David W. Forbes
Hawaiian National Bibliography 1780-1900 Volume I: 1780-1830.

The first volume deals with the earliest period of the islands' discovery, rewriting much of the bibliography of Cook, La Pérouse, and other old favourites.

Quarto (250 x 205 mm.), 548 pages and 30 illustrations; printed in black and red, bound in fine-weave green cloth.

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About the Book

The long-awaited bibliography of Hawaiiana, many years in the making. This first volume deals with the earliest period of European discovery of the Hawaiian Islands, and rewrites much of the bibliography of Cook, La Pérouse, and many other voyagers. The first printing in the Islands is covered in this volume, as is the coming of the missionaries, and the development of a political history.

The second volume covers the period during which the Hawaiian monarchical form of government was established and its sovereignty became recognised internationally. Also recorded is the passing of the Hawaiian Bill of Rights, and the establishment of a legislative form of government by which the voice of the people was heard for the first time. Great attention has been given to the listing of all Hawaiian government documents in the form that they appeared. Many of these were first published as broadsides; some were offprints from the government newspaper, the Polynesian.

The third volume is devoted to a period which saw the creation of the constitutional monarchy in alignment with the 1864 constitution of Kamehameha V. It also saw the decline of the whaling industry, replaced by sugar, a move which ultimately resulted in the reciprocity treaty with the United States in 1875. The fourth and final volume covers the years 1881-1900 which were without a doubt the most politically charged, unstable and volatile period in Hawaiian history. While reciprocity agreements with the United States had resulted in prosperity, sugar politics and the interests of Island businessmen were pitted against a monarch desirous of extending his power beyond the constraints of a constitutional monarchy.

Extensive annotations provide a summary of the published works in the bibliography. All known editions of each work are listed, together with the exact title, date of publication, size of the volume, collation of pages, number and type of plates and maps, references, and location of copies. Extensive well-informed notes describe the significance of each work. Hawaiian National Bibliography wins prestigious award MLA AWARDS PRIZE FOR A DISTINGUISHED BIBLIOGRAPHY
TO DAVID W. FORBES FOR Hawaiian National Bibliography, 1780-1900:
Volume 1, 1780-1830 New York, NY-December 3, 2000-The Modern Language Association of America has announced the winner of the second Modern Language Association Prize for a Distinguished Bibliography. The prize will be presented to David W. Forbes for his book Hawaiian National Bibliography, 1780-1900: Volume 1, 1780-1830, published by the University of Hawaii Press. Mr. Forbes will receive a certificate and a check for $1,000. The MLA Prize for a Distinguished Bibliography was established by the MLA Executive Council in 1997 in response to a proposal from the association's Advisory Committee on the MLA International Bibliography. The competition in 2000 was open to bibliographies published in 1998 or 1999. Awarded each even-numbered year, the prize is one of fourteen awards that will be presented on 28 December 2000 during the association's annual convention, held this year in Washington, DC. The selection committee for the current prize included David William Foster (Arizona State Univ.), Gail E. Hawisher (Univ. of Illinois, Urbana), and David L. Vander Meulen (Univ. of Virginia), chair. The committee's citation for the winning bibliography reads: In this attractive volume David W. Forbes provides the first comprehensive record of "all printed works on some aspect of the political, religious, social, cultural, and scientific history of the Hawaiian Islands" from 1780 to 1830. Gleaned from public and private collections on three continents, these meticulous accounts range across genres and languages as they combine sophisticated bibliographical descriptions with clear summaries of the works' contents and with helpful explanations of the items' significance. By detailed reports of these artifacts the author illuminates both the history of the islands and the role they played in European consciousness. In its breadth, depth, clarity, and care, this first volume of an ongoing project provides a paradigm for subject-based bibliographies. Mr. Forbes is currently working on the fourth and final volume of the Hawaiian National Bibliography, 1780-1900, at the Hawaiian Mission Children's Society Library located in the Mission Houses Museum in Honolulu. Volume two of the bibliography, which covers the period 1831-50, was released this year; the third volume is scheduled for publication sometime in 2001. He has worked in the rare-book field for over thirty years, with a specialisation in voyages and travels to the Pacific and numerous years of experience with the pictorial and written history of the region. In addition to his prizewinning work, Mr. Forbes is the author of Encounters with Paradise: Views of Hawaii and Its People (University of Hawaii Press, 1992) as well as numerous articles and essays. The Modern Language Association of America, the largest and one of the oldest of American learned societies in the humanities (est. 1883), promotes the advancement of literary and linguistic studies. The 30,000 members of the association come from each of the fifty states and the District of Columbia, as well as from Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. PMLA, the journal of the association, has published distinguished scholarly articles for over one hundred years. Each December, the association's annual convention is attended by approximately 9,500 members of the MLA and allied groups. The MLA is a constituent of the American Council of Learned Societies and the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures. David Forbes's extensively annotated bibliography of Hawaii will eventually run to four volumes, to be published over about five years. The work as a whole will be an indispensable tool for the historian, researcher, librarian, collector, student or enthusiast, and the first two volumes will be of special interest to anyone interested in the history of voyages from the Cook period onwards. This comprehensive, annotated, multi-volume bibliography sets out to be a record of all printed works touching on some aspect of the political, religious, cultural, or social history of the Hawaiian Islands. In addition to books and pamphlets, the bibliography includes newspaper and periodical accounts and single sheet publications such as broadsides, circulars, playbills and handbills because they often contain the only eyewitness or contemporary descriptions of an important event or individual.

About the Author

David Forbes, who lives in San Francisco and Hawaii, has long been recognised as the world's expert on the bibliography of Hawaii. He is well known to all collectors, dealers, librarians and historians working in the area of historical Hawaiiana. His numerous publications include several works on Hawaii: especially noteworthy are his Treasures of Hawaiian History published in 1992 for the exhibition to honour the centennial year of the Hawaiian Historical Society, and his superb exhibition catalogue Encounters with Paradise: Views of Hawaii and its People 1778-1941, published by the Honolulu Academy of Arts in 1992.

Reviews

Reviews for Volume I Antiquarian Book Monthly
October 2000 Review by Colin Steele, The Australian National University Library, Canberra, Australia.
Reprinted by kind permission of the author.

Bibliographies rarely make for exciting reading or for random browsing. The sumptuous Hawaiian National Bibliography, the first volume of which covers 1780-1830, proves the exception with its expensive paper stock, detailed typography and textual annotations. This volume, the first official bibliography of Hawaii, will be required by all libraries, collectors and booksellers with an interest in the area and Australia and the Pacific.

The original idea for the bibliography, which will ultimately cover up to 1900, came from Stuart Ho and Sam Cooke in collaboration with Derek McDonnell of Hordern House in Sydney. Hordern House earn double points as they are co-publishers with the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. The compiler, David Forbes, well known for his work on Hawaii such as Encounters with Paradise 1778-1941 (1992), conducted research in many countries and libraries. The bibliography "is intended to be a comprehensive, annotated record of all printed works on some aspect of the political, religious, social, cultural, and scientific history of the Hawaiian Islands from 1780 to 1900".

Chronologically this dates from the first printed notice mentioning the Islands and Cook's death in a German periodical printed in Berlin of January 10, 1780 to the beginning of the twentieth century. By 1830, the end of the first volume, the exploratory voyages of the North Pacific had largely concluded. The monarchy was slowly achieving a stability that it had not enjoyed previously, and laws and regulations were being issued as printed documents. Even the old rule of chiefs was coming to a conclusion. 1830 marks the commencement of publication of a large number of works from the Mission Press in Honolulu.

Hawaii and Paradise have been linked from the earliest explorers (although Captain Cook's paradise was short lived) to the admonitions of travel agents seeking Japanese honeymooners at the start of the twenty first century. The first known European landing was by Cook in January 1778. The input of Cook's Third Voyage was profound and led to a continuous stream of publications for at least forty years.

Items included cover a wide brief such as newspapers, broadsides circulars, play bills and handbills. Substantial bibliographical details are indicated including pagination, plates, item location and textual commentary. Forbes's Bibliography is without doubt an outstanding reference work on Hawaii and, with the volumes to come, will remain the necessary aid throughout the twenty first century The Book Collector
Volume 49, Number 4, Winter 2000 Review by David Park.
Reprinted by kind permission of the author. Hawaii became the 50th State of the Union in 1959. Its flag, with neat irony, incorporates the Union Jack, a successor to the one against whom the fledgling United States was fighting a war of independence even as James Cook made his discovery of the Hawaiian Islands in 1778. A national bibliography is a serious matter, and although the Preface excuses the epithet with the assurance that it simply 'alerts the reader that this bibliography covers the period when the islands were a politically distinct entity', one assumes and expects something a bit special. This means money, vision, talent and, for a multi-volume project, grit. From the pantheon of Pacific bibliographies the publishing committee wisely chose the model of John Ferguson's Bibliography of Australia. Content aside, the Hawaiian National Bibliography has excellent paper, the luxury of the more ample margins bestowed by its quarto size, and is embellished by the printing in red of author's names and item numbers in red. The general presentation is friendly, in the sense that the non-specialist can see it as a book that can be read, rather than a bound set of index cards which cannot. This is definitely not a work in step with the move towards digital information displayed in the lifeless fonts we have all had to become familiar with, on or off screen. A feature of this work is the admission of newspapers and periodicals, on a selective basis. 'Breaking news' is by definition the first announcement of an event, in this case the simultaneous report of the discovery of the Hawaiian islands in 1778 and the death of Cook on his return there in 1779. Bibliographers have been nervous about newspapers with good reason. With dozens of newspapers around the U.K. alone, it is not always easy to establish where a story originated, and any newspaper on the coast of Great Britain had its fair chance of a national 'scoop' when strange ships came into port. The first announcement in England of Cook's discovery, and demise, was the official announcement in the London Gazette on 11 January 1780, following the arrival of Captain Clerke's despatches at the Admiralty, which had travelled overland from Kamchatka. In fact, the London announcement was pipped by Anton Büsching whose journal published in Berlin, carried the story on the previous day. Although Forbes follows Ferguson in listing publications alphabetically within years, he has with admirable bibliographical cunning, contrived that these items appear first, followed immediately by the first announcement in North America: The Boston Gazette, 24 April, which gained the information from newspapers taken for the prize Liverpool. When Cook arrived, there were perhaps 300,000 Hawaiians in the islands. He agonised about the introduction of venereal disease, but this was merely the understood fraction of a cocktail of imported diseases which, assisted by hard liquor, devastated the population. By 1853 there were a mere 65,000 left, along with 2000 English or Americans, falling to 46,000 when American plantation interests began to really get underway in the 1870s. Imported labour was the answer: Japan the principal solution, so that by the eve of Pearl Harbour, and along with Chinese, Portuguese from the Azores and Madeira, and Filipinos (after 1898), Japanese numbered over one-third of the population while the Hawaiians and part Hawaiians together could muster no more than 10 per cent. Today Hawaii is a multi-ethnic society that identifies fully with its native Hawaiian past. Inevitably works relating to Cook's Third Voyage and his death at Kealakekua Bay loom large, and indeed up until 1789 when both Dixon and Portlock published accounts of the voyage of the Queen Charlotte and the King George, there is nothing else. The story of Cook runs through to 1830 with a Leith edition of the Third Voyage and, no doubt, beyond. As soon as one begins to examine this barely-hidden bibliography of the Third Voyage, one senses the synergy of the bibliographer and the rare book seller. The current interest in Cook and other explorers of the Pacific is nothing new, but Hordern House and others have brought a new energy to the subject in recent years. David Forbes has therefore, in addition to his own work and extensive travels to libraries in London, Australia, New Zealand, North America and Hawaii, been able to distil the points and issues to be gleaned from bookseller's catalogues, but hardly to be found elsewhere, with the active support of those who made them. The entries have all the bibliographical information expected, but the colour comes from the notes. The first appearance of any work or voyage has an excellent synopsis of the context and facts, points relating to Hawaii getting the fullest treatment. Features of subsequent editions are carefully noted, often with bibliographical notes which are just as readable. You will find no better description of issues of the official accounts of Cook's Third Voyage, the legion of editions derived from them, as well as the narratives of Samwell, Rickman etc., the related works on conchology, auctions of artefacts, children's books, poems and plays all inspired by Cook's story. There are probably many Pacific items in this work that have not been described so fully before, but one which caught my eye is the remarkable book by Alexander Shaw with its specimens of bark cloth, published in 1787, and of which no two copies are the same. I have come across this a couple of times, and on both occasions felt the want of solid ground on which to base a description. Forbes may not have said the last word on it (I know of two copies when the interleaving bore a watermark of 1805), but should a copy cross my path again, there is firm ground, given that the entry describes twenty copies to be found in twelve libraries Similar lavish treatment is given to the other well-known voyages up to 1830, including those under Russian auspices which are particularly important for Hawaii in this early period, and that of Vancouver who made such an impression on the Hawaiians. He is perhaps more responsible than Cook for the special place that Great Britain had in the affections of the Hawaiian nobility well into the nineteenth century. Kamehameha I, who had forged the islands into a nation, died in 1819, and with him the traditional religion. This was fortuitous for the American missionaries from Boston who arrived in the following year. Printing at the Mission Press commenced in 1822. Many of its earliest productions were ephemeral and are only known because of entries in the Journal of the Sandwich Islands Mission. Most of its productions were in the Hawaiian language, but in addition to alphabets and other mission requirements it also printed the regulations governing unruly crews ashore in Honolulu, and other royal proclamations. One that I suspect Forbes clearly could not resist reserving for an illustration is the No Ka Moe Kalohe, a broadside of 1829, which translates as 'Concerning naughty sleeping', and was an early attempt by Kamehameha III to codify morality. The note explains that under the law, when divorce was the result of adultery, the offending party could not remarry during the lifetime of their former partner. This most readable bibliography now moves towards a second volume, with many important voyages still to be recorded and chronicled. Sadly this means it will be some rime before David Forbes has the opportunity to consider the suggestion that he oblige us by treating the earlier Cook voyages in the same style that he has here. Southern California Quarterly
Fall issue, 2001. Review by Richard H. Dillon.
Reprinted by kind permission of the author. To some academics, bibliography is the stoop labor of scholarship. But to most of us it is the servant of - no, the foundation for - the research that makes possible an accurate historical narrative. And many of us, who consider bibliography to be a very demanding, taxing effort, find ourselves in a kind of awe of practitioners of this difficult discipline. California has done well by bibliography ever since the Book Club of California published Robert E. Cowan's A Bibliography of California and the Pacific Coast during World War I. That inaugural publication of the Club was followed by works from other presses, such as the various editions of The Plains and Rockies by Wagner, Camp and Becker. And surely the high point of the state's current Sesquicentennial celebration has been the Book Club's publishing of Gary Kurutz's splendid California Gold Rush. We now have another bibliographic tour de force and it is, again, from a member of the Book Club of California. However, it is published by the University of Hawaii in association with Hordern House in Sydney. (Forbes ransacked New South Wales libraries in his quest, as well as those in London, Paris and the U.S.) This first volume of an eventual multi-volume set has already been praised by the prestigious London book firm Bernard Quaritch, Ltd, for its "meticulous descriptions". Amen! The Britons particularly liked the bibliographer's coverage of Captain James Cook's third voyage, in which he discovered Hawaii, but was killed at Kealakekua Bay. This reviewer is impressed with the high quality of all Forbes's detailed annotations. Here is a book to shelve alongside The Hill Collection of Pacific Voyages. Besides describing what the Dean of Hawaiian historians, the late Grove Day, jocularly called "Cook Books," you will find here the accounts of other explorers up to Victorian times, and even a careful selection of periodical, newspaper and ephemera entries on the subject. We could, perhaps, wish for more illustrations. There are only 30, of title-pages, etc. One early reviewer lamented the lack of space to include more information on the artists and engravers responsible for the books early pictures of Island life. The ties between Hawaii and California are many and strong. The former was a kingdom and the latter a part of the Spanish Empire. Before statehood, both states were republics. The myth or legend of both places utterly fascinated Europe and the U.S. in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And Californians pioneered all-important Hawaiian tourism, thanks in part to the fascination of the Islands for world-class writers then residents in California, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Mark Twain and Jack London. There is a rare, magic, magnetism that still attracts Californians to "their" offshore vacation land of Kona and Poipu and Laperouse Bay. Here in the detailed notes of this excellent reference work is a history-in-brief of the early exploration of these "Paradise Isles. "Richard H. Dillon has written extensively on the history of California and the American West, covering a vast range of topics both
local and regional. He is also a Hawaiianaphile (to coin a word) and is well versed in the history and literature of the Islands"