The Los Angeles skyline at dawn during a recent AAS business trip.
A lot of the Society’s staff travels for work. We are a national organization and we collect material from all across the fifty states and Canada. Curators travel to conferences and to visit collectors, catalogers move about for training and to stay up to date with the latest methods, managers visit members, foundations, granting agencies, and vendors. Meetings and events are held regularly in Worcester, of course, but this past year we held a conference in Bordeaux, France, participated in collaborative exhibitions in Northampton and Boston, and gave papers or attended conferences in San Francisco, St. Louis, and London, England.
This past Tuesday several of us were on the move all at once, as you may have noticed if you follow the Society’s Instagram account. Two staffers were in California visiting donors and foundations while four others drove through snow and ice to Vermont to work out the details of a new digitization project. Another curator was in New York to attend a member’s opening and to visit with book dealers about possible acquisitions.
This 1856 map shows canal, steamboat, stage, telegraph, and railroad routes.
So what, you say? People travel all the time for work. The planes and highways are crowded with business activity every day. What is different about AAS? Nothing really…just consider this…Our founder Isaiah Thomas did not stay behind his desk in Worcester, often visiting Boston and Salem in his pursuit of interesting specimens of American printing. One of our early librarians was killed in a stage coach accident in Ohio while on a research trip. A later president traveled frequently to Central America to study archaeology there. We have been part of a global world since the beginning in 1812, not focusing on one region or state or city, but all of North America. How do you preserve the printed history of a continent? You have to move across it all the time, gathering, listening, talking, collecting. Staying home is not an option, even in the digital age.
Christopher Columbus Baldwin, AAS librarian from 1831 to 1837, who died in a stage coach accident in Ohio while on AAS business.
Watching the planes cross the dawn sky in Southern California while shaking off jet-lag and knowing my colleagues were mucking through Vermont and the slushy specialness that can be the streets of New York made me think about the movement of acquisitors, of fundraisers, of ambassadors for the Society, not only on Tuesday, but for the past 201 years. Our willingness to get in a stagecoach, on a steamboat, a train, or a plane is part of the drive to make the Society a better, more comprehensive collection. Lucky us to be part of the long history of AAS road trips.
The News-Letter (Otterville, Missouri). Jan. 27, 1862. Vol. 1, no. 1. Newspapers published by Civil War regiments are scarce. One scarce genre of newspapers is Civil War regiment publications. Sometimes a regiment had printing equipment at a fort or took over a printing office at an occupied town and produced its own newspaper for the amusement of the troops. Often the only issues known survive because someone sent one home as a souvenir. Last year we acquired a rare camp newspaper from Otterville, Missouri called The First Division Proclamation, published by an Illinois regiment. I was surprised to find this second camp newspaper published at Otterville at the same time, but by an Indiana regiment. It is an unrecorded title not listed in the standard references or OCLC. The News-Letter was published by J.K. Davisson of the 24th Indiana Volunteers. The printing is a bit crude, but that is to be expected of a camp publication. It has two poems, some camp news, a humorous piece about camp etiquette, jokes, and camp gossip. One piece mentions two other camp newspapers being printed at the same time. One is the First Division Proclamation mentioned above and the other is the War-Eagle,only a few examples of which are owned, printed by a separate Illinois regiment. The News-Letter is printed on blue ruled ledger paper with the inside blank as space for a soldier to write a letter. In this copy, William Smith wrote a letter home to Indiana telling his brothers they should not enlist.
Another year done means another Annual Report. For most, the phrase “annual report” doesn’t exactly elicit imaginings of stimulating reading material. But here at AAS we like to think of the Annual Report as more than just a business reckoning. It’s also a reflection of a thriving community—a learned society, if you will—made up of diverse individuals which offers a wide range of resources, events, exhibitions, and seminars. So if you look beyond, and even to, the numbers, lists, and recaps of the year, you’ll see a much more interesting story take shape, one in which the Society is growing and flourishing as it enters its third century.
That’s why we’ve decided to share with you some of our favorite parts of this year’s Annual Report (September 2012 – August 2013), now available in print and online.
The covers! Almost every printing job gives us the chance to show off a physical book history element. For this issue of the Annual Report,we inverted the idea of endpapers and placed them on the outside of the text rather than the inside, to almost bookend the events of the 2012-2013 year. The example we show here is a marbled sample from a copy of Isaiah Thomas’s 1810 The History of Printing in America. The endpapers were pasted to the board covers and first leaf to secure the binding of the volume. It’s not that we disapprove of securing the binding of the Annual Report—we just want you to dive right in and read it cover to unprotected cover. On the back cover over the endpapers is the bookplate of Isaiah Thomas that was engraved by Paul Revere in 1769. There was a lively debate about which version of Thomas’s bookplate to use, State I or State II. Annual Report 2013 challenge: figure out which one we used.
The several pages covering bicentennial events. Although the bicentennial now seems ages ago, this provided the perfect opportunity to reflect one more time on what was an extremely busy but extremely successful autumn in 2012. From the vintage dancers at the Black and White and Read All Over gala, to the many appearances of Isaiah Thomas, to the Grolier Club exhibition in New York, the celebrations raged on!
The recent acquisitions. In pursuit of our mission to “collect, preserve, and make available for study” the printed record of what is now the United States through 1876, we are continually acquiring new items through purchase or gift. (If you’re curious to know more about our acquisitions process, check out the feature article in the latest issue of the Almanac.) Although there are too many to feature them all, we picked a few that illustrate the breadth and rarity of the collections. Among them is the only known copy of a 1788 broadside about a double hanging in western Massachusetts related to Shays’s Rebellion; a bound volume of six early American pamphlets, five of which we did not yet hold in our collections; an 1886 McLoughlin Bros. three-dimensional panorama book featuring a farmer, a parrot, and an elephant; and yet another addition to our quickly-growing collection of the various editions of Audubon—a plate from the original elephant-sized folio edition of Birds of America. Not too shabby!
The “In Memoriam” section. At first glance this may seem like a strange choice, especially given what a sad year it was for AAS membership—we lost twenty-four members, almost twice as many as last year, and many of them close friends and staunch supporters of the Society. But this is also what makes this section so rich. As a whole, it provides a captivating look at a cross-section of our membership, and serves as a reminder of how lucky we are to count such fascinating and illustrious people as part of our community. They include prestigious historians, local businessmen and philanthropists, former staff members, dedicated researchers and writers, and many, many World War II veterans. We are pleased to have the opportunity to mourn, honor, and celebrate them all.
And finally, “Two Centuries of Quotes about AAS”! With two hundred years of fodder, we were sure to find some gems. Read these to find out who had a crush on one of our nineteenth-century librarians, what Henry David Thoreau thought about his visit in 1855, and what the Red Sox have to do with our centennial. This was also a section where, graphically speaking, we could let our hair down. Throughout the rest of the text we kept to Sabon 18-Point Bold Small Caps. Here you’ll see, well, we lost all control.
See? The Annual Report really is not all business. We could keep going on and on with the nuts and bolts, but then this post could be 56 pages long. So at this point, you might as well just read the Annual Report.
Howe, Samuel Gridley. The Blind Child’s First Book. Third edition. Boston: New England Institution for the Education of the Blind, 1852. This is a fairly early (and rare) example of printing for the blind using raised type known as Boston Line, developed by the book’s author Samuel Gridley Howe (1801-1876), who gained national fame as the founder and public face of the New England Institution for the Education for the Blind, later the Perkins Institution. A forerunner to the dot system of Braille, Boston Line incorporates the shapes of letters used by seeing readers. The text encourages its blind readers to develop the senses that they do have, reminding them, “You can learn to hear much better than people who can see.” The Blind Child’s First Book joins the thirty Boston Line books now held in the AAS collections.
“Continental Life Insurance Company of New York” by Louis Prang & Co. (1870)
As many researchers already know, life stops in 1876 for many parts of the American Antiquarian Society’s collections which are limited to the pre-Centennial era. Recently, however, the Society has amended its collection policies to permit the curator of graphic arts to add prints produced between 1876 and 1900 to the Society’s holdings in order to tell the story of print production through the end of the century. The ephemera and photography collections both already include the 1876 to 1900 period, so adding the prints (lithographs and engravings, as well as relief prints) made sense contextually. This change will allow late-century chromolithographs to be added to our holdings.
Not long after this policy was put into place, I was reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which starts out set in 1879 when a bump on the head sends protagonist Hank Morgan back in time to medieval England. Samuel Clemens, writing the text between 1885 and 1889, was well aware of the proliferation of inexpensive prints in the United States and often includes chromolithographs in his detailed descriptions of American interiors. In chapter 7 of A Connecticut Yankee, Hank Morgan is settling into his spacious chambers in Arthur Pendragon’s castle. His reaction to the space, while thick with Twain humor, reflects the ubiquitous, homey nature of chromos as understood by late-century American readers. Hank states,
“God Bless Our Home” by Louis Prang & Co. (1873)
As for conveniences, properly speaking, there weren’t any. I mean little conveniences; it is the little conveniences that make the real comfort of life. The big oaken chairs, graced with rude carvings were well enough, but that was the stopping place. There was no soap, no matches, no looking glass….And not a chromo. I had been used to chromos for years, and I saw now that without my suspecting it a passion for art had got worked into the fabric of my being, and was become a part of me. It made me homesick to look around over this proud and gaudy but heartless barrenness and remember that in our house in East Hartford, all unpretending as it was, you couldn’t go into a room but you would find an insurance chromo, or at least a three-color God-Bless-Our-Home over the door; and in the parlor we had nine.
“News from Lexington, Putnam Leaving the Plow” by Kellogg & Bulkeley Co. (1886?)
AAS has a collection of just over 300 individual chromolithographs intended for framing, most dating from 1845 to 1875. This group includes several examples of prints issued by insurance companies (see top) and we even have chromos printed in Clemens’ adopted hometown of Hartford, Connecticut, a city that supported several thriving print production factories (right). The collection includes excellent examples made by Boston firms, and is somewhat slanted towards premium prints—images that were given away to subscribers by newspaper or magazine publishers, Sunday schools, book stores, etc. We have examples of brightly colored advertisements, religious scenes (yes, we even have a God-Bless-Our-Home chromo), humorous prints, landscapes and portraits of adorable children. Now, with the recent policy change, we can make our best effort to find additional examples from after 1876, because, as Twain insinuates in his final line (“and in the parlor we had nine”), quantity and easy proliferation were part of the attraction of these vivid, inexpensive, kitschy and sometimes even artistic prints.
Horoscope, Philadelphia, March 1850. A rare find for the manuscripts department is this hand written horoscope, or “nativitie,” The four page document features a chart mapping out alignments of planets and the moon. The astrologer gives the twenty-three year old subject details about his character, general fortune on specific days and months, and children – “you will have 6 children, but will raise only 4.” Most predictions are positive, with occasional warnings on certain days – “Sickness, which may interfere with and mitigate against your success in business undertakings…” And at the end comes the all-important disclaimer – “Now Sir! I have given you a general statement as to the manners, your prospects fluctuate during life, and you will find the advice valuable to follow. I mean to say, that on the days noted for evil, you should be on the ground, attending to your business, and deal with caution when giving credit. This information receive and follow, and you will reap the benefit, you will understand, that this judgment will be found correct to events yet hidden in the womb of futurity as a general guide to prevent misfortune.”
It has been a big year for some of the country’s most important documents. January saw the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, and just last week was the 150th anniversary of the reading of the Gettysburg Address. This Thursday in the United States we celebrate our national day of Thanksgiving, and so are looking back, once again, to 1863, when countless Union newspapers printed President Abraham Lincoln’s Proclamation for “a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficial Father” on November 26. Each year since, the sitting president has formally proclaimed that Thanksgiving Day should be celebrated on the last Thursday of November (this changed in 1939 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt set it one week earlier; two years later it was ruled by Congress to be observed as a legal federal holiday on the fourth Thursday in November). In President Lincoln’s Proclamation he states, “it has seemed to me fit and proper they [the bounties of the United States] should be solemnly, reverentially and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and voice, by the whole American people.” This proclamation appeared in many publications, including post-observance mentions in some Confederate newspapers. The copy seen to the left is from the October 8, 1863 issue of the Amherst, New Hampshire, Farmer’s Cabinet.
Lincoln’s edict was met with support from Union state governors’ offices. In AAS’s collection are several broadsides endorsing a national day of Thanksgiving, including from New England states Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, but also this featured example from the Colorado Territory (see below), which closes with a prayer that “the white-winged messenger of peace may again perch upon our banners as they wave in triumph from sea to sea and from shore to shore.”
By the time of Lincoln’s Proclamation, Thanksgiving practices had their own history spanning Colonial and Revolutionary America, and it was an issue frequently brought to the surface by states observing a yearly Thanksgiving holiday. This is in addition to Sarah Josepha Hale, long-time editor of the popular Godey’s Lady’s Book, promoting the idea of a national thanksgiving. Her editorial in September 1863, “Our National Thanksgiving,” provides the recipe for such a holiday, tying it closely to the war effort – she closes, “A national feeling of Thanksgiving, putting the beauty, goodness and love of the Creator before the eyes of the dullest and the hearts of the coldest, would effect incalculable benefits to our Country.”
Items in the Society stemming from this day are not just limited to those created by people in executive positions, however. For example, contained within the collections is also an assortment of pamphlets and transcribed sermons reflecting numerous religious denominations, places, and subjects. This assortment includes titles such as America’s Blessings and Obligations, A Willing Reunion Not Impossible, and The Necessity for Religion in Politics.
The print culture of Thanksgiving 1863 is understandably more somber than images of Pilgrims and turkeys. This includes a double-page wood engraving by Thomas Nast (1840-1902) in the December 5, 1863 issue of Harper’s Weekly (below). In this image, a central illustration of Columbia is seen kneeling at the Union Altar which is draped with the American flag. Six scenes of Thanksgiving prayer – the Union Army, kneeling Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the Navy, farmers in the country, residents gathered in a Town Hall, and emancipated slaves – surround the dominant allegorical figure.
So is Thanksgiving a day of food and feasting? Absolutely. It is also one that has evolved from the New England fall festivals into joyous reunions and big dinners. But during the years of the Civil War, especially 1863, it grew into one of observance, serious moral and religious thinking, church services, and prayer. In an attempt to answer one the earliest appeals for its establishment as a national holiday, Lincoln shaped it into one about the widows, orphans, mourners, and others suffering from the war.
Calico Dress Ball! There Will be a Social Dance at Lyceum Hall, West Acton. Boston: Searle Printing, 1870.
This large (42” x 28 ½”) broadside was one of a group of five sheets purchased together, all of which relate to activities in Acton and West Acton, Massachusetts, between 1865 and 1875. Printed in Boston by F.A. Searle, who was well-known for his circus posters, all of the broadsides make excellent use of large, eye-catching wooden type and brightly colored paper. Given the thin paper and temporal nature of the events advertised (dances, fund-raising levees, and church festivals), it is amazing that these five printed sheets survived. This broadside advertises a dance in mid-February, which may have been held in honor of Valentine’s Day, a popular occasion for community social events.
At most non-profits, November and December are year-end fundraiser months. You are probably getting a lot of solicitation letters in your mail box, along with those stacks of glossy holiday catalogs. AAS has several important initiatives underway, including donations to our Annual Fund. This year, however, we are also trying something new.
Council for New England Records, “The booke of Orders,” 1622-1623.
The Society’s curators have selected thirty objects from the collection that would be excellent candidates for digitization. These are books, periodicals, photographs, or manuscripts that are heavily used or fragile but are not available digitally through any of our partnerships or collaborative projects. The inspired idea of our Image Coordinator Jaclyn Penny (who oversees all of our digital processing), this 2013 year-end initiative will allow the Society to raise the funds needed to photograph and record all thirty of the selected pieces. In the digital-fundraising catalog the candidates are each listed and described, with the appropriate curator stating why the object should be made available through a digital surrogate. We spent a couple of weeks selecting material, writing up the texts, building the website – all the while thinking this was going to be a great way for people to help the Society, bit by bit (or byte!), to provide access to important historic documents. For example, the earliest item is a manuscript of the Council for New England Records, “The booke of Orders,” 1622-1623 (see above), and the latest is the children’s book Christmas Alphabet published by McLoughlin Bros. around 1900 (see below). Most of the objects are under 80 pages in length and can be digitized for between $25 and $200.
So, great idea, right? We built the website and made the pitch to our usual email list of friends and supporters (many of whom support our annual Adopt-a-Book program, which will be back in the spring of 2014). We put the catalog up on Monday morning, November 18th. And… (drum roll, please) the response has been positively overwhelming! In the first hours over half of the listings were funded for digitization. We are so thrilled that this important material is going to be made available for scholars and researchers around the world. Thank you, thank you!
Carolyn Wells, “Christmas Alphabet.” New York: McLoughlin Bros. 1899-1900.
Here is how it works — supporters donate the funds to have the selected material digitized (which they can do in honor of someone else). The material is then taken to our in-house photographer and digitized. The files are processed and loaded into the Society’s database and links are made to those files from various places, including our online catalog. Keep an eye on the fundraising catalog, as we will also be putting links there as we process each order.
As I am typing this blog post, more orders are coming in and we are all cheering – it is a bit like a mini-telethon! I fear that we will not get this post up before everything is gone. Either way, we can surely call the initiative a success. So the Society’s curators send out a great big thank you to all of AAS’s supporters and friends who help and will help us in the future with providing access to our outstanding collections. I think it is safe to say that we will definitely be repeating this fundraiser again – and yes, there are still a few items left, if you want to cruise over to the website and take a look.
Most sincerely, the Society’s curatorial team: Vincent Golden, Lauren Hewes, Thomas Knoles, Elizabeth Pope, and Laura Wasowicz
“National monument to be erected at Gettysburg, Pa. — .” By James Goodwin Batterson. (New York: Major & Knapp, ca. 1863-1867)
“The newspapers are making morning after morning the rough draft of history. Later, the historian will come, take down the old files, and transform the crude but sincere and accurate annals of editors and reporters into history, into literature. The modern school must study the daily newspaper.” – The State (Columbia, SC) December 5, 1905
On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln gave one of the most memorable speeches in American history when the cemetery at Gettysburg was dedicated just four months after the great battle. Edward Everett spoke first for over two hours. When it was Lincoln’s turn, his speech was over almost before people realized he had begun.
One of the people in the audience was a reporter for the Associated Press. He sent in a report about the speech which was subsequently printed in various newspapers. The Cincinnati Gazette for November 21, 1863, printed the entirety of Everett’s speech on page 1. On page 3, they gave a description of the ceremony and included Lincoln’s speech as recorded by the AP reporter. Whether he tried to copy it down by shorthand or tried to reconstruct it from memory and/or by consulting others who were there, we do not know. It does differ from the traditional version of the Gettysburg Address we know today from fair copies written out by Lincoln after the event.
Here is the version reported in the Cincinnati Gazette. See how many differences you can find:
Four-score and seven years ago our fathers established upon this continent a government subscribed in liberty and dedicated to the fundamental principal that all mankind are created free and equal by a good God – [applause] – and now we are engaged in a great contest deciding the question whether this nation or any nation so conserved, so dedicated, can long remain. We are met on a great battlefield of the war. We are met here to dedicate a portion of that field as the final resting place of those who have given their lives that it might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this, but in a large sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, the living and the dead who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract from the work. [Great applause.]
Let us long remember what we say here, but not forget what they did here. [Immense applause.] It is for us rather, the living, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work that they have thus far so nobly carried forward. [“Good,” and great applause.] It is for us here to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us, for us to renew our devotion to that cause for which they gave the full measure of their devotion. Here let us resolve that what they have done shall not have been done in vain; that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth offered; that the Government of the people, founded by the people, shall not perish.
This week we continue our curators’ acquisitions stories with curator of newspapers Vince Golden. His story combines elements of both of the previous posts (I and II), making for quite an interesting turn of events!
There are various phrases in the English language that mean act immediately. Strike while the iron is hot. He who hesitates is lost. We are encouraged to jump at an opportunity. Shakespeare wrote, “Nay, but make haste, the better foot before.” On the other hand, we are told to look before we leap. Slow and steady wins the race. Haste makes waste. Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Make haste slowly.”
As curators, one of our main duties is to acquire materials for the collection. Some situations require haste. A new dealer’s catalog arrives and we have to quickly scan it for potential items and get our order in before someone else snaps it up. An auction catalog often has a short deadline from the time it arrives. Someone stops by with an issue in hand wondering if we would be interested.
On the flip-side, patience is a virtue. It may take months or years developing a relationship with collectors before they decide to donate their collections to the American Antiquarian Society. We might have to wait a few months while the board of directors of a historical society debates the pluses and minuses of transferring their newspapers to AAS.
In 2002, I received a phone call from a gentleman who had several volumes of Greenfield, Mass. newspapers. His father had rescued them decades before when someone was cleaning out a house and left them by the sidewalk to be thrown away. The gentleman wanted to sell the volumes. Over a series of phone calls, I got a better idea of the scope and condition of the collection. They went back to the 1790s and appeared to fill in large gaps in our collection. I thought progress was being made when for some unknown reason communication was cut off. There were no responses to phone calls or letters. I saved my notes and put the incident in the back of my mind.
Seven years later the gentleman called again, this time from a new number and location. He wanted to know if we were still interested in the volumes. Of course we were. What was different now was that he offered to donate them. The following month I was traveling near where he lived, and I offered to drive to his house and pick up the volumes, which he agreed to. When I went, I found myself in western New York on a small two-lane road with no cell phone signal. We met at a crossroad and I followed him back to his house. We ended up on a dirt road driving through trees for over half a mile to a not quite completed log-cabin house. Inside, sitting on a table, were sixteen volumes of old newspapers. We sat down and he told me what happened.
When he first contacted me things were not going that well for him and he was looking to sell the volumes to raise a little cash. The reason he stopped contacting me was he fell ill and was in the hospital for a long time. After recovering from his illness, things improved for him. Once his health and fortune recovered he decided he could afford to donate the newspapers to us.
Detail of bookplate on the bound volumes of newspapers
So, I finally ended up with the newspapers in the trunk of my car in the middle of nowhere, western New York. When I got back and was able to carefully take a look at the volumes I discovered something special about them. The volumes had bookplates reading “J. Denio’s property, Greenfield, (Mass.).” John Denio was originally a Vermont printer who moved to Greenfield in 1802. At different times he was part owner of the earlier Greenfield Gazette and the Franklin Herald. He also helped establish the later Greenfield Gazette in competition with the Franklin Herald. This was a publisher’s file of his own newspapers. They must have been saved by the family over many years only to be subsequently thrown out and rescued by someone that found them interesting. And after several more years, they finally ended up in our collection. Over 600 issues were added to the collection. The newspapers (all from Greenfield, Mass.) included:
Impartial Intelligencer for 1792
Greenfield Gazette for 1792-1811
The Traveller for 1811
Franklin Herald for 1812-1822
Franklin Herald, and Public Advertiser for 1822-1823
Greenfield Gazette for 1823-1826
Greenfield Gazette and Franklin County Advertiser for 1826-1827
Seven years is a long time to wait, but the wait was worth it.
Ever since we’ve been recording information, we’ve been trying to find ways to keep it out of the wrong hands. This need often times comes to the forefront during times of war and conflict when information is at its most valuable. Codes, ciphers, even invisible ink, have been employed quite successfully and famously in the past, so it wasn’t rare to find a coded letter in our manuscript collection here at AAS. However, rare or not, when one finds a coded letter, one has to investigate!
Perhaps lesser known than George Washington’s or Benedict Arnold’s use of code are the treasonous letters of Dr. Benjamin Church. Church, a Harvard-trained physician and close confidant of Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Paul Revere, was appointed the first Surgeon General of the Continental Army. He even participated in the Boston Tea Party. Despite his patriotic façade, he provided General Thomas Gage with information about munitions, military plans, and equipment. It is unknown why he sold secrets to the British. Some believe it was his attempt to uphold his luxurious lifestyle when money got tight. Others think it was the influence of his British wife. Whatever the reason, he was found out, imprisoned for treason, and after serving some years in prison, was exiled to the West Indies. The ship, however, never reached her destination, and Church was never heard from again.
One of Church’s coded letters, written from Philadelphia in 1777, was deciphered by Samuel West, a former classmate of Church’s from Harvard. Seen here is West’s transcription of the letter, with the broken code at the bottom. This letter was found within our West Family Collection (and was later moved to our US Revolution Collection). The original coded letter written by Church can be seen at the Library of Congress.
Just out of curiosity, I passed a copy of the letter, in code, to a friend who had recently taken a cryptography class. Upon my brief and inexpert inspection, the code seemed somewhat easy to crack, but I had the translated letter right beside it, so I’m sure that increased my confidence as I guessed my way through the code. It turns out, though, I was right. The letter was completely deciphered in about one hour. Why was it so easy? Church used a simple mono-alphabetic code, assigning a single symbol to a single letter. All it takes to crack a code such as this is a quick character analysis (observing which characters appear most frequently, which characters are always next to one another, etc.) and one can quickly determine which characters represent which letters.
I wonder why, when performing such a dangerous, treasonous act, Church didn’t take better care to disguise his secrets. Why did he use such a simple code? The code surely kept the message secret from casual readers or interceptors, so perhaps those were the only readers Church was worried about. But anyone who really wanted to could easily break it. If one is to go into the business of espionage, one best use a complex code. As Church stated at the end of his letter – “Use every precaution or I perish –”. He should have heeded his own advice.
Manton, Walter P. Taxidermy Without a Teacher. So. Framingham [Mass.]: The J.C. Clark Printing Company, 1876. The author describes how he originally wanted to call this book “Simple Chats on Taxidermy,” and in it he certainly takes a conversational approach after first setting the stage: “I ask the reader to take himself, in imagination, to my work-shop, and to proceed as if I were at his elbow, guiding his hand and explaining to him the mysteries of this mysterious and beautiful art.” What follows is a manual of instruction for preparing and preserving birds and animals, including information on hunting and hygiene. This copy has a blindstamp on the title page from Philbrick James Library and the bookplate of Deerfield Public Library, which declares, among other rules, that “All loud talking or unnecessary noise in the Library room is strictly prohibited.”
Last week, curator of children’s literature Laura Wasowicz posted about finding a unique find in a dusty house. This week, curator of graphic arts Lauren Hewes talks about another tack curators more often have to take: “hard work and diligence.”
Recently, the Society’s curatorial staff was asked to blog about significant acquisitions and the process by which historic material comes into the collection. I think perhaps the blog editors were hoping for high adventure, with hidden treasures discovered at flea markets, or exciting visits to exclusive dealers. Alas, the reality is that most of the great pieces and memorable objects come to AAS through plain old hard work and diligence.
Take for example the rare watercolor by American artist Thomas Worth (1834-1917) illustrated below. This watercolor, The Darktown Fire Brigade – A Prize Squirt, is the original study that Worth made for a lithograph published by Currier & Ives of New York. After the Civil War, Currier & Ives hired Worth (along with other cartoonists) to create several different series of comic prints. The Darktown prints are difficult for today’s viewers. They are racist and insulting and they use gross caricatures to mock and make fun of free African Americans in a variety of situations. The figures are made to look foolish and outlandish and reflect the anxiety of white Americans as freed slaves integrated into what was becoming a mixed race society. Eventually numbering over seventy-five titles, Darktown prints were sold individually for 20 cents each or six for a dollar. The caricatures of African Americans as firemen, clergy, sportsmen, and cowboys, were quite popular in their time. Over 73,000 sheets were sold from the series and when Currier & Ives folded, the lithographic stones for the series were purchased by a competitor and reissued into the twentieth century. The Darktown series is just now beginning to be evaluated by scholars trying to understand racial conflict and perception in the United States during the pre-Civil Rights era.
All well and good, but how did AAS end up with the watercolor? It is a long story and it started back in 2005 with my predecessor Georgia B. Barnhill, curator emerita of graphic arts. She paid a visit to AAS member Philip C. Beals. Beals (like his father before him) was a collector of American prints, with a special focus on sporting prints by Currier & Ives. There, in Mr. Beals’s print cabinet, lay the watercolor by Thomas Worth, tucked in among lithographs of sulky drivers and snipe hunters. Mr. Beals eventually gave over 160 prints from his collection to the Society, greatly increasing the institution’s holdings of Currier & Ives lithographs. In 2009, after Mr. Beals passed away, Gigi and I returned for a visit with his widow, Elaine W. Beals, who had called about possible future donations. We had a lovely visit, and were asked to make a list of prints from the Beals collection that the Society would like. It was my first time seeing the Worth, and I was impressed with its condition and the way it illustrated the creative steps behind the lithographic process at the end of the century. The Worth, of course, was placed on the list of sixty or so prints that we created for Mrs. Beals.
I thought no more about the watercolor until 2012, when AAS Drawn to Art fellow Melanie Hernandez arrived from the University of Washington, Seattle, to work on her dissertation project: “Currier & Ives’s ‘Darktown’ Series: Recovering White Capital through Violent Satire.” I communicated with Mrs. Beals about four Darktown lithographs in her collection and, knowing she intended to donate them anyway, asked about having them in Worcester in time for Hernandez’s month-long fellowship. She and her family graciously agreed to donate the four lithographs and, most generously, to loan the Worth watercolor to AAS for one month. This was an outstanding opportunity for one of our fellows to see a work of art that helped explain the entire process behind the prints she was studying, and so we jumped at the chance.
The lithograph based off of Worth’s watercolor.
The watercolor was loaned to AAS for four weeks. Both Melanie Hernandez and I spent a lot of time with the drawing, comparing it to the published lithograph, noting the changes that the printers had made to Worth’s original design and the changes Worth himself had made to the title and other elements of his drawing. We were given permission to photograph the watercolor and it is included in Hernandez’s dissertation. We returned the watercolor to Mrs. Beals after the fellowship was over with many thanks.
Then in the summer of 2013, one of Mrs. Beals’s daughters contacted me about coming to pick up yet another group of prints from our 2009 list. There had been a family gathering and many of the prints were distributed to children and grandchildren, but there was a small group of a dozen or so pieces for AAS. The group of material, to my great surprise and delight, included the Worth watercolor. Bringing the watercolor to Worcester took just over eight years, with multiple people on the curatorial staff and acquisitions team all working together to build a good relationship with a donor. As curators, part of our job is to explain the strengths of the Society and why AAS would make a good home for an object. Donors can then decide how they wish to distribute their collection. We are very pleased to add the Worth watercolor to our holdings and can now help future scholars bring relevance to this difficult work of art.
Peoria Daily Transcript (IL) Sept. 27, 1858. June 9, 1859.
Those who research the history of printing love mistakes. It is the little “oops” that give us clues into the methods of production. A piece of type might work loose and fall on top of the bed and get printed that way, showing us the shape of the type. When the same page is printed twice it reveals the imposition of the pages.
In the case of these two issues, one of them has the name of the town, Peoria, misspelled. Five of the six letters are out of place. That tells us the masthead was made up of individual pieces of 48-point type instead of one solid block. What it doesn’t tell us is why it is so badly misspelled or how long they were printing it this way before anyone noticed. Was the compositor illiterate and tried to put back letters that dropped out? Was someone drunk? While one question was answered by the misspelling, it also led to other questions that will remain unanswered.
