California Antiquarian Book Fair 2020: Travel & New
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CALIFORNIA ANTIQUARIAN BOOK FAIR 2020: TRAVEL & NEW ACQUISITIONS CALIFORNIA ANTIQUARIAN BOOK FAIR 2020: TRAVEL & NEW ACQUISITIONS F O R E W O R D Dear friends and colleagues, We are happy to present our new catalogue for the upcoming California International Antiquarian Book Fair 2020! Here one will find two big and very different sections - Travel and Early Soviet Art. We selected best items from the recent acquisitions fro this fair catalogue The main highlight of the Travel is, of course, extremely rare and historically significant handwritten letters of Vitus Bering and Christian Berckhan (#1). In Art section we also have famous names like Rodchenko, Mavrina, Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, ROSTA Windows, Lenin and Stalin, Chaplin, etc. The fair will be held from February 7 to February 9 (Pasadena, CA). Our booth is # 405. Please stop by! Bookvica & Globus Books teams 2020 BOOKVICA 3 F O R E W O R D Bookvica 15 Uznadze St. Nizh. Syromyatnicheskaya St. 11/1 0102 Tbilisi Suite 208 GEORGIA Moscow, RUSSIA +7 (985) 218-6937 +7 (916) 850-6497 [email protected] www.bookvica.com Globus Books 332 Balboa St. San Francisco, CA 94118 USA +1 (415) 668-4723 [email protected] www.globusbooks.com BOOKVICA 4 I TRAVEL 01 [BERING AND BERCKHAN’S LETTERS] Two Extremely Rare and Historically Important Original Autographed Letters Signed from the Great Northern Expedition (1733-1743), the First by the Expedition Leader and European Discoverer of Alaska, Vitus Bering (17 April 1741), and Second by the Expedition’s Artist Johann Christian Berckhan (23 April 1741). Each letter is housed into a custom-made folder, and both folders laid into a brown full morocco clamshell box bound in a Russian style of the period, richly decorated with gilt tooled ornaments on the boards and the spine; with two gilt lettered light-brown morocco title labels on the spine. Both letters bear the secretary’s notes “Zapisano v knigy” [“Written down to the book”] on the left margins which most likely reflects the fact that they had been copied or registered in official correspondence books of the administrative office in the Bolsheretsky ostrog. Extremely rare original manuscripts from the Great Northern or Second Kamchatka Expedition (1733-1743) – an outstanding Russian Expedition of exploration in the Arctic, North Pacific and Alaska inspired by Peter the Great and fully funded by the Russian government, which involved seven independent parties and about 3000 people, and became one of the largest exploratory missions in history. The main goals of the expedition were to confirm that Asia and America were separated with a strait in the North Pacific, to discover and map the Northern Sea Route or Northeast Passage around the Siberian Arctic coast, to find the northern sea route to Japan, to explore and describe natural resources and people of Eastern Siberia and secure its attachment to the Russian Empire. The expedition was put under the general command of a Danish explorer in Russian service Vitus Bering, a leader of the recently completed First Kamchatka Expedition (1725- 1727) which had mapped the coasts of Kamchatka and north-eastern Siberia, but hadn’t sighted the American coast and thus couldn’t confirm that the continents didn’t connect in the far north. BOOKVICA 5 No 01 BOOKVICA 6 The “maritime party” of two vessels “St. Peter” and “St. Paul” under command of Bering himself and naval Lieutenant Alexey Chirikov (1703-1748) explored the North Pacific and became the European discoverers of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands. “St. Peter” and “St. Paul” left the newly founded ports of Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka on June 4, 1741 and sailed eastward. After the ships had been separated by a fog, they independently reached Alaska, Bering sighted and named Mount St. Elias in the Gulf of Alaska and discovering several islands off the southwestern coast of the Alaskan peninsula, including Kayak and Kodiak Islands, and several islands of the Aleutian group (Shumagin Islands and others). “St. Peter’s” doctor and naturalist Georg Steller (closely connected with the authors of both letters - (V. Bering and J. Berckhan) became the first European to step on Alaskan soil when the party landed on the Kayak Island on July 21, 1741. On the way back to Kamchatka “St. Peter” wrecked off the coast of an uninhabited island in what will be later known as the Commander Group, and being forced to winter there, the crew lost to scurvy 29 of its members, including Bering himself who died on December 8, 1741. In the spring of 1742 the rest of the crew, including Steller, managed to build a smaller vessel and sailed to Kamchatka, reaching Petropavlovsk in August 1742. The first letter written in a secretarial hand and signed by Vitus Bering is an amazing survival shedding light onto the last stage of the expedition shortly before Bering’s departure on the fateful voyage from which he would never come back from. The letter was written in the Petropavlovsky ostrog – the new Russian fort in the Avacha Bay (Eastern Kamchatka) which had been founded by Bering half a year earlier – on October 6, 1740. Dated less than two months before Bering’s departure to America on June 4, the letter is in fact one of the last documents signed by him and becomes one of the few known documents authored by Bering so close to his tragic death on an uninhabited island in the North Pacific on December 8, which was later named in his honour. The letter signed by artist Johann Christian Berckhan is closely related to the so-called “Academic Party” of the Great Northern Expedition and one of its most prominent members Georg Wilhelm Steller (1709-1746). Led by the Professors of St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences Gerhard Friedrich Müller (1705-1783), Johann Georg Gmelin (1709-1755) and Louis De l’Isle de la Croyere (1690-1741), the party strived to produce a comprehensive description of the geography, BOOKVICA 7 history, biology, botany and ethnography of Siberia and Kamchatka. The “Academic Party” in fact carried out the first scientific expedition to Russia and surveyed vast territories of Siberia from the Ural River to Lake Baikal and Irkutsk, and from Lena River and Yakutsk to Transbaikalia. Johann Christian Berckhan was attached to the “Academic Party” as an artist and draughtsman and produced a series of perspective views of Russian cities and prominent sites, many – for the first time (Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, Tobolsk, ruins of a Kalmyk settlement near Semipalatinsk, Tomsk, and others), and hundreds of botanical and zoological drawings, portraits and costumes of indigenous people. Several of his botanical drawings (including a view of a rhododendron branch) were later used illustrations in Gmelin’s “Flora Sibirica” (SPb., 1746, Tab. LIV). In early March 1739 Berckhan was attached to the new member of the “Academic Party” – German doctor and naturalist Georg Steller who had joined the scientists in Yeniseysk in December 1738 and was dispatched with a scientific mission to Kamchatka. Steller, Berckhan and their assistants arrived in the Bolsheretsky ostrog in Kamchatka on September 27, 1740 and wintered there, studying Kamchadals and Koryaks together with another member of the “Academic Party” Stepan Krasheninnikov (1711-1755). In early 1741 Steller was invited by Bering to take part in his voyage to America, as “St. Peter’s” doctor and naturalist, and happily accepted the offer, leaving Berckhan in the Bolsheretsky ostrog where the latter continued producing drawings of local subjects. The letter signed by Berckhan was written during his independent work time in the Bolsheretsky ostrog, after Steller’s departure to the Avacha Bay in March 1741, and asks the local authorities to help by providing Berckhan with an assistant and by constructing a leak-proof dwelling for him so that he would be able to do his duties “intrusted to me by the Academy of Sciences and Adjunct [Professor] Steller.” The Saint Petersburg branch of the Archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences houses three more letters by Berckhan (one in German and two in Russian) dated June-July 1742 and July 1743 (AAH РФСПб. Ф. 21. Оп. З. No 41. Л. 1-2 об.) The letters give an interesting insight into Berckhan’s life in the Bolsheretsky ostrog without Steller and reveal his anxiety and struggle during the winter of 1741-1742 when his superior and friend didn’t return from the voyage with Bering (although he was supposed to return in the autumn 1741, Steller came to Belsheretsky ostrog by foot only in August 1742, after the wreck of BOOKVICA 8 “St. Paul” and forced wintering on the Bering Island). As follows from Berckhan’s 1742 letters, the leak-proof barabara (dwelling) he was asking about in our letter (23 April 1741) had never been constructed. Nevertheless, he managed to produce the drawings of “9 fish, 7 birds, 30 herbs, 6 items brought by the sea, 3 mushrooms, 2 Kamchadal people” (quoted from: Cherkashina, A.S. Risovalshiki Vrotoy Kamchatskoy Ekspeditsii [Draughtsmen of the Second Kamchatka Expedition ]] // “O Kamchatke I Stranakh, Kotorye v Sosedstve s Niyu Nakhodiatsia”: Materials of the XXVIII Krasheninnikovskie Conference. Petropavlovsk- Kamchatsky, 2011, pp. 216-221). After Steller’s return to Kamchatka, Berckhan continued working with him for at least two years. After Steller’s death in Tyumen in November 1746 Berckhan accompanied his possessions and collections to St. Petersburg, making sure nothing was stolen. In the late 1740s he worked in the Academy of Sciences’ Kustkamera, making drawings of the museum’s ethnographical and zoological objects. No records of sales of his original manuscripts or autographs have been found on the western market. 1. Bering, Vitus Jonassen (1681 – 8 (19) December 1741) [Autograph Letter Written in Secretarial Hand and signed “W.