Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble...

A colleague brought this item to my notice. It's part of a sammelband (a fancy German term for a bound collection of separately issued works) of seventeenth century religious pamphlets. The author's name conjures (pun intended) images of Harry Potter and the rest of J. K. Rowling's world. This collection is a real find, especially if you are interested in the formation of religious sects in the early modern period.

Lodowicke Muggleton (1609-1698) was born in England during the reign of James I (the famous English Bible which that monarch authorized was published in 1611). In the 1630s Muggleton became a zealous puritan, until puritanism became more moderate, at which point (in the late 1640s) he withdrew and declared himself an agnostic. By 1650 he was twice a widower--hard on his wives, it seems, and no wonder--he began to have "inward revelations" in 1651 and '52 (hearing voices is, and always has been, a bad sign). He and his cousin, John Reeve (1608-1658) formed a sort of cult with themselves as the prophets, which became known as the Muggletonians (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muggletonian).


They had a pamphlet war with the Quakers at the time, and the works in our volume are all related to Muggleton and his sect. They are, in order of their binding, A transcendent spiritual treatise upon several heavenly doctrines (1652), A divine looking-glass: or, the third and last testament of our Lord Jesus Christ (1661); Joyful news from heaven (1658); A true interpretation of the eleventh chapter of the Revelation of St. John (1662); A true interpretation of all the chief texts, and mysterious sayings and visions opened, of the whole book of the Revelation of St. John (1665); The neck of the Quakers broken: or, Cut in sunder by the two edged sword of the spirit which is put into my mouth (1663); A letter sent to Thomas Taylor, Quaker, in the year 1664 (1665); and finally, A true interpretation of the Witch of Endor (1669), the title-page of which is shown.

Diary of a decorated Rhode Island Civil War Veteran

One of the great benefits of having scholars actually USE your collections is that they teach you about them. It is impossible (and in most cases irresponsible) to be a specialist as a librarian. For the most part, our collections are so broad that to specialize in one area is to ignore another.

A researcher is working diligently on a history of Battery G, First regiment, Rhode Island Light Infantry Volunteers (a group of about 150 men), the only Rhode Island unit that still lacks a published history.

One of the men in the battery was Captain James A. Barber (1841-1925), of Westerly, who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor on June 16, 1866, "for gallant and meritorious conduct in action at Petersburg, Va., April 2, 1865, he being one of a number of picked artillerymen who voluntarily accompanied an infantry assaulting party and turned upon the enemy the guns captured in the assault."

The diary in our collection is a field diary (dated January 1, 1861 to December 14, 1862), written at the time Barber was serving, rather than a fair copy made later (the John Hay Library at Brown University has two fair copy diaries that Barber kept, dated 1863 & 1864). It also contains the photo shown here and his obituary from the Westerly Sun (June 26, 1925). Here is a scan of the leather cover with its little protective flap, as well as one opening, showing 2 of over 100 written pages of the diary.

"Worth a fiver someday..."

For Easter's posting (a bit early), I thought I'd mention one of the high spots of the Irish collection, which is the broadside proclamation considered as the Irish Declaration of Independence. Here is an image of ANOTHER COPY, ripped shamelessly from the website of the Irish Times (along with an article on it, see http://www.ireland.com/focus/easterrising/proclamation/):

"There is a mystery about who wrote the Proclamation. It is assumed that Patrick Pearse wrote a draft, with additions by James Connolly and other signatories, but nobody knows for certain. The opening lines with their appeal to history have the ring of Pearse about them while the later reference to the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland sounds like Connolly.
The document itself was printed in Liberty Hall the day before the Rising started. About 2,500 copies were run off on the presses that produced Connolly’s Workers Republic newspaper. Pearse read the Proclamation to a crowd of onlookers outside the GPO on Easter Monday and copies were posted up in the street or left around to be taken away by onlookers.
It is believed that about 40 copies of the original Proclamation still exist. One is on display in Leinster House, another in the National Library while the National Museum has acquired one in the past month. In recent years one was sold at auction for €390,000 [ca. $600,000].

Watching from the balcony of the Metropole Hotel as Pearse read the Proclamation outside the GPO, L.G. Redmond-Howard, a nephew of John Redmond, noted that some members of the crowd took away copies as souvenirs as “they'd be worth a fiver each some day, when the beggars were hanged”.

Stranger in a Strange Land

No, this isn't about the science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein--jet back 200 years to America as a new nation, when an Englishman visited the former colony to see what he could see. This is Charles W. Janson's The Stranger in America, first published in 1807.

Janson lived in America from 1793 to 1805, and did not like what he saw, or at least felt that the rise of Jeffersonian democracy was guided by the devil. He lived for some time in Rhode Island, where he failed in business, and traveled in the South, equally hating Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia, where he was defrauded in the Yazoo land scheme. In the Preface is a wonderful and biting critique of American self-love, still prevalent and observable today:

Americans make a point of denying every truth that in any way tends to expose a defective habit, or a national error. They bow before the shrine of adulation, fondly conceiving themselves the merited favorites of heaven; and the United States "a country where triumph the purest principles of legislation which ever adorned civil society; a country in which the human character is already elevated to a superior species of man, compared with the miserable wretches of Europe.

There are so many delicious and snarky quotes in this book, I'll just have to urge you to come in and read it. What's also fabulous about our particular copy, is that it is from the collection of William Davis Miller (1887-1959), who was a past President of the Providence Public Library (his papers are at the Rhode Island Historical Society, see http://www.rihs.org/mssinv/Mss629-12.htm). Inside this volume is a letter and an invoice from the bookseller who procured the book for Miller in 1926 (Pickering & Chatto of London, a firm still operating today).

Gallery Night!

Gallery Night Exhibition
March 15-April 15, 2008

The Providence Public Library presents a selection of works from its wonderful and eclectic collection of circulating and non-circulating books on art, architecture and design, many of which were owned by Rhode Island architect Edward Irving Nickerson (1845-1908). Born in Pawtucket, Nickerson attended public school and studied architecture in the office of Clifton A. Hall, a well-known Providence architect. Nickerson married Lyra F. Brown, the only daughter of a Providence industrialist, and thus was able to travel the world and collect fine books and furniture. In 1879 he started his own firm, mainly designing large single-family houses for wealthy families, with an occasional municipal or group commission—including a memorial chapel for the Benificent Congregational Church in Providence). His impressive collection of over 700 architectural books (mostly dating pre-1800) came to the library after his death in 1908.

The detail shown here is from Charles Locke Eastlake's (1836-1906) Hints on household taste in furniture, upholstery, and other details (Boston, 1874). Eastlake was a Plymouth-born British designer and writer, educated in Royal Academy schools and apprenticed under architect Philip Hardwick. His Hints on household taste was first published in 1868 (ours is the second American edition), and was the first and most influential British publication on household art. The work exerted great influence in the U.S. on the Aesthetic movement (a Britain-based fashion which preceded Art Nouveau). Eastlake included illustrations of wallpapers, tiles, artifacts, and furniture.

Loose lips sink ships

So I'm loving this war propaganda collection--a prime candidate for digitization, in my opinion, but we'll see. Here's a great little item issued by the War Department intended for returning soldiers, warning them to keep silent about any details related to missions or military action. The cartoons are great, and it manages to deliver the message without making the soldier feel as if he is under suspicion. This is fascinating stuff.

Scanner Snafu

So we ordered a very expensive scanner to jump-start our digitization program (what digitization program, you ask? Tune in to this blog in the future to find out...), and the vendor told us that the wondrous machine had been shipped (it comes from Germany). We wait a week or so, and then it finally arrives. "Your scanner is here!" folks tell me with excitement. It's in a cardboard box (red alert #1), and weighs about 300 pounds (red alert #2, though come to find out the thing actually DOES weigh 132 kilos, or 291 pounds). A reputable shipper has delivered it, and we signed off on the delivery.

Well, in the course of trying to shift this 300-lb gorilla off its pallet and onto a dolly, the box came apart. What was inside? 300 lbs of stainless steel screws (about 25,000 of them), all in little boxes! What the heck?!? Where is our scanner?!?
A few calls later, we learn that this has happened before--another scanner had been shipped to Montserrat and never showed up (no one knows where THAT one went). Ours, however, apparently ended up in Dubai, of all places.

Another scanner has been ordered (fortunately we do not send a check until the item is here), so we'll keep you posted as the chapters of our digitization efforts unfold. It really is NEVER dull at the public library!

Local author

Brent Nosworthy, an independent scholar who lives in Providence, has utilized an array of contemporary accounts to present on-the-ground views of what it was like to fight in the American Civil War. This, claims Nosworthy, is a departure from his former books—The Anatomy of Victory (1992), With Musket, Canon, and Sword (1996), and The Bloody Crucible of Courage (2003)—in essence a trilogy “penned to chronicle the development of infantry, cavalry, and artillery tactics during the age of the musket [1688-1865].”

This book will appeal more to the armchair tactician than the reader who seeks a “soldier’s eye view” (for that you simply go to the primary sources, or edited versions of same), though it is still a valuable work. While reading it one wants a scale model of each battlefield with miniature soldiers to move around, just to grasp the tactical and strategic significance of what Nosworthy is attempting to convey. Civil War enthusiasts and those who delight in the minutae of military history will love it. The book is technical and analytical, rather than an evocative narrative, although the excerpts from contemporary accounts do bring the reader to the battlefield.

Nosworthy’s command of the subject is obvious, though ponderous at times, but the real value of Roll Call to Destiny is in its insistence on a rigorous re-examination of what actually happened on the ground in these battles (Bull Run, Gettysburg, and Fair Oaks, among others). Nosworthy challenges traditional claims about the use of specific weapons and tactics by citing contrary evidence and statistics from a vast literature—this is what real scholarship is all about.

In reviews of his previous books, critics have accused Nosworthy of ignoring manuscript archives, but I applaud his focus on contemporary published material—which is often overlooked and frankly more relevant to what he is trying to accomplish. In my experience, academic historians have an unreasonable prejudice against published sources, as if print is somehow less inherently legitimate as evidence than manuscript material—a methodological bias which is happily not universal.

I particularly enjoyed Nosworthy’s “Conclusion,” which examines Civil War historiography from 1862 to the present, and discusses the trends in writing about the war as veterans’ and survivors’ accounts emerged, as well as those of historical committees and federal commissions. (I can’t resist a plug here—thousands of these accounts are available for anyone to read in the Caleb Fiske Harris collection on the Civil War and Slavery, in the Providence Public Library). Nosworthy concludes that “a patient researcher can come up with a new, but justified interpretation of an already well-documented event,” and his latest book is convincing evidence that this is the case.

Kunhardt revisited

A few posts ago I mentioned our first edition of Pat the Bunny (1940) by Dorothy Kunhardt. I ran across a couple of miniature libraries by the same author, issued by Simon & Schuster, in their original cardboard pictorial cases--part of the Golden Books series ("designed and produced by the Sandpiper Press and the Artists and Writers Guild, Inc."). I've scanned a few of the covers from the Tiny Animal Stories set (1948) here, including a dime to indicate the scale. We also have a set entitled Tiny Nonsense Stories (1949), both beautifully illustrated by Garth Williams.

What I'm reading (and reviewing)

Still Broken: A recruit’s inside account of intelligence failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon, by A. J. Rossmiller

Rossmiller was in college when the towers fell on 9/11. Like many Americans, he channeled his outrage and decided to serve his country in whatever capacity he could. Resisting the urge to enlist immediately, Rossmiller finished college and became an analyst for the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), a branch of the Department of Defense. Driven by a desire to serve which was not satisfied in the cubicles of the Pentagon, Rossmiller volunteered for service in Iraq.

We honestly expect bureaucratic waste and confusion in office environments like the Pentagon, but we hope that a theater of war, where lives are at stake, is run with more efficiency. Not so, reports Rossmiller, who tells of scores of innocent bystanders taken into custody, interrogated with crude methods, and imprisoned for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. “Considering that the single most vital element in fighting an insurgency is to eliminate popular support for the fighters, rounding up and incarcerating as many people as possible is exceptionally counterproductive,” says Rossmiller in a typical understatement. “Practically speaking, the United States is creating more insurgents than it is eliminating when it detains or kills innocents.”

When Rossmiller returned to the Pentagon, he and his colleagues tried to create useful analysis for the intelligence community, but their reports were routinely edited and often completely altered for political reasons—they were told that the reports were “off message” and “too pessimistic.” Rossmiller’s greatest concern is that politicization of analysis has become ingrained into the intelligence community, which is “the first line of defense in the protection of the United States.” He believes that “we are institutionalizing processes that make future failures a near inevitability.”

Still Broken is the tale of a well-intentioned citizen who came to realize that the very system he wished to serve all but prevented him from doing so. It is impossible to read this book without shaking your head in disbelief, or without feeling Rossmiller’s mounting frustration as his efforts are continually disregarded or altered to fit political agendas.

The book is written with an engaging mix of naïve idealism, self-deprecation, and a fine-tuned sense of irony—undoubtedly honed by the grinding bureaucracy of the federal government. Underlying the entire account is a simmering frustration with what seems to be a conscious and willful avoidance of success in Iraq on the part of the U.S. government. One almost suspects a conspiracy, except that a conspiracy of such sublimity is not to be credited—it is far more likely and believable (if tragic) that our decision-makers are simply short-sighted and disinclined to share information, power, or responsibility.

Hey--we've got that book!

A book caught my eye today and I said to myself, "what is THAT book doing here?" It was Pat the Bunny, which I have read to my son and daughter many times. This copy, however, is the fist edition, issued in 1940.

Dorothy Kunhardt was born in New York City in 1901, took a degree from Bryn Mawr College, had four children, and was a successful children's author, writing books like Little Ones (1935), Lucky Mrs. Ticklefeather (1935), Billie the Barber (1961), and Pudding Is Nice (1975)--which was formerly titled Junket is Nice (1933) and Rennet Dessert Is Nice (1947). According to Wikipedia (citing Publisher's Weekly), Pat the Bunny has sold over 7 million copies, making it the 6th bestselling children's book of all time.

My favorite part is "daddy's scratchy face." In modern editions it is sandpaper, but in this edition it is actually sand glued onto the page. Fabulous.

Extra-illustrated books, part II

During my first week on the job I spent some time with the reference collection (the librarian's basic toolkit), and I was thrilled to discover that we have an extra-illustrated copy of John Russell Bartlett's Bibliotheca Americana: A catalogue of books relating to North and South America in the Library of John Carter Brown of Providence, R.I. (Providence, 1865-1871). What is fabulous about our copy is that it was Bartlett's own, given to the Library by his son, John Russell Bartlett, Jr. (1843-1904), who was retired a Rear Admiral from the navy.

Bartlett senior met John Carter Brown around 1845, when the former was a bookseller in New York, and a relationship was established as dealer and collector. After his tenure in the Southwest as the Mexican Boundary Commissioner, Bartlett returned to Providence, the place of his birth, in 1853. John Carter Brown had mentioned in 1849 that he would "be glad to have your advice and suggestions regarding some part of my library," and Bartlett began working with Brown in earnest to pursue books related to the "Great Subject" (Brown's term for the expansion of Europe into the Americas).

The printed catalogues helped to legitimate the field of Americana collecting, and consequently drove prices for these items up (unfortunately for Brown). They also informed the public of the scope of the collection, thereby increasing the demand for answers to reference and research questions. The second catalogue also provided a bibliographical training ground for the sons of John Carter Brown (John Nicholas and Harold), who spent much of their time with proof sheets of the latter volumes, sending corrections and suggestions to Bartlett.

Shown here are instructions in Bartlett's hand for the insertion of illustrations, starting with a portrait of George Alsop, to accompany the catalogue entry for his famous A character of the province of Maryland (1666).

Extra-Illustrated stuff, part 1

I may have mentioned in a previous post that we have some fine extra-illustrated books sprinkled through the collection, many of them given by Mrs. Jesse H. Metcalf (the wife of a Rhode Island senator) in the 1940s. What, you ask, is an extra-illustrated book?

A century ago it was a common practice among bibliophiles to take a favorite book (a literary classic, a biography, a Bible—anything that an enthusiast would embrace), and personalize it. That is, you would find images (engravings, maps, pictures, etc.) or letters or other works on paper, mount them to standard sized sheets, and rebind them with the original work near appropriate parts of the text. An extra-illustrated edition of the Bible, for instance, might have an image of St. John at the beginning of that gospel. These are fascinating and almost entirely undocumented cultural artifacts—indeed, some librarians break them apart on principle (a real shame, though they mean well in their narrow way).

To some collectors it became a contest as to how much one could swell the original—in the Huntington Library there is a Bible that was issued in three royal octavo volumes, and was expanded to sixty elephant folios (about 30,000 extra items were used to create the set).

A lively literature opposing and championing the practice appeared in the late 1890s and ended by the late 1930s—not coincidentally the period in which bibliographic pursuits achieved the status of high (i.e. professional or scientific, not amateur) scholarship.

The book I found was a speech by the famous Boston historian Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924), entitled The Pilgrims of Plymouth, delivered in that town in 1920, on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the Mayflower’s landing (December 21, 1620). One biographer called the speech a “masterpiece of sophistication and disillusionment,” which sounds rather like the feverish debunking of national myths that academics still favor today.

Our copy, published in January 1921 in 575 copies, is beautifully rebound in blue leather, and signed by Lodge himself (he signed five hundred of them when they were issued). Among the 40 illustrations of historical figures there is a SIGNED portrait of Calvin Coolidge, dated December 1919, “to Henry Havelock Pierce” (most likely the first owner of the book). What the heck?? Unfortunately it is impossible to scan on a flatbed (it would break this very beautiful binding), so I have scanned the spine. The text, I discovered, refers to Coolidge, but not by name:

“Liberty,” said Georges Clemenceau, a great man of our own time, “liberty is the power to discipline one’s self,” and this was the spirit which inspired the Englishmen who signed the Mayflower compact. No greater principle than this could have been established, for it is the cornerstone of democracy and civilization. They knew that there could be no organized society unless laws made by the state were obeyed by all, and this mighty principle they planted definitely in the soil of their new country, where it has found its latest champion in a successor of Bradford and Winslow, the present Governor of Massachusetts [i.e., Calvin Coolidge, who was about to become the Vice President of the U.S. under Warren G. Harding].