Category: Student Posts

This past week we were asked to take a trip down to our local archives and meet the archivist. The archivist here at Montevallo is a fun man named Carey Heatherly, and he was a huge help in finding what we needed for our assignment. My partner Mary Haynes and I, armed with our questions and notebook, were ready to do some digging.

The first set of questions had to do with the oldest book in the archives. We ended up with a 1702 copy of The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis, the 3rd edition with sculptures. This particular copy was printed by Jacob Tonson, an 18th century bookseller and publisher famous for buying the copyrights to William Shakespeare’s plays. We do not know exactly how it ended up in the United States, let alone in Alabama, but we did discover through the archive’s book logs that the College bought it for $6.50 on February 8,1952 form someone known only as “Elizabeth Bkseller”.

(Juvenal, Decimus. The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis, 3rd ed. with sculptures. Jacob Tonson. Greys-Inn-Gate, London, 1702.)

The second Set of questions asked about a book with visible signs of wear and use. After searching for a bit, the best example we could find as a 1960 copy of The Mind of the South by W.J. Cash. This book had significant amount of both underlining and marginalia. With the help of the archivist we discovered that this book actually belonged to Ethel Rasmusson; Ethel was not only an avid donator to the archives, but also an instructor of history at the University of Montevallo. She received her master’s degree from the University of Chicago, and mainly taught History 101 and 102. Based on the areas underlined and the marginalia, we assume that this book as used to teach part of her class.

(Cash, W.J. The Mind of the South, 1st Vintage Ed. Vintage Books Inc. New York, 1960.)

The final set of questions we were set out to discover involved a collection within the archives. When told this, the archivist pointed us towards the Library of Science collection. Identifiable by a stamp on the inside of the cover, this ongoing collection is made up of children’s books with vibrant drawings in them. Some of the books included are stories like Gulliver’s Travels by Swift, The Haunted Bookshelf by Morley, Merrylips by Dix, and many more. The cool part about this collection comes for the history of it. Mainly used during the 20’s and 30’s, these books were used in classrooms to show perspective teachers how to build a classroom library. We did some digging and actually found the course descriptions of the classes this collection was used in. Book Selection was the name of the class, under the code of LS (Library Science) 301/302; the class was taught by Greta Largo who was an assistant professor in Library Science.  The significance of this collection stems from our area’s deep history in education for women because not only was it taught during the time of Alabama College for women but, also because Education was (and still is) the largest major on campus.

The first visit to the archives was a complete success, and I cannot wait to discover more and more as this course continues.

During my meeting with Shepherd University’s archivist Christy Toms I learned a lot about the archives and special collections housed at the Scarborough Library. The oldest book that they have cataloged was published in 1792 (“Memoirs of the Life of the Late Charles Lee Esquire”), but Christy also told me that the library hasn’t always documented the provenance of the items they collect, so it’s quite possible that there are older books somewhere in the special collections.

To see an example of reader use in a book, Christy showed me a copy of  book “A History of Shepherd College,” which was published in 1967. Shepherd student Martha Campbell signed and embossed her name on the first page of the book, and had Shepherd professor Dr. Slonaker to sign the title page. Other than this display of ownership, there was no marginalia left in the book. The lack of visible use of this book tells me that, for Martha, owning the book was more important than engaging with it and its contents. So far Christy has found little evidence of reader use in materials other than yearbooks, but she hopes to find more marginalia and marks of ownership as she combs through the rare book collection.

Most of the archival items that the Scarborough Library houses were donated to the them by people in the area with the hope that the archives would preserve the materials better than they could manage themselves. One such collection is the Folk Collection (as in George B. Folk, not folk culture or heritage), which Shepherd acquired in the 1970s. The collection consists of the contents of Folk’s personal library. In order to keep to collection, Shepherd had to promise to keep all of Folk’s books together and not break up any parts of the collection. While Christy took me to see the collection on the shelves, she mentioned that the books are sorted by their Library of Congress call number and that she wishes that they knew specifically how Folk kept the books on his own shelves in order to show them in that order instead. Topically, Folk’s collection of books seem to be about West Virginia’s regional history and genealogy, but I think that not knowing how Folk actually stored his collection leaves a bit of mystery as to how he thought about his collection as items that he owned instead of how the words on the pages interested him.

Upon meeting with the archivists of the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, I learned many interesting things. One being that there is a long journey ahead of me. With all the resources that are available, you can imagine that beginning an archival based research project on the history of the social life of books of Appalachia is like confronting the Leviathan. However, being the proud Appalachian that I am, I am ecstatic to embark on this journey and further connect myself with the history of what I am honored to call home. The Appalachian Mountains, being one of the oldest mountain ranges on the planet, has an extremely deep and rich culture and history. It came to my knowledge through the help of our archivists that the oldest book in our library the philosophical work known as Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times by Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury. This work was first published in 1714 (Volume III), although the copy I have in my hands is a reprinted version from 1958 that was printed by J. Baskerville in Birmingham, Alabama. According to our senior archivist, the owner of this set before it came into the hands of the college is unknown. As far as the history of this work goes, it turns out that Cooper, the grandson of the first earl, was an English politician with a taste for neoplatonic derived philosophy as is revealed in this book (The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica). It is thought that this famous 18th century philosopher and student of John Locke created this exploration of moral sense in response to another great philosopher of the same time, Thomas Hobbes (McAteer). According to McAteer, through the style of writing of Anthony Ashley Cooper, it can be felt that this book had intentions of affecting the readers moral sense in a positive way rather than simple speculation (McAteer). On another note, a specific collection in our library that I am particularly interested in exploring is the James Taylor Adams collection. James Taylor Adams was a faithful patron to the Appalachian literary world. A jack of all trades, Adams served and worked as a writer, newspaper editor, historian, Post Master, and merchant. He lived in an area known as Stephens of Wise, Virginia. Adams diligently created a collection of Appalachian folklore and folk songs along with historical records of Wise County. There are also many works of local genealogy in the collection. The college came by this wonderful collection of local history over forty years ago through the gracious donation of the Adams family after the passing of James Taylor Adams. Bailey Curtlan Helbert The University of Virginia’s College at Wise, 2017 Department of Natural Sciences Biochemistry  

The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. “Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury | English Politician and Philosopher [1671-1713].” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, 9 Feb. 2007, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anthony-Ashley-Cooper-3rd-Earl-of-Shaftesbury#ref184884. Accessed 18 Jan. 2017.

McAteer, John. “The Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671—1713).” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/shaftes/. Accessed 18 Jan. 2017.  

While at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise we do not have a resident archivist, we did meet with a group of library staff that was very excited about the idea of this class and project.  The group had compiled together for us a collection of the oldest books in the library.  The very oldest being the text, “Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times” by Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury.  The book was printed in 1758, and based on the data sheet on the book, it was printed in Birmingham, England by John Baskerville.  Unfortunately, there was no data available concerning who owned the book before the college acquired it; and since the book has been rebound, there are no hopes of determining on establishing an owner based on a name written on the inside cover.  Upon doing research on the book, it was first published in 1711, and was revised by Shaftesbury in 1713 before his death.  This book is a philosophical one, and provides the reader with Shaftesbury’s thoughts and opinions on a broad range of subject matter.  The time in which Shaftesbury wrote this book is deemed “The Age of Enlightenment”.  This was a period of time in which the “old order” of civilization was receding, and a sort of “new order” was being brought to the forefront. This new age of thinking was founded on science and reasoning, and it would later found the basis for important events such as the French Revolution.  Those that would have owned and read this book during this time period, were probably interested in adopting a new way of thinking and opening their minds to certain aspects of the world.

 

We were also interested in taking a look at books that were well worn and had obvious use.  They pointed us in the direction of the collection Gladys Stallard.  Gladys was a local woman from Dorchester, which is a specific section of Norton, Virginia, and she had left her book collection to the college upon her death.  The particular book I looked at from her collection was “Call Me Hillbilly” by Gladys Trentham Russell; she had written on the inside cover of the book that she acquired it in September 1974.  This book talks about the lives of people that grew up in the Great Smoky Mountains near Gatlinburg, Tennessee.  Within the book, it features pictures of people from the region and provides their names; alongside this information, Gladys Stallard had written in many birth dates and death dates of the individuals.  Mrs. Stallard had also obtained book reviews of the text, and stapled them to the inside of the front cover. This was interesting, as it made me wonder if perhaps she had personally known the author or had some connection to her.  It was easy to tell from the condition and the comments in the book, that this was one that she frequented often.  Looking at the other books in her collection, it would be safe to assume that Gladys was proud of and interested in preserving the lives and history of the people that live in the South-West Virginia and East Tennessee region.

We were also interested in looking at one specific collection, and they directed us to the collection of James Taylor Adams.  There are 1242 stories, narratives, and individual works along with 1408 songs in the collection.  This collection is composed of folklore and folktales from our local region, along with songs, poems, and genealogies.  James Taylor Adams was a local man, from Stevens, which is specific part of Norton, Virginia.  In Stevens he was a postmaster, and he also wrote articles for and organized his own newspaper. In my opinion, he collected the stories from around the region in order to preserve them and keep them alive for later generations.  His collection has been at the library for over 40 years, and it was donated by his family to the college.

 

After discussing the various collections in the Scarborough Library at Shepherd University with Christy Toms (The Coordinator of Archives and Special Collections) I discovered some interesting facts about the collection. First, the oldest book in the collection was the “Memoirs of the Life of the Late Charles Lee Esquire”. It was published in 1792 in London by J.S Jordan. It is not known who owned the book previously because unfortunately Shepherd University has no record and there were no notations inside the book to tell me otherwise. The book discusses his military career as well as his radical Whig republicanism reputation. Anyone who owned this book would have an interest in the life of a soldier and somewhat of an extremist during this time. Some evidence I found of a book with notations in our collection was in “A History of Shepherd College”. It was published in 1967 in West Virginia. The author was Arthur Gordon Slonaker. Inside was an inscription to the owner of the book, Martha Campbell, from a professor. Unfortunately I could not find much about her due to the lack of middle name ok the inscription. What I do know is that students aren’t much different from that time as there are today. She used this book to learn more about the university she was attending and had possibly a favorite professor sign it. When speaking with Christy Toms, I learned a little bit about a collection of yearbooks. What was interesting is there were gaps in years of the collection. For example, during World War I as well as the Great Depression and World War II. This would have represented the idea that a yearbook was less of a necessity in their life due to financial problems. The unifying theme in this collection is that they all are from Shepherd University. The collection came from members of the community donating their yearbooks in order for others to learn about past. This is a great example of a book as an artifact. Although they are not necessarily a literary work, they still can tell us a lot about the past and the owners of these books.

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!  

The library at UNC Asheville is…well, it’s a library. It’s not sleek or modern or fancy, but we’ve got some good tech and great staff. It looks like what you’d expect to find at any library on a state campus. And then you get to the Special Collections door, shown here. I (with Dakota) was able to meet with both of the librarians who work behind this strangely fancy door: Gene Hyde and Colin Reeve. They were both lovely, letting us handle the books as well as showing us how to navigate their database – and, of course, welcoming us back anytime (barring the fact that there’s a doorbell outside what I’ve come to call the Marble Gate). There were a great number of books inside this room (many of them fairly recent, but I’ll touch on that later). There’s room for error, since both Gene and Colin admitted that their database was acting up, but out of this mass of caged books we were able to draw out a strong contender for Oldest Book In Room: A priest to the temple. Or, The country parson his character, and Rule of Holy Life. This book, written by George Herbert and published in 1675, bears clear signs of being passed from hand to hand over the centuries, as indicated by the title page. This book was rebound on November 26, 1913, as stated by a note scrawled before the title page, but still retains its original pages. It’s just not, you know, falling apart. Before the title page, there are a number of notes with varying degrees of legibility stating who the book belonged to, and in some cases under what circumstances. The earliest entry we found during a cursory inspection was from 1727; it was mostly illegible to me, having been written in script with now-fading ink and all, but we did determine that it belonged to someone named Wells. I think I could pick out a few other random words, such as “Wightman,” “Bosford,” and “Roe.” I don’t know if these are names or places, since they were all written by the same hand and aren’t all formatted the same way. The next dated entry (that we could find) was from July 1, 1878, when this book was given as a “birth day greeting” to a S. Howard Hall. “Soon” after that, the book was rebound as I said by someone with the initials S. H. H. After that, it gets a little fuzzy date-wise. There are pencil marks on the initial pages, seeming to indicate ownership by a library prior to that of UNC Asheville (and relatively recently, at that) and even a price: $220. Gene and Colin mentioned that this book was purchased from a book dealer at some point, but I’m not sure when this happened in relation to said library. This book kind of doubles as an answer to the first two questions of our assignment (the oldest book and a book that bears evidence of reader use) so I’m going to touch a bit more on this one but briefly throw in another book as a sort of safety net. Clearly, the past owners of this book wanted to stake their claim upon the pages and were not afraid to write in it, but the pages themselves are largely intact. Given that the subject matter isn’t something simple, and also that it covers a largely religious subject in a time where religion was a key part of life (even more so than today in ways), I think it’s safe to say that the owners of this book were purposely very careful to conserve it. Perhaps it held some sort of meaning for them, which might be how it arrived with its pages not crumbling or even dogeared. This stands in stark contrast to another book of which I regrettably didn’t take a picture. Though published later than Herbert’s, this book (something beginning with The pilgrim’s progress, though I didn’t catch the rest) was crumbling so badly that it had to be kept in an envelope. The original leather binding had a severe case of redrot, to the point where half of it had fallen off entirely, and the pages themselves had separated in the middle of the binding. (The picture here is not of the book in question; it’s just an example of redrot I found. The actual book was in way worse condition.) I know Herbert’s book was rebound so it’s not really a fair comparison, but the pages (which were intact in both books) showed a clear difference nonetheless. I’d hazard a guess that either the owners of Herbert’s book valued it more than the owners of the other book valued theirs, or the latter book just passed through way more hands. Or both. The most notable collection in that room, though, wasn’t nearly so old. And it’s a cookbook collection, of all things: The Pamela C. Allison Cookbook Collection, spanning from 1932 to 2015. Gene and Colin had a great time describing their adventure to Pamela’s house to retrieve the cookbooks; there were around 3000 of them just piled around this woman’s house. They only took 1000 or so (those that ascribed to the common theme of Southern cooking) but those fill up two large bookshelves in the Special Collections room and are continuing to expand. In a statement available on the UNC Asheville Special Collections website, Pamela herself wrote “My cookbook collection is rooted in three seemingly unrelated interests—good food, reading, and research.” She combined her childhood love of her grandmother’s cooking with her desire to broaden her reading sphere, and started amassing cookbooks until it became an obsession. One of the professors here, Dr. Erica Abrams Locklear, was teaching a class that explored culture through cookbook literature, which motivated Pamela to donate her collection for the good of the Asheville community. She’s still collecting today. Near the end of our meeting, the discussion turned to the librarians’ most valuable commodities. Though we did discuss the value of a book or two, they made clear that their collection wasn’t based on value. Half-jokingly, they told us that their most valuable commodity was space, and they were running out of it fast. It’s pretty clear just by looking around the room; all of the protective bookshelves were almost entirely full, and the normal bookshelves housing the cookbook collection were almost sagging under the weight of the number of books crammed into it. There’s so much crammed into each book, too; look how long I spent rambling about one or two books in this post, not even delving into content. I hope they can figure out plans for either increased storage or expansion; it won’t be good when we run out of room for this kind of knowledge.

On Wednesday 11, 2017, Brittany Williams and I met with Midwestern State University’s archivist. Remarkably, we had this entire assignment handed to us in a single collection. MSU was fortune enough to have this exceptional collection donated to our library by the family of Nolan Moore, the original owner. Moore traveled the world in search of original publications of greats works and literature. Being in the same room with fragments of Sumerian tablets, books published hundreds of years ago and even original news clippings from incredible moments in history was overwhelming. The oldest, complete work in the collection is the Nuremberg Chronicles, published in 1493 by Anton Koberger. The original book was made with the woodblock print technique in Latin; MSU has the German translation. The Nuremberg Chronicles is a summary of the Bible and the history of significant cities. The process of woodblock printing alone is astonishing because it is such an intricate way to produce books. I feel that the time that went into making this huge book shows how significant books were to this culture or time period. The book and its pictures were so well preserved, which speaks for the importance the contemporary society found in this medium. From this collection, the biggest theme that stands out is the obvious effort Moore put into building up significant literary periods. Another theme I noticed was that most of the books would be considered core texts or some of the most commonly studied works of literature from Dante’s Inferno to many of Hemingway’s works.