This is a descriptive catalog of one of the world’s largest collections of Milton and Miltoniana.Housed at USC’s Thomas Cooper Library, the Wickenheiser Collection contains more than six thousand volumes, including more than sixty seventeenth-century editions of Milton’s writings and significant holdings of seventeenth-century Miltoniana. The special focus on illustrated editions makes this perhaps the most comprehensive collection of Milton illustration in existence - from the first illustrated edition of
Paradise Lost
(1688) through all the major illustrators that follow, particularly John Martin (1789-1854) and Gustave Dore (1832-1883), and with original drawings by several of the artists. The collection’s eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century editions record Milton’s continuing impact, while expansive holdings of Milton biography, scholarship, and criticism document the evolution of knowledge of the poet’s writings and influence.Augmented by nearly 300 color illustrations, this comprehensive descriptive account of the Wickenheiser Collection is being published in 2008 to honor Milton’s birth four hundred years ago. The book includes descriptions of nearly twenty-eight hundred editions in the collection, with a large number of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century editions described for the first time. Detailed listings are provided for all seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Miltoniana as well as select later works. In addition to the listings,
Wickenheiser
provides a section devoted to original drawings, illustrations, engravings, prints, portraits, manuscripts, illuminated texts, ephemera, memorial medals, and other artifacts to show responses to Milton through the centuries.