I, along with fellow Montevallo student Savannah Willard, met with the school archivist to discuss the questions posed to us by Dr. Pauley and Dr. Bankhurst. Despite the fact that I have been interning in our school’s archives for the past semester, many of these questions were not things I’d gotten to explore yet, and it was very exciting to explore them.

Oldest book: The Satires of Decimus Junis Juvenalis, 3rd Edition with Sculptures

This book was printed by Jacob Tonson, a book printer at Grey’s-Inn-Gate in London, in the year 1702. It is written in eighteenth-century English, and therefore spelling and some grammatical structure was quite different from that which we use today. This, combined with the general state of the book, kept me from trying to read much of it. The book itself had obviously been rebound, but even despite that it was very nearly falling apart. The spine was completely separated from where the papers were bound at the side.

Beyond what we could guess, there was not a very obvious trail of history within the book. We were able to find the number assigned to the book when the school library bought it on February 8th, 1952 for $6.50. They bought it from someone in the ascension records penned as “Elizabeth Bkseller,” which Savannah and I took to mean Elizabeth- bookseller. It was one of ten or so books bought from Elizabeth on the same date. It was near this period of time that our school was needing an entirely new library because the building that the library was housed in was rapidly becoming too small.

Perhaps if the original cover and binding had been present, we would have been able to find more information about previous owners, and how this book got from London all the way to Montevallo, Alabama. Savannah and I discussed several ideas, including things such as a visitor to London from the USA buying the book and bringing it home with them, or it being brought by a native Londoner who had moved to Alabama.

Marks of use: The Mind of the South by WJ Cash

This copy of The Mind of the South was printed by Vintage Books Inc, in New York in 1960. It was a 1st Vintage Edition and was originally owned by Professor Ethel Rasmusson. She was a professor of History at Montevallo, teaching 101 and 102 level classes. The book bears notes and underlining- it was probably used for lecture purposes when she moved on to teach at the University of Alabama after Montevallo. The book was part of a collection that she left to Montevallo in her later life.

Collection: Library of Science Collection

The University of Montevallo started as the Alabama Girls Technical Institute, as a means for giving young women a way to be better prepared for life and become either excellent homemakers or have a way of making a small income for themselves. Particularly popular in the 1920s and 30s was the education program, in which girls would have to take at least one class about how to build a small rural library for students of all ages. The books in this collection are ones that were gathered in Library Science 301 and 302, Book Selection for children. They are all children’s books with vibrant drawings such as Gulliver’s Travels by Swift and The Haunted Bookshelf by Morley, and all are identifiable by a specific stamp from the Library Science department. The collection is an ongoing one, as some of the books originally in the Library Science department are still in regular circulation in the University’s library. The school archivist, Carey Heatherly, is currently collecting the books as they are rotated out of regular circulation and taking them into the special collections registry. He told us that this collection was a reflection of both the history of our school as a girl’s institute, and as the history of our Education major, which to this day is one of the most popular majors on campus.