Yale Bulletin and Calendar

April 6, 2007|Volume 35, Number 24

"The Custard Apple Tree" is an image from the second volume of Sir Hans Sloane's "A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbadoes, Nieves, St. Christopher's and Jamaica," published in 1725.

Library exhibit showcases books
that feature images of trees

"A book is the death of a tree," wrote the French diplomat and poet Saint-John Perse in 1965. It is, perhaps, appropriate then that an exhibition about trees will be the next display at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript, which boasts nearly one million volumes on its shelves and many more paper manuscripts in its vaults.

Titled "Trees in Fact and Fable," the exhibition opens on Thursday, April 12, and continues through the end of May. There will be an opening reception for the exhibition, featuring introductory remarks and readings, at 5:15 p.m. that day.

Drawn from all of the Beinecke's major collections, the exhibition features illustrated books, pamphlets and broadsides covering six centuries -- from an incunable edition of the "Divine Comedy," published in 1491, to a broadside quoting Thoreau that came off the press in early 2007. All of the items picture trees or parts of trees: wood, fruit, leaves, branches and roots.

"Several different exhibitions of tree books could have been put together from the library's resources," says Christa Sammons, who organized the show. "With this particular selection, I tried to show a wide variety of book design and illustration through the years, while including some of the best-known trees of history and literature: Longfellow's spreading chestnut and forest primeval, Joyce Kilmer's poem 'Trees,' trees mentioned in the Bible, Connecticut's Charter Oak, the California redwoods."

The exhibition begins with a colorful series of botanical books -- in a section titled "Trees in Fact" -- starting with what is thought to be the first treatise on the oak tree, Jean Du Choul's "De varia quercus historia" (Lyon, 1555). This section of the show culminates in Romeyn Beck Hough's "American Woods" (Lowville, New York, 1888-1910). In 12 geographically arranged volumes, Hough gathered samples of 350 types of wood. Each of the sample cards includes three translucent specimens of the same wood, cut crosswise, longitudinally and at an angle between. Because of their age, the specimens in "American Woods" are ecologically valuable, notes Sammons, and because of their beauty, the book is a highly sought title. (The entire suite of wood samples has been scanned for the Beinecke's digital library, which is accessible to the public from the library's website.)

The trees mentioned in the Bible are also represented in the exhibition -- from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis 2:9, to the tree of life for the healing of nations in the Revelation of St. John 22:1-2, the great oak that caused Absalom's death (II Sam. 18:9), Elijah's juniper tree (I Kings 19:4-5) and the fig tree in Luke 13:6-9. The display includes a wide range of Biblical illustration, from 17th- and 18th-century interpretations through Czeslaw Milosz's Polish translation of the Revelation St. John, illustrated by Jan Lebenstein (1986), and the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible, printed and illustrated by Barry Moser (1999). A similar iconic use of tree imagery in parable and epigram is illustrated by a selection of emblem books of the 16th and 17th centuries.

"Trees abound in literature, and the last section of the exhibition, on literary trees, barely begins to exploit the sources," notes Sammons. Eighteenth- and 20th-century editions of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" are on display, with contrasting illustrations of the same scenes in each epic. Also on view is French sculptor and painter Aristide Maillol's illustrations of Virgil's "Eclogues" in a German edition of 1926.

Ovid's "Metamorphosis" -- "a rich source of tree transformations," notes Sammons -- is represented by 16th- and 17th-century illustrated editions showing Daphne, pursued by Apollo, turning into a laurel tree; Phaeton's mourning sisters, the Heliads, changing into poplar trees; Myrrha, in her despair, being transformed into a myrtle tree; and the old couple Philemon and Baucis, who are turned into intertwining trees so that even in death they are not parted. William Blake's "Poison Tree," Goethe's gingko, Walt Whitman's "Song of the Redwood" and Major André's foreboding tulip tree from "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (as interpreted by illustrator Arthur Rackham) are a few of the classic trees on display. The list continues with Betty Smith's bestseller "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" (1943), John Ashbery's "Some Trees" (the poet's first collection, published in Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1956) and Gary Snyder's "Fates of Rocks and Trees" (1986), illustrated with photographs by Michael Mundy.

Finally, "Trees in Fact and Fable" includes several books from the Betsy Beinecke Shirley Collection of American Children's Literature, including an array of mid-19th-century alphabet books and primers ("A is for Apple Tree"). A case titled "Sendak Does Trees" features Maurice Sendak's books "Lullabies and Night Songs" (1965), which includes the familiar verse "I had a little nut tree"; "Higglety Pigglety Pop!" (1967), which recounts the adventures of Jennie the Sealyham terrier and her conversations with a depressed ash tree; and "Grimms' Fairy Tales" (1973), which includes "The Juniper Tree," involving an evil stepmother, two murders, a severed head, cannibalism and reincarnation.

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is located at 121 Wall St. Exhibition hours are 8:30 a.m.-8 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday; and 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday. Admission is free. For further information, visit the library's website at www.library.yale.edu/beinecke.

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