 Desert Plants - A Curator’s Introduction to the Huntington Desert Garden
by Gary Lyons
The Huntington is famous for its spectacular desert garden, one of the largest such collections of cacti and other succulents in the world. Nearly 100 years old, the twelve-acre garden today showcases more than 3,000 species of desert plants. Visitors to the garden marvel at its many wonders, including the massive Cereus xanthocarpus cactus weighing some fifteen tons; the vivid blue and green Puya, a rare type of bromeliad; the Lithops, or “living stone,” whose camouflaged leaves mimic the shape and color of rocks; and the dazzling red, orange, and yellow torch-like blooms of the aloe.
In this beautifully illustrated volume, Lyons draws on his decades of experience with desert plants to present the rare and unusual specimens in the Huntington’s desert garden. He tells of the garden’s early development, describes its principal collections, and gives instructions on the care and landscaping of desert gardens.
Praise for the Huntington’s Desert Garden:
“Nowhere else is there such a stunning collection of these succulents in quantity, maturity, and diversity.”—Maureen Gilmer, DIY’s Weekend Gardening
“A radiant spectacle of beautiful freaks.”—New York Times
Gary Lyons is Curator of the Huntington’s Desert Garden and the author of Desert Gardens. An internationally recognized drought-tolerant garden designer, scholar, and conservationist, he is a member of the World Conservation Union’s Species Survival Commission, a fellow of the Linnean Society of London, and the author of numerous articles on desert gardens.
100 pages, 8 1/2 x 10 1/2 inches, 92 color illustrations
ISBN: 978-0-87328-218-5 (cloth)
ISBN: 978-0-87328-231-4 (paper)
 John James Audubon
and The Birds of America
by Lee Vedder
John James Audubon’s sumptuous four-volume edition of Birds of America, published between 1827 and 1838, contains 435 hand-colored life-size prints of 1,065 individual American birds. A glorious union of science and art, it remains an unequaled achievement in ornithology illustration.
In tracing Audubon’s quest to produce this groundbreaking work, Vedder draws on the artist and naturalist’s own writings and the latest scholarship on his life and on Birds of America. Plates from the Huntington Library’s double-elephant folio are reproduced in color, including the wild turkey, Baltimore oriole, bald eagle, and the (once presumed extinct) ivory-billed woodpecker. Vedder provides with each plate a commentary on the unique characteristics of the species depicted, based on Audubon’s own observations in the field.
Lee A. Vedder is the Luce Curatorial Fellow in American Art at the New York Historical Society in New York City, serving as the primary curator of its painting and sculpture collections. She holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Maryland and specializes in British and American art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
94 pages, 6 x 9 inches, 47 color illustrations, cloth
ISBN: 978-0-87328-217-8, $24.95
 The Uses of History in Early Modern England
edited by Paulina Kewes with an afterword by F. J. Levy
The essays in this collection investigate the ways in which the past was exploited to meet the concerns of the present in early modern England. The understanding of the past in this period was characterized by a deepening and more fully articulated conception of time and history, with its roots in impassioned religious and political controversies. The discourses that arose from this dialogue informed and drew together a daunting range of genres and activities: prose accounts, polemical tracts, poems, plays, romances, secret histories, novels. Although many of these genres are no longer recognized as history, early modern writers and readers treated them as such. In assessing the uses of the past, therefore, these essays consider “literary” and “factual” writings side by side, avoiding traditional chronological and disciplinary divisions and the artificial separation of secular from ecclesiastical history. Cumulatively, they supply the context and provide a vast array of evidence for the way in which the deployment of history for political, religious, moral, aesthetic, or commercial purposes shifted between the mid-sixteenth century and the late eighteenth.
Contributors:
Ian W. Archer, Eve Tavor Bannet, David Cressy, Richard Dutton, Martin Dzelzainis, Felicity Heal, Christopher Highley, John N. King, Mark Knights, Karen O’Brien, Paul Seaward, John Spurr, Andrew Starkie, Arthur H. Williamson, David Womersley, Daniel R. Woolf, and Blair Worden
Praise for The Uses of History in Early Modern England:
“A superb group of contributors provide by far the best survey ever produced of the uses of the past in early modern England. The essays give the history of both religion and politics their proper place, and essays on drama, poetry, and the novel put historical writing in the context of other literary activities. The volume, which covers the whole period 1500 to 1700 and beyond, also serves as an invaluable guide to the current state of the literature on the subject. Yet the whole is much more than the sum of its parts: a provocation to thought, an invitation to new research, it will prove a landmark volume, one that everyone working on the early modern period will want to own and keep close to hand.”
—David Wootton, Anniversary Professor of History, University of York
“Early modern thinkers used the past in a multitude of complex ways that we have only begun to understand. In this ambitious and wide-ranging collection, a roster of nineteen stellar scholars have made the most important contribution to this subject since F. J. Levy’s Tudor Historical Thought, first published in 1967.”
—Robert D. Hume, Evan Pugh Professor of English, Pennsylvania State University
Paulina Kewes is a fellow and tutor in English literature at Jesus College, Oxford, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her publications include Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660–1710 (1998), and a number of articles on Renaissance, Restoration, and eighteenth-century drama and politics. She has also edited a volume of essays, Plagiarism in Early Modern England (2003), and is completing a book on the staging of history in Elizabethan England. F. J. Levy is an emeritus professor of history, University of Washington.
450 pages, 6 3/4 x 10 inches, 7 b/w illustrations, cloth
ISBN: 978-0-87328-219-2, $39.95
 Mexican Gold Trail
The Journal of a Forty-Niner
by George W. B. Evans
Edited by Glenn S. Dumke with a preface by Robert Glass Cleland and a new foreword by Peter J. Blodgett
On February 20, 1849, 29-year-old attorney George W. B. Evans set out from Defiance, Ohio, determined to make a fortune for his wife and family in the Gold Rush. He kept a painstaking record of his journey to California on one of the least known of the overland routes, crossing northern Mexico on the wild, little-used trail through Chihuahua and across the deserts of southern Arizona. Along the way, he faced many perils and hardships, including cholera outbreaks, Indian attacks, and long, waterless treks. Evans reached the Agua Fria diggings on the Mariposa Grant in late October that year, but failed to strike it rich. Moving on to work as a customs inspector in San Francisco and then as an auctioneer in Sacramento, he became weakened by disease and overwork and died at age 31 on December 16, 1850.
“Evans' detailed day-to-day account of his adventurous journey takes us deep into Chihuahua, Mexico, on a very roundabout and little-used road, before he angles northward to the Gila and its junction with the Colorado River at Yuma Crossing. And, unlike many forty-niners, Evans fills us in on his subsequent stay in the Sierra Nevada gold mines.” -- True West
“Evans...offers a lot of observations about the physical and social conditions in northern Mexico in the mid-19th century, both in a state of noticeable decline...His journal also gives us an idea of the evolution of American attitudes about Mexico and Mexicans in the last century and a half.” -- The Herald Mexico
“[This] is the journal of a tenderfoot who ‘saw the elephant’ on a strange trail, who faced death by disease, starvation or thirst more than once, whose single desire was to gain wealth enough in the gold fields to permit him to return to his family in Ohio, and who, failing to attain this desire, died at an early age a few days after the journal ends.” -- Southwest Review
George W. B. Evans (1819–1850) kept a vivid, detailed diary of his journey to California via Mexico to join in the Gold Rush. Peter J. Blodgett is the H. Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western Historical Manuscripts at the Huntington Library.
360 pages, 6 x 9 inches, 9 b/w illustrations, paperback
ISBN: 978-0-87328-222-2, $24.95
 The Cornucopia
Being a Kitchen Entertainment and Cookbook
by Judith Herman and Marguerite Shalett Herman
Winner, American Institute of Graphic Arts' Fifty Books of the Year
See sample PDF pages
The Cornucopia, published to wide acclaim in 1973, is an exquisitely annotated collection of five centuries of European and American culture as seen through the eyes of both the chef and the gourmet. Drawing on more than 150 sources, beginning with The Forme of Cury (1390), through to the 1890s and some of the most beautiful examples of culinary Victoriana, this richly good-humored book tumbles out a virtual treasury of food lore, commentary and opinion, customs and attitudes, and more than three hundred delectable and tested recipes, given in their original format.
From a 1598 recipe for “four and twenty blackbirds baked into a pie,” to an exquisite 1653 Izaak Walton recipe for stuffed pike, to an 1898 formula for a drink improbably named the ”Bosom Caresser” (sherry, brandy, sugar, an egg yolk, and a pinch of cayenne pepper), this unique volume is all the food lover could ask for.
Reviews of the original edition:
“I am enjoying it immensely, and it is one of those books that makes one want to try things out--like the puff pastry on page 233...I love the way the book is set up...that the recipes have been left as written...my congratulations for a job well done.”--Julia Child
“The Cornucopia...is pure entertainment...such general easy jolliness is hard to find and much to be savored....I can find nothing but plain enjoyment in the book.”
—M. F. K. Fisher, The New Yorker
7 1/4 x 9 1/4, 319 pages, 500 line illustrations
ISBN: 978-0-87328-213-0, cloth, $29.95
 Kate Greenaway's Mother Goose
Introduction by James Thorpe
Kate Greenaway (1846–1901) was one of the most popular British book illustrators of the Victorian era. A contemporary of Randolph Caldecott and Walter Crane, she attracted a wide audience in the United States and England, and many of her books were printed in German and French editions as well.
One of Greenaway’s early successes was Mother Goose, or the Old Nursery Rhymes, first published in 1881. Her enchanting watercolors of children wearing clothing from an earlier age and frolicking in the countryside evoked the Victorian reader’s sense of nostalgia for the rural life of eighteenth-century England, and echoed Greenaway’s own longing to retreat from the industrial, urban setting of her native London.
This new edition of Kate Greenaway’s Mother Goose reproduces illustrations from the rare 1881 edition in the Huntington Library’s collections. The Huntington owns an extensive collection of books illustrated by Greenaway, several of her manuscripts, and nearly one hundred of her original drawings.
5 1/2 x 8 1/2, 48 pages, 45 color illustrations
ISBN: 978-0-87328-216-1, cloth, $14.95
 The Botanical Gardens at the Huntington
Second Edition
by the Director and Curators
The Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, are a remarkable showcase of exotic plants from all over the world, and this lavishly illustrated volume depicts many of the most unusual and beautiful specimens. The introduction tells the fascinating story of Henry E. Huntington’s development, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, from railroad and real-estate magnet to one of Southern California’s leading philanthropists, and the transformation of his self-supporting working ranch into a world-class botanical garden.
Today the 206-acre estate comprises fifteen specialized gardens filled with 20,000 different kinds of plants, with as many as 1,800 rose species and cultivars, 1,200 camellia cultivars, and 5,000 cacti and succulents. Themed gardens are devoted to roses, camellias, subtropical, Australian, and jungle plants, as well as palms, bamboo, and water lilies. Especially popular with visitors are the desert and Japanese gardens. The book presents a comprehensive look at these astonishingly diverse plantings, from towering landmark trees to minuscule rare desert succulents, many pictured in the book’s 270 color photographs.
Praise for the first edition:
“An armchair expedition through one of Southern California’s greatest public gardens….An outstanding tribute.” —The Southern California Gardener
“[The Huntington Botanical Gardens are] arguably the finest extant example of Southern California’s golden age of horticulture, a period that lasted from the late 19th century through the 1920s.” —Horticulture
8 1/2 x 11, 200 pages, 270 color illustrations
ISBN: 978-0-87328-215-4, paper, $24.95
 The Children's Garden Book
by Olive Percival
A gardener "ought to have a little make-believe," the Southern California garden maven Olive Percival mused more than 80 years ago. Inspired by this principle, she devised plans for whimsical gardens that could be enjoyed by children and adults alike. Her delightful schemes included "The Garden of Aladdin," an enchanted, sunken orchard fragrant with kumquat, persimmon, and orange trees; "The Fairy Ring," a blue fairyland of forget-me-nots, larkspur, and borage; and "The Sliced Cake," a round, pink-and-white garden divided into wedges—the perfect setting for afternoon tea.
Percival’s charming illustrations and instructions for fifteen fanciful children’s gardens, all selected from her unpublished manuscript in the Huntington Library, are reproduced for the first time in this volume, designed in keeping with her own Arts & Crafts aesthetic. Described by Percival as "a potpourri of flowery facts and garden lore," The Children’s Garden Book shows children that the pleasures of one’s own garden may be achieved through planning, patience, dedication, and imagination.
Olive Percival (1869–1945) was a multi-talented writer, photographer, gardener, artist, and bibliophile who lived in the Arroyo Seco artists’ enclave near Los Angeles. She was the author of several books on gardening and garden lore, including Our Old-Fashioned Flowers (1947), Yellowing Ivy (1946), and Leaf-Shadows and Rose-Drift, Being Little Songs from a Los Angeles Garden (1911). The Huntington Library owns Percival’s diaries, more than 700 of her photographs, and three book manuscripts.
Reviews:
"Olive Percival (1869-1945) believed that if children gardened, they would create a better world as adults. The writer, artist, bibliophile and Arroyo Seco resident penned this 'potpourri of flowery facts and garden lore' but never saw it published.
Reproduced for the first time, the text and 106 line illustrations are endearingly dated, and the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts period is timeless.
The book opens with advice to young gardeners. A passage titled 'If You Expect to Gardenize' is followed with an answer: Simply give plants what they need when they need it. A section titled 'What an Amateur Gardener Needs' is followed with suggestions for tools, seeds and 'a little make-believe and a great deal of stick-to-it-iveness.' Under the heading 'A Permanent Christmas Tree,' you'll read a plea for forest protection. Other subjects include plant names, sundials, cats, birds and drinking pools.
Fifteen garden plans follow with fanciful names such as the Lavender Walk, Sliced Cake, Flying Carpet, Fairy Ring, Garden of Aladdin and Rosamond's Labryrinth. Each is simple and small-scale, ideal for children and 'grown-up amateurs.'
Percival's inspiring book is bound in beautiful sage green linen with gold lettering and violet trim — exactly as she envisioned it more than 80 years ago. The author would have been pleased."
—Los Angeles Times
"A charming array of previously unpublished blueprints for garden design -- and an ascent into an enchanted old flax-and-sundial world."
—East Bay Express
"In publishing "The Children's Garden Book: Instructions, Plans & Stories from a Gentle Age" ($24.95), penned by Percival more than 80 years ago, the Huntington Library has opened a window to the enchanted fairyland she hoped all children could enter...
Percival paces the slim and charming volume for children, punctuating small chunks of copy with coy illustrations of steaming teacups, circled posies and prowling cats...
Children will find advice dispensed as if from a loving grandmother, and even though most of the plants are geared to a different climate, this book will delight and inspire. Percival's dream, it would seem, is posthumously fulfilled."
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"The multi-talented Arts and Crafts proponent, Olive Percival, left a legacy of artful garden plans and stories for children, which have just been published for all garden lovers. The fifteen garden designs and her sketches reflect a time when young imaginations could be entranced by romantic stories of fair maidens, enchanted places, and the magic of Aladdin. . . . The book is charming and contains creative works that stand the test of time."
—National Garden Clubs, Inc.
9 3/4 x 8 1/2, 64 pages, 106 illustrations
ISBN: 978-0-87328-210-9, cloth, $24.95
 Not of an Age, but for All Time
Shakespeare at the Huntington
by Jane Purcell
The Huntington's Shakespeare collection is one of the four largest in the world. That an American library, and a California library at that, could match the collections of the two great libraries of England was a source of considerable pride to Henry Huntington. This generously illustrated volume introduces readers to Shakespeare the man, the poet, and the playwright, using examples from the Huntington's store of rare items. The book also addresses the valuable scholarship that has resulted from studies of this collection. While most of the color illustrations are from the Huntington’s extra-illustrated Turner Shakespeare, the volume also includes images drawn from the art collections and other rare books in the Library.
6 x 9, 80 pages, 68 illustrations, bibliography, index
ISBN: 978-0-87328-201-7, cloth, $16.95
Reviews:
"This is a pleasing book for anyone with an interest in Shakespeare's life and works... Purcell's command of Shakespeare scholarship comes through on every page, but the knowledge is worn lightly and served up with a palatable style...a good model for libraries to follow, as it is a
publication that successfully straddles the generic divides between a monograph, an in-house guide, and an exhibition catalog."
—Fine Books & Collections Magazine
"[A] beautifully designed and bound book . . . The text touches on
textual authenticity, the question of authorship and many other
attendant elements of Shakespeariana with admirable succinctness."
—Palm Beach Post
 The Peaceable and Prosperous Regiment of Blessed Queene Elisabeth: A Facsimile from Holinshed's Chronicles
Edited by Cyndia Susan Clegg
Holinshed's Chronicles contains one of the few accounts of Elizabeth's reign written during her lifetime. A contemporary history, it was subjected to censorship by the Privy Council. This facsimile edition, a compilation based on this portion of the Chronicles in copies in the Huntington's collection as well as the British Library and Cambridge University Library, documents the censorship and demonstrates that it occurred in three stages.
The Chronicles, a scrupulously produced monument to Elizabeth, is also a rich source for the study of printing practices. The base text chosen by the editors, an unusual copy in the Huntington Library, contains the largest sample of proofmarkings that survive from the sixteenth century. The proofmarkings are examined in light of contemporary printing-house practices and in relation to other copies of the work in libraries around the world.
12 x 16, illus.
ISBN: 978-0-87328-161-4, cloth, $325
"The peaceful and prosperous regiment is a monumental work of scholarship. It will enable further investigations of its material and should provoke similarly radical studies of other texts. Cyndia Clegg's historical introduction is concise and elegant, and Randall McLeod’s textual commentary is an extraordinary tour de force of meticulous analytical bibliography. The book is beautifully designed and produced and the many diagrams and legends are genuinely illuminating. It is an object of beauty, and a rich resource for historians and literary scholars."
--Michael Warren
University of California, Santa Cruz
Editor of The Parallel "King Lear," 1608-1623 (1989)
 The Huntington Library
Treasures from Ten Centuries
Award Winner, 35th Annual Bookbuilders West Book Show
The Huntington is one of America’s premier cultural, research, and educational centers, with holdings that are among the most treasured artifacts of Western civilization. Its most famous treasures include a lavishly decorated fifteenth-century manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, one of only eleven known vellum copies of the Gutenberg Bible, Benjamin Franklin’s handwritten autobiography, a rare double-elephant folio of Audubon's Birds of America, and George Washington’s own survey of Mount Vernon. The collections comprise more than five million rare books, manuscripts, photographs, maps, prints, and ephemera, with extraordinary resources for the study of British and American history and literature, the history of science, and the history of printing. The Huntington Library: Treasures from Ten Centuries opens the doors of what is known as a scholar's paradise, exploring the value of these holdings in history and for the present.
ISBN: 978-0-87328-206-2, paper
ISBN: 978-0-87328-205-5, cloth
 Reconsidering the BLUESTOCKINGS
Edited by Nicole Pohl and Betty A. Schellenberg
Essays by Elizabeth Child, Elizabeth Eger, Harriet Guest, Deborah Heller, Gary Kelly, Susan Lanser, Jane Magrath, Emma Major, Betty Rizzo, and Susan Staves suggest the roles played by the women of the Bluestocking circle in the cultural and social transformations of the second half of the eighteenth century in England.
294 pages, paper, 7 x 10
ISBN: 978-0-87328-212-3, $26.95
(also published as Huntington Library Quarterly 65:1&2)
Read reviews of this title
 Charles F. Lummis
Editor of the Southwest
Edwin R. Bingham
Charles F. Lummis (1859–1928) was a colorful, dynamic, and often eccentric crusader for the Spanish heritage of California. The founder and editor of Land of Sunshine—or Out West, as the magazine was known after 1902—he recruited writers such as Mary Austin, Jack London, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to contribute short stories, poetry, articles, and essays, many of them based on Western themes. Lummis himself wrote editorials extolling the glories of Southern California, decrying racial prejudice, and calling for the preservation of California’s historic landmarks.
Bingham examines Out West from a number of angles: as a Western business enterprise, as a promotional vehicle, as an outlet and training ground for regional writers, and as an instrument of reform. His study, first published in 1955, remains an important and absorbing account of Lummis’s life and of the magazine he established.
“A clear and concise picture of the man as well as of the editor…written in a smooth-flowing style, and well documented, this study will appeal to students of Southwestern culture.”—United States Quarterly Book Review
“Bingham writes an important chapter in Western literary history, describing the association of [Lummis] with such writers as Washington Matthews, Ambrose Bierce, Frank Norris, Joaquin Miller, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, Sharlot M. Hall, and Mary Austin.”—American Literature
“Carefully documented and thoughtfully written.”—Pacific Historical Review
“The author shows how an aggressive and talented editor projected his personality and translated his ideas into action.”—Essential Books
Edwin R. Bingham is professor emeritus of history at the University of Oregon. He is the author of a biography of Charles Erskine Scott Wood and the editor of California Gold, Northwest Perspectives, American Frontier, Frontier Experience, and Fur Trade in the West.
228 pages, 6 x 8 3/4 inches, 5 black-and-white illustrations, paperback
ISBN: 978-0-87328-221-5, $19.95
 Uncle Sam's Camels
The Journal of May Humphreys Stacey Supplemented by the Report of Edward Fitzgerald Beale
Lewis Burt Lesley, editor
With a New Foreword by Paul Andrew Hutton
In 1855, at the urging of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, the U.S. Congress funded an unusual experiment: the importation of camels in order to test their fitness for military purposes in the Southwest. Camels, it was presumed, would fare much better than horses and mules in the desert’s punishing climate and terrain, and therefore could be used to transport supplies to frontier forts more quickly.
Lt. Edward Fitzgerald Beale led the nation’s first and only “camel corps” expedition from Texas to California in 1857. Joining him was nineteen-year-old May Humphreys Stacey, who kept a detailed journal of their harrowing adventures. In Uncle Sam’s Camels, Lesley reproduces Stacey’s account as well as Lt. Beale’s glowing report on the expedition, in which he frequently comments on the camels’ remarkable endurance. Originally published in 1929, Lesley’s study was one of the first to treat this curiosity in U.S. military history, and it remains the definitive text on the subject.
"[Stacey’s] journal vividly portrays the trials and hardships of the expedition as it moved…to the land of the Mojave on the Colorado, which was its destination. In perusing the journal, one is forcibly impressed with the hazards of travel in the United States in the 1850s, especially in the largely unexplored regions of the Southwest."—Mississippi Valley Historical Review
Lewis Burt Lesley was a history professor at San Diego State University. Paul Andrew Hutton is a history professor at the University of New Mexico and Executive Director of the Western History Association. He is the author of Phil Sheridan and His Army and the editor of The Custer Reader, Frontier and Region, and Ten Days on the Plains.
324 pages, 6 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches, 4 black-and-white illustrations, paperback
ISBN: 978-0-87328-220-8, $24.95
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