Setting our own history straight!

The new copper domeIt’s funny (and a bit embarrassing for an organization that’s all about historical accuracy) when facts get obscured by the mists of time (and foggy memory) and then re-emerge with such clarity that one is left with only “Duh!” to say.

For some time now – through all the planning and the fundraising – we have been referring to our need to replace the original copper on the Society’s dome.  Several times, in fact, I made reference to that copper as now being more than 100 years old, the current Antiquarian Hall having been built in 1910.  But when the roofers began the replacement work this spring (they did great work – now completed), they started discovering things that surprised both them and me!

First, as they began to carefully remove the old copper they found that the flat roof areas that surround the dome were made of solid marble – huge blocks of it – although we had assumed that the marble was only a trim.  They even discovered that the “wedding cake layers” leading up to the dome were also solid marble. Okay, I said to myself, so they built things solidly back in 1910.  But when the roofers began to peel away the copper on the dome itself, we got even more puzzled.  They found that the entire surface of the dome was constructed of flat sheets of a whitish stone (marble?), each cut into the shape of an isosceles trapezoid (yay for what we learned back in geometry!), and mortared, side by side, one to another.  That seemed just totally weird.  Why would they have gone to such trouble and expense to construct the dome entirely of stone, only to then cover it up with copper?  But still I kept insisting to the roofer that the copper dated from the original 1910 construction.  I was certain.

Certainly wrong, that is.  Searching for answers, I went back to a set of my notes from the late 1990s (notes that were in a binder that was stashed not six inches from my computer monitor) in which I had traced the entire history of our buildings, back to our founding in 1812.  Sure enough, there I found reference, in my own hand, to the fact that the copper cladding was added to the dome in 1920 to correct a decade of water seepage in the original stone roof.   I even had taken note of the report of the October meeting for that year, which stated:  “Under the authority granted by the Society at the April meeting the dome of the building has been covered with copper and the interior of the dome has been repainted at a cost of $4,389.30….”  Boy, how times (and prices) have changed!

And so, with the benefit of hindsight, I started looking at the rest of evidence I had gathered over the years, right on my own computer.   Judging from the size of the shrubbery, this photograph must have been taken during one of the first winters at 185 Salisbury (notice how smooth and white the surface of the stone dome appears):

… and compare it to this next photo…. Not only has the shrubbery grown taller, but — lo and behold — the dome is no longer smooth but now has raised ribs (just like the copper roof we recently replaced).

But it was these next two pictures that were “the smoking gun” for me.  In the first one, the dome is clearly white and smooth…

… and here is a post-1920 postcard that is – without any question – derived from that very same photograph (right down to the piles of dirt in the gutter).  But look what the colorist has done: given the dome a greenish patina!  Duh!!  Copper had arrived (although apparently the guys planting the shrubs never left).

So the fact is that the old copper on the dome was only 92 years old.  May the new serve us as well as the old did.

Video: AAS’s Political Collection Explored

Check out this preview for the second segment featuring the American Antiquarian Society on C-SPAN3’s American Artifacts program. This segment is led by James David Moran, our Director of Outreach, and Philip Lampi, chief researcher on the “A New Nation Votes” project. It will showcase some of AAS’s political collections, including ballots, political cartoons and campaign newspapers. The preview below features a political print from the mid-term elections of 1862 called “Jeff. Sees the Elephant.”

The full segment will be aired this Sunday at 8 a.m., 7 p.m. and 10 p.m., Eastern Time.

You can also now view the entire first segment on C-Span’s website.

Stay tuned for more to come!

The Acquisitions Table: Pictures for Baby to Draw

Art in the Nursery.  Pictures for Baby to Draw. And Pictures for Baby to Laugh At. Boston: D. Lothrop & Co., ca. 1879.

This small oblong (5 ¼ x 7 ½ inch) book imitates in miniature the format of drawing books for older children and youth.  The chromolithographed cover depicts boys and girls together creating artwork in their own nursery studio, reflecting the late nineteenth-century attitude toward childhood as a time devoted to wholesome play and learning through artistic creativity.

Purchased from Judith Richards.  Linda & Julian Lapides Fund.

Video: AAS President Shares Collections

The American Artifacts program on C-Span 3 will air a 30-minute television program on the American Antiquarian Society this weekend. The program is a virtual tour of Antiquarian Hall showcasing some of the Society’s treasures with our president, Ellen Dunlap. A short segment featuring the Eliot Indian Bible can be seen here.

The full program will air this Sunday at 8:00 a.m., 7:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. It will also air again on Monday at 11:30 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. and Tuesday at 3:30 a.m.  All times are Eastern Time.

Additional programs featuring AAS will appear in the coming months. Stay tuned!

The Card Catalog – In Memoriam

Card catalog as it was in the reading room

This is the type of post which started out as an “In Memoriam.” Something lighthearted which included lines about the deceased card catalog’s birth in the 1970s, it being a ‘descendent of generations of particleboard furniture’ and that it ‘leaves behind grieving relations such as the filing cabinet, map drawer, etc.’ But the more I thought about the current standing of the card catalog, the clearer it became that it was not “In Memory” but “In Honor.”  The card catalog is not dead – it is archived. A large portion of it is still among the living. So the tone started to change. But then things took another turn.

The American Antiquarian Society’s Facebook page posted a pretty provocative photograph this weekend. I felt the same way many viewers did when they first saw it. My jaw dropped. My heart hurt. And while it doesn’t tell the whole story, the response was strong. And anxious. Perhaps because it depicts the Antiquarian Society in the active process of disposing – incompatible bedfellows to say the least.

Emptied card catalog frame

I’ll be the first to state that card catalogs, at first, seem a crashing bore. Until you post a picture of it in a pile. In it, parts of the former card catalog from the AAS reading room were seen out of their context in the Great Outdoors. At first glance, it’s intense – but if you look closely you will see what’s missing: most of the card drawers and all of the cards.

Perhaps a bit of backstory. This September was the targeted date for the removal of most of the card catalogs from the AAS Reading Room. After all, cards have not been filed in the general catalog since 1995; but we had to keep most of its contents, as some cards date to the 1880s. The decision was one which has been on-the-table/off-the-table for over a decade – with bicentennial activities coming up for this October, the time seemed right to make A Move.

The catalogs still actively used (maps, sheet music, printers’ file and checklist drawers) are still in the reading room. The lion’s share was retained and moved on carts by staffers to the ground level – accessible yes, but in the stacks which are closed to readers. Contained here are the Imprints and first editions, the old general catalog and the newspaper catalog, and representative samples from the other catalogs.  The remaining catalogs (and their furniture) were offered up as souvenirs and then recycled. In an email to the staff, the Marcus A.

Card catalog in new basement location

McCorison Librarian and Curator of Manuscripts Tom Knoles noted that the catalog has been:

a daily presence for as long as we’ve worked here… the card catalogs tell the history of AAS collections and cataloging over a period of more than a century. It will be a venerable and worthy part of the AAS archives.

In a fascinating article published last September, “Serving Higher Education’s Highest Goals: Assessment of the Academic Library as Place” authors Heather Lea Jackson and Trudi Bellardo Hahn consider the library space as one which has components (stacks, card catalogs, furniture, arrangement, etc.) which stimulate a desire for researchers to feel connected to a higher, abstract if you will, mission.[1] Beginning with Mircea Eliade’s classic The Sacred and the Profane, the authors consider how we experience “space, time, nature and life in religious and nonreligious ways.” (428). They further highlight that the library-as-space has been held in frequent conversation seeing that “the field faces a potential crisis related to technological progress and mass digitization” (430). This is, by no means, new. Former AAS Fellow Thomas Augst noted this connection in his essay “Faith in Reading: Public Libraries, Liberalism, and the Civil Religion”[2] but the resurfacing of this argument and the disposal of items continuously held in reverence is one underscored by our response to its absence and removal. The card catalog was a necessary component of nonreligious space which kindled an emotional response.

Part of what seems to have happened (and continues to happen) is a mourning for the card catalog – items which served as the nucleus for access to the materials. They have moved from a public space to an archival space. And that sudden change is visible. Most ‘archive’ items are enveloped in a weaning period – where items ended up sitting on dusty shelves, attics, basements, etc. prior to becoming fodder for the archive. In short, the card catalog was another way of serendipitously shelf-browsing in a place with closed stacks. And now that opportunity and form of access is gone. And so we remember it for what it was – in a place and in a time. Arrested. Which is not unlike all other items already archived which have become preserved, reformatted, recollected, assembled and integrated. So we’ve come full circle. Perhaps this piece is, as originally intended, an “In Memorium” for a staple of the Reading Room space which has made the Great Move On.

[1] College & Research Libraries. September 2011, Vol. 72 Issue 5, pages 428-442.

[2] In Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States, eds. Thomas Augst and Kenneth Carpenter (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007).

The Acquisitions Table: Iu Pitabun

Mortimer, Favell Lee.  Iu Pitabun.  Boston: American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1844. 

This is an extremely rare Chippewa language translation of Favell Lee Mortimer’s adaptation of Bible stories.  It was formerly owned by renowned Americana collector George Brinley (1817-1875), whose collection was sold off in a series of auctions after his death.  This copy will be joining nearly 300 Brinley titles that AAS acquired at the auctions with money provided by Brinley’s will.  From Swann Auction House via Joseph Felcone.

The Acquisitions Table: Southern Rights

Southern Rights (Jacksonville, FL).  Oct. 4, 1862.

When Brigadier General J.M. Brannan took over Jacksonville, FL, his troops found standing type in the newspaper office and pied it.  Later some of them took a proof sheet of the Oct. 4, 1862 copy and added an extra paragraph at the end and printed up some copies “for the purpose of showing to our friends at the North, the ‘Talent, Vigor, Heroism and Military Ardor’ that is not displayed in this Trophy of Jacksonville.”  AAS has an original copy of this issue and is apparently the only institution with both original and Union-occupied reprinted issues.

The Acquisitions Table: A Cheap Primer for the Blind

A Cheap Primer for the Blind.  Louisville, Ky.: American Printing House for the Blind, 1874.

This primer is printed in large oblong format with raised-letter type known as Boston line.  AAS has some thirty titles printed in Boston line; about half of which were actually published for the blind, as opposed to providing samples of the raised text for the seeing public, making this primer quite a find.

The Acquisitions Table: No License

No license. A question to be settled in the State of New York. New York: Journal of the American Temperance Union, 1846. On linen.

This textile broadside was issued as an extra to the Journal of the American Temperance Union during the 1846 elections in New York State.  That year, every one of the 800+ towns in the state (excepting New York City) was required to vote on whether they would require local merchants to have licenses to sell hard liquor.  If the “No License” laws passed in a town, then local officials would not be permitted to issue permissions for the sale of alcohol.  This broadside falls solidly on the “No License” side of the question and reprints several poems, lists of statistics, and stories all with a strong pro-temperance message.

The Acquisitions Table: The Other Side

The Other Side (Bloomington, IL).  Apr. 14, 1868.  Vol. 1, no. 4.

This is a campaign newspaper printed in broadside format.  It was a Republican paper edited by C.F. Merriman, a long-time newspaper editor of this town.  Though stating it was to be published daily, output was irregular, and it claimed a circulation of 2,000.  The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library is the only other institution that has any copies of this title.

A View at the Bicentennial

Back in the 1950s, the AAS used to exhibit its items in places with traffic – (skeptical? Check out this 1952 photograph taken by Ted Woolner showing the front window of the Industrial City Bank and Banking Co. in Worcester with our Graphic Arts items) – but then the Internet was born and we learned more about how to use the web as a site of display.

Indeed, during this 200th year of the American Antiquarian Society, we will celebrate the people, buildings and collections of AAS through various exhibition projects (including one at the Grolier Club in New York this fall). Part of marking this occasion has also included the recent publication of The American Antiquarian Society, 1812-2012: A Bicentennial History by Philip F. Gura [see blog post here]. To supplement this text, the Society decided to make available – in color and high-resolution – the images and captions from the book via an online resource.

 This website, titled The American Antiquarian Society, 1812-2012: A View at the Bicentennial, highlights these interior illustrations.  They illustrate the places (the homes and spaces) – people (leaders and support staff) – collections (rare treasures and unknown items) – access (cataloging and digitizing) – and scholarship (publications and outreach) which have been protected, finessed and cultivated here for centuries.

Here you will find the more than 100 images included in the bicentennial history. The images are first divided by chapter and figure numbers, but then are further separated into sub-categories by the Society’s leaders, buildings, collections, programs and modes of access.  A timeline, made using a selection of these images, has also been produced. In part, this site was created as a companion to the book (if you wanted to interact with some of the more difficult-to-read-items like Thomas Jefferson’s letter of acceptance, for instance) but it can also serve as a tool and alternate mode of access to a place populated with a unique legacy and richly constructed resources. The online space serves an appropriate one to showcase many of these images since like the Internet, they are linked and connected in more ways than one.

The Acquisitions Table: The History of Pamela or Virtue Rewarded

Richardson, Samuel.  The History of Pamela or Virtue Rewarded.  New York: N.C. Nafis, 1835.

This tale of a young woman’s rise from servant to a charitable and understanding wife of a wealthy man was a bestseller in the long eighteenth century. The frontispiece is a metal engraving of Pamela embracing her husband’s daughter from a previous relationship–pretty hot stuff for the early nineteenth century!  Nehemiah C. Nafis issued popular literature including fairy tales and songsters in the 1830s.

When Ansel Adams came to town

Without a doubt, many amazing people arrive daily on the doorstep of Antiquarian Hall. They bring research early in its infancy, artistic projects, personal histories, obligations of library pilgrimage – all in need of the AAS touch. In 1813, Isaiah Thomas made clear the intent for the doors and collection be open to all who had reason to use it: “the historian with his best materials…and to the philosopher a faithful source of ingenious speculation” (p. 8 An account of the American Antiquarian Society, 1813).

Edgar Allan Poe daguerreotype in AAS collections

And Philip F. Gura in his Bicentennial History of the Society discusses some of the nineteenth-century notables who made their way to AAS in Worcester, including Henry David Thoreau and the infamous James Audubon tale (if you don’t know the story, be sure to pick up our bicentennial history).

Indeed, the Society is open to all uses. Even if you are doing a favor for a friend who is writing a book on the history of dags and your friend is unhappy with the one he took – even if it’s of a well-known AAS treasure, the 1848 Edgar Allan Poe Daguerreotype by S.W. Hartshorn.  And even if your friend’s name is Ansel Adams.

Black and white copy negative in AAS collections

In the 1950s when Curator and later Director of the George Eastman House, Beaumont Newhall (1908-1993), was researching his The Daguerreotype in America (1961), he wrote to then AAS President and Director Clarence S. Brigham:

…back in 1947 I copied a number of daguerreotypes in your collection for use in my book AMERICAN DAGUERREOTYPES…  I am now happy to write that I am getting the pictures ready for publication at last.  One of the daguerreotypes which I especially wish to features is your magnificent portrait of Poe.  Unfortunately the photograph which I took of it is not at all good.  My friend Ansel Adams has most kindly offered to take another photograph of the daguerreotype…  I am writing to ask if you would have the kindness to allow him to make this copy.  He will get in touch with you directly to make an appointment.  He will bring his own equipment and will only need a well-lighted area in which to make the copy.  I will shortly send you a list of the other daguerreotypes in your collection which I should like to include in the book…

[AAS Archives 1950-1959 Correspondence “N” November 16, 1958]

Now I can candidly disclose that the work of helping to secure permissions, rights and reproductions isn’t always very glamorous (albeit the choices and resulting projects are compelling). The allure of things like copy stands, strobe lighting and negatives of archival items kind of gets lost in the work of the day-to-day. So reading something this exciting is enough to send you bouncing to the signed reader registers (I know, we’re a lively bunch). And there noted on November 21, 1958 is Ansel Adams 131 24th Avenue San Francisco in to photograph the Poe Daguerreotype.

Admittedly, signature gawking isn’t really our specialty (we’re kind of surrounded by manuscripts), but what these moments mean beyond the page makes them more noteworthy. They are kind of like nuggets of archiveness where different professions come together – artist, librarian, historian – around an object and capture that piece of history to share it with others. These little surprises show this intricate overlay where literally one archive is on top of another – through efforts of interpretation, preservation and creativity. It really gives something as already special as the Poe daguerreotype a life beyond the walls of Antiquarian Hall.