The Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS) conference opens tomorrow in Washington, D.C. This annual event provides library professionals the opportunity to connect with book dealers, book artists, and art book publishers in the Exhibits Hall on May 3-4. The theme this year is "Art + Politics."

minksky-1.jpgFB&C columnist and book artist Richard Minsky will be exhibiting The Bill of Rights, a set of ten bookworks, one for each of the amendments to the Constitution. (Seen here at left is his Amendment I, a reliquary for the ashes of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. You can read more about it here.) Minsky told me that The Bill of Rights has never been shown in Washington, D.C., and he added, "With all that's going on, it's more relevant now than ever."

Minsky will be sharing his exhibit space with fellow artist Warren Lehrer, whose new book, A Life in Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley, is featured in our current issue.

Our Bright Young Librarians series continues today with Sara Sterkenburg, Cataloging and Exhibition Services Librarian at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

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How did you get started in rare books?

 

Early into college I grew enamored with how histories have been expressed visually in different cultures and times. By that I do mean art and architecture, but also the design of newspapers and typefaces, fashion, film, political symbols, and how the technology and politics of the time drove these processes. I knew I wanted to work with art or special collections right away. But it wasn't until I spent a summer during graduate school digitally archiving and cataloging a newspaper and ephemera collection at the Museo Nacional de Arte in La Paz, Bolivia that I knew I more specifically I wanted to describe them. That role was the most challenging one I've ever had, made increasingly difficult by a cataloging language barrier, technology gap, and short timeline. But in the end, the access to these materials was immediately and measurably heightened. After that experience I took on a lot of similar opportunities with unique collections, particularly those that involved working with metadata or taxonomy development. I enjoy every moment of it!

 

Where did you earn your advanced degree?


I hold a Master of Science in Information (MSI) degree from the University of Michigan's School of Information.

 

What is your role at your institution?


My official title at Vanderbilt University is Cataloging and Exhibition Services Librarian. The position itself is actually split 50/50 between two distinct types of work, but I wear a lot of hats - most of them involve wrangling metadata in some capacity. On one side I am the cataloger for our non-archival materials in the Special Collections Library. This typically means rare, fine press books, and artists' books. But it can also mean video, audio, music, ephemera, objects, or maps.

 

The other side of my job involves working with an amazing team on exhibit design in our libraries. My main responsibility is to handle metadata creation and input for our program. I work with our curators pretty directly, explaining the schema we use for our program (VRA Core 4.0) building documentation around that, and helping them to identify as much information as we can about each artifact using terminology and fields allowed by the schema. We are fortunate to have not only physical exhibition space, but also online exhibits and some very cool interactive touchscreen monitors in our libraries. These enable us to offer high-resolution images and more expansive metadata to supplement the physical cases and make the exhibit as a whole more interactive and impactful for our campus and community.

 

On your website you mention an interest in "systems, access, and high-fidelity metadata." Could you tell us more about this and how it relates to cataloging rare books?

 

When I work with rare books I think, deeply, about what someone would be looking for in that object, and I describe it and record it with that in mind. There is a huge responsibility in assigning metadata - but especially so with rare items: we may be the only institution who has it, and I may be the only person who ever describes it, so it's important that it's done right. I work very hard at that every day. But beyond cataloging, the system that houses a record must be equally robust and flexible, and its design must make sense to the people using it. Making sure, for example, transliterated titles display correctly in a catalog system and the library website isn't always easy. Access problems like this happen long before a user touches a book or downloads a journal article. I care about these things because I realize the path to access and scholarship isn't always straightforward. In the digital age, we have to be aware of every facet of the discovery process in order to do justice to the small parts of it that fall in our lap.

 

Favorite rare book / ephemera that you've handled?


That's a hard question. Can I cite one type of thing rather than a single book? Perhaps because I love modern and post-modern art, I'm interested in books that beg the question: "is this even a book?" Dealing with describing resources that aren't sure what they are is a wholly separate issue, but I love it when people push conceptual boundaries with their craft.


What do you personally collect?


I'm afraid to say I'm more of a dabbler or sampler than devoted collector. I have an interest in weird book ephemera that I'm starting to hone more and more - maybe I'll turn that into a Tumblr someday. But like many of my peers who have been interviewed for this series, I pretty much prefer to keep the collecting at my institution and not at home, where the materials represent far more interesting people!

 

What excites you about rare book librarianship?


As someone who works with creating and refining metadata for a living, I am of course interested in semantics and providing greater access to rare materials. But, in coming from an information science graduate program rather than a traditional library science curriculum, I was raised as a librarian in coursework grounded by design, data analysis, user experience studies, and digital preservation. So, I truly value having a technology tool-belt. And I think that with all types of librarianship that's a growing necessity. For rare books, there's a constant battle between these materials that are so fragile and innately historical, and the rapidly increasing user demand for digital access in new, increasingly innovative and flexible ways. User demand, luckily, often drives funding, so there is opportunity for grants and support on digital projects for primary resources. It's an exciting time to be a young rare books librarian. New skills are continually required to keep up with this remarkably intelligent field, so  I definitely keep one foot in the print universe and one in the digital, and I very much love living in that intersect.

 

Thoughts on the future of special collections / rare book librarianship?

 

The future is very bright! It shouldn't be a surprise that growth in the management of rare books and special collections is becoming more and more digitally focused. I am seeing fascinating projects coming out of so many different institutions. As the digital humanities expand, we are seeing desire for the re-use and repurposing of data, as well as the creation and extraction of new types of data from our collections. I think we will especially see collaboration with international bodies to digitize rare materials that haven't previously been accessible across borders.

 

I am particularly interested in seeing where the future takes us with new schema and more robust metadata for rare collections, because I think that will really be the foundation that paves the way for our institutions to continue exploring data curation and big data concepts. I see future projects requiring new types of information professionals in our institutions who are equipped with data mining and programming knowledge and can work with developers to use frameworks like Hadoop to query our metadata and extract new knowledge from our rare materials. This will undoubtedly translate to more interdisciplinary data comparisons, and working with people who used to operate in different silos, but now value cross-pollination from other fields and industries.

 

Any unusual or interesting collection at your library you'd like to draw our attention to? 


Yes! Vanderbilt University is home to the Television News Archives, which is the most extensive collection of television news in the world! For books, we have an impressive and growing collection of artists' books - including a large amount of Claire Van Vliet and Barry Moser's works, all of which have beautiful craftsmanship. In our archives I would point to the James M. Lawson, Jr. Papers, which cover the Civil Rights Movement, include James Earl Ray correspondences, and document much of Reverend Lawson's activities: including fighting for gay rights, prisoners' rights, and for basic equality for more than sixty years.

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Christies Torah.jpgOn Wednesday of this week, Christie's Paris hopes to surpass the $1-million mark for the newly discovered, complete, and large copy of a rare Hebrew Torah, printed in Italy in 1482. It is thought to be the first printed edition of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, in Hebrew. It is the first Hebrew book with printed vowels and cantillation signs, and the auction house refers to the incunable as "arguably the most important book in the history of Hebrew printing and publishing."

Including this example, only 28 copies of the vellum edition are known (some incomplete), plus an additional 11 on paper (mostly incomplete), making it, as our friend at Booktryst points out, "rarer than copies of the Gutenberg Bible."

The auction estimate is $1.4-2 million.

Image Courtesy of Christie's.
7758868.jpgRare bookseller Stuart Bennett delivers yet another delightfully bookish novel with Lord Moira's Echo, a follow-up, if not exactly a sequel, to his 2012 novel, A Perfect Visit. That novel, as some of you will recall, told the tale of an American librarian and a Canadian graduate student who became involved in a time-travel experiment. The student, Vanessa Horwood, traveled to Jane Austen's England, only to become trapped there when she is erroneously jailed for forgery.

All is not lost for Horwood because she does become friendly with Austen, but at the end of A Perfect Visit she is indeed stranded in 1817. Lord Moira's Echo (Longbourn Press, 14.95) opens in 1823. Vanessa has made a new life in Bath, and apart from a few references to her possible "rescue," Bennett's second novel has a more defined historical narrative. He takes up Austen's "lost" years, 1801-1804, for which primary sources cease to exist. It has long been rumored that Austen fell in love during these years, and Bennett uses historical evidence (and imagination) to pin her to Francis Rawdon-Hastings, second Earl of Moira and later Marquess of Hastings.

Two tales intertwine in Lord Moira's Echo--that of Jane's 1801-1802 affair with the earl, and of Vanessa's discovery of it in 1823. Austen family intrigues, the Prince Regent's insatiable greed, and a kidnapping all do their part to further the plot. Bennett's ease with dialogue and his ability to convey historical events--without beating us over the head with it--are commendable.

Yes, there is a plethora of fiction out there featuring Jane Austen--and, no doubt, more to come--but "Janeites" will find shelf space for the best of them, including both of Bennett's novels. 
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Two years ago, I blogged about the start of World Book Night, now an annual tradition on Shakespeare's Birthday (aka April 23 or "yesterday") wherein volunteer book givers around the world offer free books to other people. It's become a spectacular success.  Check out this zip code map of the location of American book givers for the 2014 rendition:

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The entire country was blanketed with book givers.

So here's how this works: a panel of librarians and booksellers get together each year and decide on 30-35 titles across a variety of reading levels and interests to issue for free for World Book Night.  The authors waive their royalties and the publishers arrange for specially printed editions.  Then folks apply to become "book givers," filling out applications that are evaluated based on their potential to reach "light and non-readers."  Successful applicants pick up 20 copies of their selected book at a community book drop (typically the local public library or bookshop). Then World Book Night rolls around and the book givers flood the streets evangelizing their books.

Now I'm curious if any of our readers participated in last night's event.  If so, please share your experiences in the comment section below.  If you were a book giver, let us know if it was fun, it people were receptive to your gift, and what the experience was like.  If you were a book receiver, tell us about getting your free book.

And on the collecting front, I'm curious about these "specially printed editions" produced by publishers. That seems like a potentially interesting book collection to me.  Is anyone putting together a World Book Night book collection?
 

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Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
                                                            Hamlet
(2.2 199-200)


The Folio Society has been preparing for William Shakespeare's 450th birthday since 2006, when the renowned British fine books publishing house embarked on an ambitious project to print every tragedy, comedy and history in a large format, limited edition collection. The entire canon, including poems and sonnets, is now complete and color-coded by genre in individually numbered volumes. Zerkal deckle press paper, Moroccan leather binding and typeset in letterpress on hand-marbled paper, these books are a sumptuous tactile experience.


The series is a feast for the eyes as well; Shakespeare's words stand alone, elegant and unobstructed by small margins and notes because the texts and commentaries are now in separate volumes. This affords readers the  delight of reading Shakespeare unencumbered by visual clutter.


Each page meets the Folio Society's rigorous standards for quality and craftsmanship. These gems are also attractively priced at $545 per volume. Such beauty is fleeting - only three hundred copies of each volume exist.  What better way to celebrate the Bard's birthday than by enjoying his work in such a wonderful manner. 

 

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Celebrations are underway all over the world this year for the centenary of Dylan Thomas' birth. But one of the most unusual - and most intriguing celebrations will occur in the Welsh town of Laugharne. Thomas lived there for the final four years of his life, calling it "the strangest town in Wales." Laugharne, and its residents, were the direct inspirations for Thomas's last great masterpiece, the play "Under Milk Wood." Described as Thomas's attempt at a Welsh Ulysses, the play features an omniscient narrator who describes in minute and poetic detail the lives, dreams, and thoughts of the inhabitants of Llareggub ("bugger all" backwards), a small coastal village in Wales.

To celebrate the centenary of their most famous export, the residents of Laugharne are banding together with the Welsh National Theatre to produce an immersive theatrical adaptation of "Under Milk Wood." Entitled "Raw Material: Llareggub Revisited," the live theatre event invites audience members on a stroll through Laugharne where they will encounter characters in the play acting out their roles in situ. The free-rolling adaptation will be as much about the residents of Laugharne as it will be about the actors performing the parts.

National Theatre Wales describes the play as such:

On foot, we will explore hidden and transformed spaces as we find Thomas's characters re-imagined on screen by some of Wales's most extraordinary and well-loved performers. As we go on our trail through the town, local townsfolk introduce us to the actions, habits and secrets that make today's Laugharne as curious and unique a place as it was when Thomas called it home.

The play takes place between May 3rd and 5th, however tickets are already sold out.  BBC Wales will also be on hand to record the entire performance for broadcast on May 5th.

[Image of Dylan Thomas' boathouse from Wikipedia]
Two New York rare booksellers claim to have purchased--on Ebay, no less--an annotated dictionary that belonged to William Shakespeare. George Koppelman and Daniel Wechsler, both members of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America, the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, and the Grolier Club, have astounded the book world today with what might be the literary find of the century, or millennium.  

The book, John Baret's An Alvearie or Quadruple Dictionarie, was published in London in 1580. Koppelman and Wechsler bought in for $4,050 on Ebay in 2008, thus beginning an incredible journey. Though the dictionary is unsigned, it holds thousands of annotations in a sixteenth-century hand, including what the booksellers believe are subtle clues to Shakespeare's writing process. It is, as the booksellers write, "A most obscure book. A humble copy. An extensive network of annotations that, through obscurity and a lack of attention, comes to light only now, never previously studied or speculated upon. These are the basic stepping-stones to providing plausibility to the dream that such a monumental discovery is possible. The rest is in the evidence."

bookpush copy.jpgThat evidence is presented in an illustrated account of their acquisition and subsequent research, titled Shakespeare's Beehive: An Annotated Elizabethan Dictionary Comes to Light. At Shakespeare's Beehive online, copies of the limited edition hardcover are $75 (seen here at left), and an e-book version is available for $15.

Rare bookseller Henry Wessells, who received an early copy of the study, posted a review on his blog, commenting, "The ordinariness of the individual annotations is, to me, precisely what argues for their authenticity: they form not a rough draft of any single text, but a tool kit."

It has been reported that the Folger Shakespeare Library will release an official statement regarding the news later today. (Update: the Folger's response, "Buzz or honey" was posted here.)

Some are already speculating on the seven-figure sale of the discovered dictionary.   

All this comes just in time for Shakespeare's 450th birthday on Wednesday.

Image via Shakespeare's Beehive.

Appointment in Samarra

Appointment in Samarra (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For all the remembered writers of the 20th century, John O'Hara may not be among them.  He was, however, commercial, and in his own words, he said, "I'm not some hairy philosopher. I'm just an ordinary guy who happens to write well."
    O'Hara was one of the 20th century's best-selling authors. His biographer, Matthew J. Bruccoli, claimed O'Hara published more words than any other writer in the century. The public loved O'Hara, and he wrote for them. Critics were less kind.
     Still, O'Hara knew what he was about. "The United States in this century is what I know," he said. "I want to record the way people talked and thought and felt, and do it with complete honesty and variety."
     The Schuylkill County (PA) Historical Society, the birthplace of O'Hara, is now trying to keep O'Hara's memory alive. The Society got an early start on preserving the history of the area, having incorporated in 1903, but only last month decided to build an O'Hara collection. Their collection began simply enough with the recent donation of two letters written by O'Hara, one dated in 1954 and the other dated in 1961, and they serve as a cornerstone for other artifacts to come from the author's life.
     Upon publication of O'Hara's first book, Appointment in Samarra, the New York Herald Tribune wrote that, "The genuine value of Appointment in Samarra is the author's grasp of his dubious hero's character." Hemingway praised the book highly and Edmund Wilson wrote that the book was "a memorable picture of both a provincial snob, a disorganized drinking-man of the twenties, and of the complexities of the social organism in which he flourished and perished."
     Last year, Penguin Classics re-issued Appointment in Samarra, and other O'Hara books have followed.  The author is finally receiving a bit of his critical due, particularly for his later works, which remain some of best portraits of the 20th century.

Our Bright Young Librarians series continues today with Sarah Burke Cahalan, Special Projects and Reference Librarian at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC.

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How did you get started in rare books?

My first library job was an apprenticeship in the Weissman Preservation Center when I was an undergraduate at Harvard.  I cleaned awful adhesives off of colonial currency--yes, I was a money launderer--and I made clamshell boxes for daguerreotypes.  At the same time, I worked in an independent bookstore, which is where I started to learn about reference services.  After college (thanks to a grant), I had a vagabond year in which I read poetry and rode trains in Europe and Asia.  I spent time with beekeepers in Malta, Tunisia, Italy, and Slovenia.  The amazing thing is that my interest in apiculture is relevant to my current work with rare garden books, which often have coverage of beekeeping and other types of animal husbandry.  My MA in medieval art focused on the making of art objects; it was supervised by a codicologist at the Courtauld Institute, where I also worked part-time in the archives.  By the time I arrived at Simmons for my MLIS I knew to search out people who could teach me about special collections and rare books librarianship.  I finished the degree in 2010--not an amazing time for library jobs!  So I was very happy to find my way to Dumbarton Oaks.

Please introduce us to Dumbarton Oaks and your role there:

Dumbarton Oaks is a Washington, DC-based research institute of Harvard University.  We support research in Byzantine, Garden & Landscape, and Pre-Columbian Studies.  Dumbarton Oaks offers fellowships throughout the year as well as short-term research stipends and internships.  We also have several hundred authorized Readers who routinely visit the Library.  The institute includes Gardens, a Museum, Archival Collections, and a Publications department.  I divide my time between the Research Library and the Rare Book Collection.  The Rare Book Collection supports scholarship in all three subject areas, but it is strongest in Garden & Landscape because of the collecting interests of Mildred Barnes Bliss, one of the founders of Dumbarton Oaks.

My title, Special Projects & Reference Librarian, encompasses the range of my duties.  I do day-to-day reference work and answer complex questions about rare book holdings.  I try to maintain a social media presence for the Rare Book Collection.  I supervise the Rare Book Reading Room four afternoons a week and handle many of the image orders we receive there.  I developed our online exhibit template and the content type for describing rare books (using a MARC-Dublin Core crosswalk).  I hosted a "miracle fruit" party a couple of years back.  I co-organized a symposium in October 2013 titled "The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century," and am currently working on the symposium volume with my co-editors.  I've supervised two interns and look forward to working with more interns in the future.  One of the really fun parts of my job is working with the Museum's gift shop to develop products that use images from the collection.  "Special projects" can mean any number of things!

Favorite rare book / ephemera that you've handled?

I get really excited about manuscript copies of printed works.  The amount of labor that goes into this sort of project is astounding.  One example I've returned to several times is a late eighteenth-century manuscript copy of Paolo Boccone's 1697 Museo di piante rare, with added Linnaean names and morphological details.  Items that complicate my ideas of what is unique and what is a reproduction always catch my interest.  For example, Dumbarton Oaks holds several albums prepared by workshops of artists in Penang, Malacca, and Singapore for Europeans stationed abroad; the illustrations in these albums were copied and assembled for purchase, meaning that similar paintings are extant in multiple horticultural libraries today.
 
What do you personally collect?

I prefer to keep my responsibility for cultural heritage materials at work, where there's proper HVAC, emergency preparation, etc.  If I acquire anything these days it is all of the kids' books I loved when I was growing up.  But they quickly get applesauce on them.  My house is not a safe place for books and it won't be for at least a decade, when my children are less inclined to chew on things that should not be chewed upon.  I do have a beautiful wooden card catalog which is mostly used for seed packets, shells, and other little objects.

What excites you about rare book librarianship?

I love that almost everything I have ever found interesting is relevant to my job.  I worked part-time at the Harvard Botany Libraries while I was attending Simmons.  I remember the day I realized how important my knowledge of Latin was going to be in helping a scholar who was researching the earliest documentation of specific plants.  It was thrilling!  I had been developing obscure skill sets and interests for years, and here was a profession in which they could actually be useful.  Even my guilty pleasures--I have subscribed to Vogue for years, and I love British publications like Tatler--end up being useful when I know the name of a particular country estate or a particular detail about the history of costume.  On a good day, I get to share discoveries from the collection with people in our community and beyond.  Rare book librarianship is really the best job in the world.

Thoughts on the future of special collections / rare book librarianship?

I am interested in the combination of our assets with other datasets.  No matter one's opinion on MOOCs, our digital facsimiles can gain new traction and new audiences as learning moves online.  Interoperability of digital collections (such as that facilitated by IIIF and linked open data) will make it possible to compare disparate collections in the same platform.  The potential uses of GIS for understanding intellectual history are extraordinary.  Of course these big projects require collaboration across departments and institutions, not to mention time and money.

The boundaries among rare book librarianship, visual resources, and the sciences are blurring.  So many of the questions I handle are along the lines of "Can you help me find an image of _____?"--whether it's an archaeological site or a period map or a particular plant.  There are fantastic print resources and databases for some of these queries (natural history in particular), but others are lacking.  Much of it comes down to knowing the collections and knowing the personality of specific library catalogs.  But it's also important to keep up with developing tools and metadata standards in fields other than our own.  I just learned about Audubon Core, a descriptive metadata standard for biodiversity resources, and I've been working with natural history materials for years.

Any unusual or interesting collection at your library you'd like to draw our attention to?

Yes!--in collaboration with Jason W. Dean at the University of Arkansas I am working on S. Fred Prince, an illustrator of natural history who worked primarily in the Ozarks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Much of his work is based on specimens he collected and observed in the field.  He produced work on ferns, wildflowers, caves, and butterflies.  The manuscript materials are now held in a number of collections around the United States.  Some are at Dumbarton Oaks, including a manuscript on ferns that also includes maps and pressed specimens.  We hope to gain more exposure for his work.  We've just started putting materials on Tumblr and I'm sure I'll be Tweeting developments @stampedinblind.

Any upcoming exhibitions at your library?

We have two exhibit spaces and four of us share curatorial responsibilities, so we always have new exhibits going up.  Since some of the exhibit space isn't routinely accessible to the general public, we've been trying to curate at least one online exhibit a year.  My colleague and I are planning an exhibit on Hagia Sophia for next winter.  Several departments at Dumbarton Oaks (notably the Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives) have important documents and objects relating to this site, many of which have been or are in the process of being digitized, so in addition to an on-site exhibit we are developing an online portal as a reference tool.  This is the sort of project that will be of use to a broad spectrum of visitors, since Hagia Sophia is the best-known work of Byzantine architecture.