RARE AMERICAN BOOKS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 168, 18 July 1942, Page 6

RARE AMERICAN BOOKS

EXHIBITION IN DOMINION (0.C.) WELLINGTON, this day. To foster interest and good will between the peoples of America and New Zealand, the Alexander Turnbull Library has drawn upon its resources to exhibit a nt.nibor of books that are significant in the development of the United Sta os. and its contact with New Zealand. Rare sixteenth century engravings by De Bry show the landing of Columbus and the arrival of the English in Virginia. Early maps show the vast unexplored interior, and, a long enduring error, California as an island. The earliest link between the two countries appears to be the "Proposals for a Voyage to New Zealand" in 1771, put forward by Benjamin Franklin, as a result of Cook's first voyage. Other associations are formed by John Ledyard, of Hartford. Connecticut, who accompanied Cook's third voyage, by John Robert Godley, who wrote "Letters From America" in 1844, by W. T. L. Travers, who wrote the first New Zealand printed book on America in 1889, and by Reginald Mantell, whose diary recorded his journey there in 1849.

In the realm of literature a small selection has been given. The books include first editions of Edgar Allan Poe, J. G. Whittier, Herman Melville, Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Washington Irving. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Walt Whitman. The library has a fine copy of the two volume first edition of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1852). in the original state, and the first edition (1876) of Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer," with a long whimsical note in the writing of Clemens himself.