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Final Project Update: Week Four

With one week left to go, there is a lot of work left to be done on the site. Last week I made a lot of progress with the tools that I will be using, and expect my two StoryMap JS presentations and Timeline JS to be finished in the next few days. I am […]

With one week left to go, there is a lot of work left to be done on the site.

Last week I made a lot of progress with the tools that I will be using, and expect my two StoryMap JS presentations and Timeline JS to be finished in the next few days. I am also considering using Juxtapose JS to enhance the depiction of subtle bibliographic details of the books that I’m working with. Once these tools go up on the site, all that will be left will be the text, as well as some more static pictures of each individual book. While I wanted to include an interview on the website as well, with Dr. Poste’s surviving daughter, making contact has been a real challenge, and I’m, unfortunately, running out of time. To make up for this shortcoming on my site, I’d like to record at least one interview with either the current Special Collections Librarian, and/or the former. The current Special Librarian has a working knowledge of what the library was like when Dr. Poste was a professor of library science, and her predecessor would have actually worked with Dr. Poste, however briefly, and was around the library while he was dealing in antique books. With any luck, I’ll get an interview yet!

Today, I staged another photo shoot with my beautiful books… I just can’t seem to help myself. There is a space on my website that is meant for a large image to be displayed at the top of each page, and I have been keeping the default image there as a placeholder until I could come up with a better one. While I originally wanted to use a picture from the college archives, ideally a building like the old library in which Dr. Poste would have worked, I couldn’t find any of decent quality, so I decided that I would have to stage my own headlining photo. Thankfully, the Livingston County Historical Society allowed me to borrow a WWII captain’s hat to pose with Poste’s donations so better convey the “soldier librarian” theme that I’m trying to push. We’ll see how it turns out!

Final Project Update: Week Three

The worst part about not having a partner for this project, with an immune system like mine, is that when you get very sick (for the second time this semester), you’ve got no one to pick up the slack. Fortunately, what I have been able to accomplish since my last post is a clearer focus […]

Fortunately, what I have been able to accomplish since my last post is a clearer focus on and direction for the tools that I am going to work with to present on my project site. After our last class on Thursday, the professors suggested that I utilize a tool that another group is having tremendous success with: StoryMap JS. This tool would allow me to take each of the three books that I’m discussing and give the visitor a closer look at certain aspects and details of them with a heavily guided narrative. I’ve already played around with it a bit, and am very excited about its potential! However, I need to take the time to form a better understanding of how this tool works, as I’ve been hitting a few annoying roadblocks that are really slowing down my progress. Luckily for me, and the rest of the class, we have two great professors who go above and beyond to help us succeed, and I’ll have had some assistance with this issue by the end of tomorrow!

The plan for this week is to either make successful contact with Dr. Poste’s daughter or put that potential addition to the site to rest, as well as to finish my first StoryMap JS, get some back-lit pictures of the books, and finish writing my introduction page. I will be a hot-tea-chugging, tissue-stuffed computer gremlin for the entire first warm, sunny week that western New York has seen all semester… but I’m not bitter about that.

Final Project Update: Week Two

Last week was a short week for me. I only had Monday and Tuesday to fit in work for not only my on-campus classes and internship, but also to get something done for the project site, as I was out of state for a academic convention from Wednesday to Saturday. However, I’d like to think […]

Last week was a short week for me.

I only had Monday and Tuesday to fit in work for not only my on-campus classes and internship, but also to get something done for the project site, as I was out of state for a academic convention from Wednesday to Saturday. However, I’d like to think that I got a fair amount accomplished in those two short days, having been extra motivated by the time crunch; I mean, I am a college student, after all. In two days, I achieved two distinct goals that, while not present on my project site, are very important to lay my foundation going forward with the rest of the project: I (finally) touched base with the Institutional Review Board for the Protection of Human Participants (IRB) at my college, and I obtained pictures of the three books that I’ll be working with.

While I have yet to make contact with this woman, it’s my hope to get a brief and casual interview with Dr. Poste’s surviving daughter, and ask her to tell me a bit about her father. I’d like to take an audio recording of this interview and post it to the website to add to its interactivity dynamic. Fortunately, my college’s IRB responded to my inquiry about what I need to do to be approved for this potential interview, and gave me the best news I could get from them: I don’t need their approval at all. The scope of my project, according to the IRB, poses the least amount of risk to the participant, and so all I need would be for her to fill out a permission form releasing me the right to post the interview. I’m really relieved about this, considering I’m not sure she will even agree to speak with me at this point, and won’t have to jump through unnecessary hoops if she does.

As for the pictures I was able to take of the three Poste donations, all I have to say is that I’m ecstatic about them! All three books photographed really well, and I got about 80+ pictures total that I would love to utilize on my site. When taking them, I was very excited about the possibility of some Renaissance scholar stumbling across my project site one day and finding them beautiful and useful.

At this point, the biggest concern that I have is how I am going to apply the required two tools that we learned in class to the project site. From the beginning, I knew I wanted to use Timeline JS, but now I’m worried that I won’t have enough information about my books, or even Poste, to develop a worthwhile presentation. Aside from that, I really wanted to use Google Maps or Fusion Tables to highlight things like where the books were published, or where Poste was stationed in Europe during his time as a Monuments Man. I’d love to somehow find out which libraries he had a considerable hand in restoring and display those with a map, but don’t quite know how to begin searching for that. Perhaps there are even other class tools that I could use instead of these ones, but I can’t think of which ones. Not having a partner makes these things a little bit more difficult to sort out!

Final Project’s First Steps: Poste’s Gifts

It’s finally time to develop the final project for the Social Life of Books course, and I couldn’t be more excited to dig in! Although it wasn’t easy and took a lot of considering and reconsidering, I finally came up with the topic that I want to focus on for this project: Dr. Leslie Poste’s contribution to the Special Collections in Milne Library at the SUNY Geneseo. It is my hope that this project will be accessible to both the Geneseo campus and surrounding community as it seeks to honor the memory of an intriguing and unique past professor and citizen.

Photograph of the inside cover of the Latin encyclopedia with the bookplate that marks it as a gift from Dr. Poste.

My first inspiration for this project was remembering my very first assignment for SLOB, which is also my first blog, based on the oldest book held in the library. I almost couldn’t believe it when I spoke with my Special Collections Librarian and she told me that our oldest book was printed in 1516: a Latin encyclopedia titled Sicuti Antiquarum Lectionum. Well, the title is actually much longer, around 100 words, so my library cut it off after the first 3. This book is very large, and in relatively good shape for being over 500 years old. The chain-line pages are thick and beautifully printed, while the margins are riddled with beautifully written Italian annotations, and perfectly round bookworm holes dot the front and back cover; it’s a antiquarian book-lover’s dream.

Photograph of Dr. Leslie Poste as depicted on Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art website.

So, you’d think that the book itself would be interesting enough, right? Wrong. The really special part about this book is who donated it: Dr. Leslie Poste. Dr. Poste was a professor at SUNY Geneseo’s Library Science department from 1958-1978. When he retired from Geneseo, he went into antiquarian book dealing, and donated a handful of books that he dealt with to Milne Library’s Special Collection around 1980. Before all of this, however, Dr. Poste served the Allies in WWII with a specialized group of soldiers called the Monuments Men, whose purpose was to travel Europe and rescue books and objects from libraries that had been terrorized and ransacked by the Nazis. While it may be tempting to assume that Sicuti Antiquarum Lectionum must have been one of the books he rescued (SWOON, am I right?), it is extremely unlikely, as it was donated to Milne Library in 1980, while he was working as an antiquarian book dealer; it’s much more likely that Dr. Poste simply came across our encyclopedia during his later book dealings. However, I still believe that this book has value in the way that it represents Dr. Poste’s interests, and his act of gifting it to Milne Library at Geneseo underscores the legacy he may have hoped to leave, as well as the vision he may have had for Milne as a keeper of such old and unique books.

This project has the potential to highlight a really interesting piece of Geneseo history and legacy, and hopefully will serve to better connect our wonderful village community with the campus, as Dr. Poste lived the rest of his life in Geneseo with his wife and daughter until his death in 1996.

There’s a lot to do and consider with this undertaking, so this week has been my first couple of steps. At the moment, I have most of the books gifted by Poste identified in the library, and have (hopefully) located his daughter, whom I’d love to have sit for an interview, depending on my time constraints. At the very least, it is my hope to connect with her and make her aware of my project that is honoring her father and his legacy at Geneseo. The website for my final project has the About Me page finished, and a basic Home page that will need a lot more tweaking as I proceed. My next steps are to record the provenance of the donated books and develop a Google Map or Fusion Table to help the site visitor get a better idea of where the books came from, and to develop the framework to the pages that will be featured on my site. I’m so excited to watch this come together!

Mapping Mr. Gray

This assignment had us mapping the various locations in which a particular book was published. We used the English Short Title Catalogue to find publications of the book of our choice, which ideally had to be published sometime in the 18th century. While we could have used any 18th century book that the ESTC could find for this assignment, I was curious about one book from my college library’s Special Collections in particular: The Poems of Mr. Gray by Thomas Gray. Their version was published in Dublin in 1775 and is part of the Rare section of the Special Collections. As my nifty, (mockingly) simple(-looking) map shows, this book was published in three different cities total: Dublin, London, and York.

I have mixed feelings about this section of the course. We are being introduced to different types of technology with the intent to give us a more expansive digital toolbox with which to build our final project. On one hand, this is completely necessary to create an interesting and worthwhile project, while on the other, it is slowly turning me into a computer gremlin. Figuring out this assignment had me sitting and staring at my increasingly harsh computer screen (for much longer than I probably should’ve had to), daylight slipping quickly away from me before my next real-world experience was realizing my room had gone pitch black and I emerged from this cave as a wild-eyed creature mumbling “geocode” nonsense at my concerned roommates.

I guess that’s just the nature of the beast.

Constructing a Book’s History

Habent sua fata libelli. [Books have their own fate.] -Maurus Now that we’ve tackled understanding and recognizing the physical production of books in this course – something that is relatively regulated and widespread – we’ve come to a more personalized, if not rather intimate, study of bibliography. This past week we’ve been tasked with […]

Habent sua fata libelli.

[Books have their own fate.]

-Maurus

1864 publication of Alexis de Tocqueville’s *Democracy in America*.

Now that we’ve tackled understanding and recognizing the physical production of books in this course – something that is relatively regulated and widespread – we’ve come to a more personalized, if not rather intimate, study of bibliography. This past week we’ve been tasked with exploring the living history of a single book; it’s life. The book I chose lept at me from my university library’s Special Collections as I was browsing a particular section called the Wadsworth Family Papers: an 1864 copy of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (vol. II).

This book was nestled between land/business documents and books written by particularly well-known members of this extraordinarily influential small-town family. The Wadsworths are mega-stars in Geneseo, NY, where I attend university. This family settled the area around 1790 and maintained considerable control over the majority of Livingston County throughout the 19th century and into the 20th. My college, the State University of New York at Geneseo, owes much of its existence to this family of educated farmers-turned-politicians, and embraces them and their history in the Special Collections of their library.

Close-up of Wadsworth’s inscription on the title page of *Democracy in America.* Fig. 2.

Title page of James W. Wadsworth’s copy of De Tocqueville’s book. Fig. 1.

As most of the Wadsworth Family Papers collection is made up of primary sources from the family’s history – that is, business, land, and personal documents, photography, and books written by them – it was somewhat surprising to see an ordinary, widely-read book included on the shelves. As soon as I took it down and opened to the title page, I began to understand why. Note the inscription shown on the two pictures of the title page: “James W. Wadsworth – Jan. 1871, Geneseo.” This was a personal book of James W. Wadsworth himself: an influential farmer, then Civil War soldier, then U.S. Congressman.

Publication Information

This copy of de Tocqueville’s book was published in Cambridge, MA in 1864 by an American publishing company called Sever and Francis. Democracy in America was written by Alexis de Tocqueville, published in 1838 as analysis of early 19th century America and its flourishing democratic system. De Tocqueville’s motivation behind this study was to look at American democracy as a model for his own country of France following their revolution. It is still today considered one of the most important references for discussing both the American nation and the democratic system. So, the intended audience, at the time of its creation, was perhaps the French nation as a model, perhaps the American nation as a mirror, perhaps both; but most certainly the people who are interested in learning about the way in which achieving equality necessitates a change in social status for many.

Owner Information

As mentioned, this book was originally owned by James W. Wadsworth, and ultimately given to Milne Library at the State University of New York at Geneseo in 1976 by Mrs. Reverdy Wadsworth after the death of her husband, James’s great-grandson. Once the book was given to Milne Library, it was ultimately placed in the Wadsworth

Book plate from Milne Library at SUNY Geneseo. Fig. 3.

Family Papers collection, effectively kept out of circulation. There is some speculation as to whether or not it had been accidentally put into circulation when it first arrived, but even if it was, it would very quickly have been taken out given its condition.

Marginalia

How can I say so confidently that James W. Wadsworth was the original owner, even though there is a span of 7 years between its publication and his mark of ownership? Well, this book is in what I consider to be, with regard to my very little experience with bibliography, very interesting condition; or, at least very telling condition. As shown in Fig. 4, there are multiple occurrences of uncut signatures in this book.

In fact, as not shown in this picture, most of the book is made up of uncut signatures. As you can see in this and Fig. 5, the areas that are uncut are very roughly and crudely done so. While it might seem that this could be indicative of a neglected book, as shown in Fig. 6, the areas of the book that are cut free from their signatures are heavily underlined and even starred.

These markings are done in pencil, unlike the inscription made at the beginning in ink. In my opinion, the use of pencil implies a studious nature of reading, and the thoroughly marked areas of interest imply a purposeful reading, perhaps by someone who understood the book enough to cut the signatures in the correct place to find the information he wanted to highlight. Perhaps this wasn’t the reader’s first time reading a copy of de Tocqueville.

Current Home

Now resting in Milne Library’s Wadsworth Family Papers collection, this book’s purpose and use has unavoidably shifted. Considering it is no longer in circulation and has spent the past 41 years in a locked room for preservation purposes, I’d say that its use has indeed changed since it was owned by James Wadsworth in 1871. No longer is it turned to when de Tocqueville’s words of wisdom are needed; in fact, his voice is but a tiny echo almost completely consumed by the legacy of James W. Wadsworth to which this book is now irrevocably tied. Instead of reading it for de Tocqueville alone, it’s read for Wadsworth, and represents Wadsworth now far more than de Tocqueville.

Follow the dynamic Timeline JS I’ve created for this post to see the history of this book come to life!

https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=1oOF307tcalL81ojObtUExw_MQyzZAqlVGi1YKIac5T8&font=Bitter-Raleway&lang=en&initial_zoom=2&height=650

The book studied in this post comes from the Special Collections of Milne Library at the University of New York at Geneseo.

Old Book Examination

This week, we were tasked with the physical examination of a book of our choosing from the special collections. I ultimately decided on a book from 1792 that was a bit different than the other books I’ve looked at up this point. This book has a beautiful brown and black speckled cover, with a small […]

This book has a beautiful brown and black speckled cover, with a small leather strip on the spine imprinted with the gold-filled word “Farces.” The library’s digital catalog titled this as A collection of the most esteemed farces and entertainments, performed on the British stage. I know this because I could hardly make out the title on the spine itself, and when I went to look for a title page, I was abruptly met with the first page of a short play, and consequently turned to the internet to provide me with the title of the book as a whole. I also noticed that there was no publication or printer information within the book itself either. What kind of book, even a book of plays, wouldn’t have this kind of information? Isn’t that what makes a publication? Also, when I began to examine the paper from each play, I noticed that each one had a different type of paper: some laid paper with horizontal chain lines while others woven paper with outer-edge watermarks. Even the text font wasn’t uniform between plays, although size looked pretty consistent.

I had to investigate.

According to Professor Pauley, this kind of book is “a “Sammelband” – a collected volume – in which separately published pieces have been bound together.” My special collections librarian was also interested in this book, and told me that some printers, especially ones who were also book dealers, would often take requests for custom bindings. Given the fact that this book is a second volume, and neither volume has publication information about the book as a whole, I think it’s likely that they were collected by an individual. The notion that this collection was a deliberate decision made by an individual or smaller group makes sense given that these plays all have a glaring similarity: they’re all farces. I hope to look more into this at another point in the semester, and hopefully update this post with some more detail and information!

For the purpose of this assignment, I chose one of the farces in this book to work with. This play is titled “The Cherokee: An Opera.” While I didn’t have to read it for this assignment, given the year it was written, its title, and its farcical genre, I’m not too disappointed about that.

When first looking at the binding, I’d consider it very well preserved for being 225 years old, save the back cover that is completely unattached. There is clear evidence of stab stitching, which makes sense considering that these plays were of distinctly separate origins, and were likely stitched together without covers before being put into this collection. The pages are all neatly trimmed, and the margins are tighter near the binding than at the outer edge.

For the play that I was working with, specifically, the paper was wove, and there was one instance of a watermark that I could see. In fact, all of the plays in this collection that were on woven paper had evidence of watermarks, while none of the laid paper did. The library I was working with didn’t have an available backlight for me to use to find these watermarks, but offered me a small flashlight that I could hold up to it while I snapped a picture with my phone. As you can see, the watermark in this play lies closest to the outer edge. This play also has signatures at the bottom center of some pages in the pattern of A, A2, A3, B, etc.

Given that fact as well as the fact that the laid paper plays have horizontal chain lines, I’d be comfortable concluding that the format of this play is duodecimo. Based on this format, I’ve calculated that two sheets of paper went into the copy of this play. Given that it cost one shilling, and any printers were likely trying to keep costs down for producing a mere farcical play, this result makes a lot of sense!

Special Collections at SUNY Geneseo

This assignment asked us to explore our local collections with the help of an archivist or special collections librarian, which was very exciting to me as someone who has been working on transcribing microfilm for this library’s special collections since last semester. Finally, an opportunity to access the special collections with a more in-depth purpose! Instead of sitting in front of dual-screen computers for hours, clicking and typing, I was on the front lines: white gloves, red string, and all. We first had to identify the oldest book in the special collections, which I did by utilizing the catalog search engine, GLOCAT, on my college’s library page. The book I found was printed in 1516, written by Lodovicus Caelius Rhodiginus, with a title so long that the collections had to cut it off to its first three words: Sicuti Antiquarum Lectionum. A loose translation of this title is “As in Past Lessons.” [Disclaimer: my Latin is very rusty, and I used Google Translate to help me with this translation. If anyone has a better translation, please comment with it!] The library’s records catalog this book under “encyclopedias and dictionaries,” which seems appropriate as it is a very large and heavy text. This is the extent of information I could find about the details of the book. This edition was printed in Venice, Italy, and was gifted to Milne Library at my college, SUNY Geneseo, by Dr. Leslie Poste in 1980. Dr. Poste has a very interesting background himself, as he worked at the end of WWII to preserve and conserve books, manuscripts, and other library materials that were seized by the Germans in their occupied countries. Wikipedia cites his work as a duty to “rescue some of the finest libraries of Europe.” After his time in Europe, he was on the library faculty at Geneseo as a professor of library sciences from 1958-1978, and was ultimately an antiquarian book dealer for the remainder of his life. Rhodiginus’s encyclopedia was one of many that passed through the hands of Dr. Poste, so while I don’t believe it had a particularly profound influence on him, I think it is a good representation of his life as a preserver of European libraries and as a rare book dealer. This book was produced in Venice, Italy in 1516, which was the same year that the city officially established a Jewish ghetto known as the Venetian Ghetto, which legally instituted political restrictions on Jewish rights. Often in the Middle Ages, Latin was used in scholarly circles as means to exclude groups of people, particularly the poor and uneducated, which situates this book neatly in this time period as an educational book written exclusively in Latin. The second task asked us to select a book from the special collections that bears evidence of reader use, which would include marginalia, marks of ownership, etc. While I explored the rest of the special collections in response to this question, I ended up back at Sicuti Antiquarum Lectionum. The marginalia in this book was the most interesting to me, although it was all in Italian. One section of the book, in particular, had the most handwritten notes in the margin. The notes were neatly placed and neatly written in a script that oozed sophistication and education. Accompanying these notes were underlined passages. Both the sophistication of the notes as well as these underlined sections imply that this encyclopedia was intimately used as a scholarly source. The final task in this assignment was to identify one of the specific collections in the library, and there is one clear choice for this at Geneseo’s Milne: The Wadsworth Family Papers. The Wadsworth Family is a household name in Geneseo, NY, and are considered its founding family considering their size and influence for generations. Due to their prevalence in the region, and the dedication they’re known for to higher education, they’ve chosen Milne Library as the keeper of their various family documents and books. This collection is primarily made up of family and business correspondence, various books, as well as some non-written items such as a collections of photographs taken by Mrs. Herbert Wadsworth that were donated by a relative of hers that she had kept the photos with before her death. The books in this collection are generally concerning land, political, and familial history, many written by members of the Wadsworth family themselves. While the collection of photographs were given by a relative of the Wadsworths, most of the collection was donated directly by the family. This Social Life of Books course provides an excellent opportunity to learn more about the area that I’ve come to love and consider a second home during my undergraduate years. While I’ve learned a lot from an internship I had with the local historical society last semester about this town and county, as an English major, I’m even more excited to see what I can learn specifically from the books that are associated with it. I’m looking forward to seeing what the rest of this semester brings!