Latest submissions to the ILAB Breslauer Prize for Bibliography 2018
The 17th ILAB Breslauer Prize for Bibliography will be awarded in 2018 to one or more books published in any language and in any part of the world between April 2013 and April 2017.
A jury of senior experts, three antiquarian booksellers and three librarians has been formed and will conduct a formal meeting in October 2017 to select from 50 submitted titles.
Prize Secretary
Fabrizio Govi – Libreria Alberto Govi, Modena (Italy)
Jury Members
Bettina Wagner – State Library, Bamberg (Germany)
Daniel de Simone – Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC (United States)
Yann Sordet – Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris (France)
Winfried Kuhn - Antiquariat Winfried Kuhn (Germany)
Justin Croft – Justin Croft Antiquarian Books, Faversham (United Kingdom)
Latest submissions for the 2018 Prize:
His Place for Story: Robinson Jeffers: A Descriptive Bibliography.
New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2015.
280x210 mm. 272 pp. of text plus 72 pp. of b/w images (repeated in color on CD). Hardcover with dust jacket. Language: English.
From the mid-1920s through the early 1930s, Robinson Jeffers was ranked by many critics as one of Americas most important living poets. By the end of the 1930s, however, he was widely thought to have little new to say, and his reputation and readership declined. In recent decades, Jeffers has been rediscovered as an early critic of the 20 th -century’s offenses against the natural world, and academics and critics again recognize the depth and complexity of his work. In light of this resurgence, it has long frustrated scholars and collectors that no one had carried forward S.S. Alberts’s 1933 A Bibliography of the Works of Robinson Jeffers. The present new study, His Place for Story, both revisits the years covered by Alberts (correcting errors) and adds full descriptive entries for all known separate Jeffers publications and for selected other publications with Jeffers contributions. Extensive appendices supply additional information on appearances of Jeffer's poetry and prose. Illustrating the text are over 400 images of book covers, jackets, broadsides, and other items, in greyscale in the printed volume and in color on an accompanying CD.
Alice in a World of Wonderlands: The Translations of Lewis Carroll’s Masterpiece.
New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2015.
280x215 mm. 3 volumes. 2656 pp. Hardcover. Language: English.
Alice in a World of Wonderlands is the most extensive analysis ever done of the translations of one English language novel in so many languages. That novel is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, one of the most quoted books in the world. On October 4, 1866 Lewis Carroll wrote his publisher Macmillan stating “Friends here [in Oxford] seem to think that the book is untranslatable.” But his friends were wrong, as this book shows with translations in 174 languages. The translations into nine different dialects of Scots language are, we believe, the most of any novel in any language. The book was published in China (463 editions), Mongolia, Lao, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan. Editions exist in Maori of New Zealand and Pitjantjatjara, an Aboriginal language of Australia. Five Pacific Island languages are represented. There is even one in Brazilian Sign Language. The first translations were German and French in 1869, just a few years after the first English edition in 1865. Translations into virtually every European language followed including all six Celtic languages and six languages of Spain. The Indian sub-continent is represented by twelve languages and Africa by eight including Zulu, Seychelles Creole, and Swahili. There are translations in three Jewish languages and a number from the Middle East. The book is in three volumes, the first with general essays and an essay about each language. In volume two, the same eight pages from Chapter VII, "A Mad Tea-Party" are translated back into English so one can read and compare how translators went about dealing with Lewis Carroll's nonsense, homophones, and twists of meaning. Volume three is the checklist of 174 languages and over 9,000 editions and reprints of Alice and the sequel Through the Looking-Glass. Compiled in celebration of the 150th anniversary of Alice’s publication.
A Publishing History of a Prohibited Best-seller: The Abbé de Vertot and his Histoire de Malte.
New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 2016.
245x170 mm. 408 pp. with color and b/w ill. Cloth with dust jacket. Language: English.
This study examines one of the most notorious examples of a book whose enormous popular success was due almost entirely to its being banned by the Vatican. The Histoire des Chevaliers Hospitaliers de S. Jean de Jerusalem, affectionately referred to as Histoire de Malte, was written by the Abbé de Vertot and printed in Paris in four quarto volumes in 1726. The author, a provincial clergyman who attained a certain fame in the capital of the monde philosophe, was commissioned by the Order of St. John to be its chronicler and compose a history of the Order from its origins in Jerusalem until the year of publication. Vertot spent thirteen years composing the work but the product was far from what his patrons expected. What was meant to be a chronicle of the Catholic Order ended up attracting the ire of the inquisition due to the numerous anti-papist statements which the author included and, shortly after it saw the light, the publication was put in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. This study is based on hitherto unpublished sources from nineteen archives and libraries around the world.
Oak Knoll Press and Oak Knoll Books was founded by Bob Fleck, Past President of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, who died in September 2016. This international firm maintains an inventory of about 23,000 titles and a backlist of more than 1,000 titles published and distributed under its publishing imprint, Oak Knoll Press. Main specialties continue to be books about book collecting, book selling, bibliography, libraries, publishing, private press printing, fine printing, bookbinding, book design, book illustration, calligraphy, graphic arts, marbling, papermaking, printing, typography and type specimens plus books about the history of these fields.
