is with a book associated with the author in some way, or failing that, with some famous person; however, I am in the library business and not the private collecting business, and so I see no reason to scorn books which show evidence of ownership even by unfamous people.  This copy of The natural historie has a 19^th century (rather than contemporary) binding, though the condition is otherwise as good as any other Holland translation for sale (and better than some.) The book also includes a fair amount of provenance information, including two bookplates and “inserted slip from early owner Jacob Winsor (dated 1656)” with marginal notes by Winsor “throughout.” This Winsor, from the scattered references to him in legal documents I have been able to find in genealogies of the time, appears to have been a landowner of no great import, but the fact of his having been a person of his time makes his marginalia potentially as interesting for research and educational purposes as it would be were he a famous person of his time. (Perhaps more so: the lives of the rich are better documented.) The fact that we have notes throughout gives this copy of the translation a good deal more value than a completely “clean” copy, because it offers the potential for researchers and students to study the contemporary reception of Pliny and of Holland’s translation of Pliny by people like Winsor.