Opera fans might hit a high note when they hear this: a collection of musical scores from the personal library of the legendary American-born Greek soprano Maria Callas is being offered in an online sale at Christie’s that ends on July 30. Chiefly dating from the 1940s and 50s, many of the scores contain annotations by Callas and dedications from composers, librettists, and admirers, according to the auction house. The scores were “apparently used by Callas for productions in which she performed," with some, like Poliuto, showing her cuts marked in blue crayon as she prepared for a 1960 performance at La Scala.

Our Bright Young Librarians series continues today with Courtney Brombosz, Research and Education Librarian at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

What is your role at your institution?

I am the Research and Education Librarian at Yale University's Cushing/Whitney Medical Library.

How did you get started in special collections?

It's hard to really say when I got started. The simple answer is I went off to Indiana University to earn my MLS. There I met Joel Silver and was introduced to a world I never knew existed, but was meant to encounter. Before even pursuing the degree, I had always been drawn to books. As a small child, my parents were thrilled to have a child that didn't mind roaming aisles and aisles of used book shops, antique malls, and thrift shops. I would grab the older books off the library shelf before grabbing the newer editions. I would inhale the smell of musty books almost ritually. It's always been a part of me.

Where did you earn your MLS/advanced degree?

I attended Indiana University Bloomington and earned my MLS with specialization in Rare Books and Manuscripts. My experience was beyond any other I have had in higher education. I seized every opportunity afforded to me. I took every rare books course that was offered at the time, including but not limited to Rare Book Curatorship, Basic and Advanced Descriptive Bibliography, and History of the Book 1450-Present.

I took on student position in every department within the Lilly Library and gained a well-rounded understanding of the profession. I will be always grateful to every supervisor who allowed me to ask questions, took extra time to teach me advanced skills, and encouraged me to keep learning. I especially loved working in the Conservation Lab with Jim Canary and Jessi Kulow. They afforded me my first student position at the Lilly and I will forever be grateful they gave me that chance.

I was able to present to a number of visiting groups through my internship in the Public Services Department. I curated an exhibition exploring the impact Shakespeare made on our global culture, and even got to be involved in the Sylvia Plath Symposium and the Grolier Club visit. It is already apparent, but my experience was above and beyond any expectations I had entering library school.

Favorite rare book / ephemera that you've handled?

This is like asking a parent to choose their favorite child. So I'll have to pick a particular day in a library to share. The most emotional experience for me was during my internship at the Folger Shakespeare Library. I clearly remember the nerves and excitement as my supervisor brought me to the vault for the first time. I first got to see the quarto room, holding nearly 200 of the earliest editions of Shakespeare. Their mere existence is a miracle, but to be in a room with so many at once was overwhelming, to say the least. From the quartos, I was casually introduced to Queen Elizabeth I's personal Bible (The Bishop's Bible,1568). With the boards wrapped in elegant red velvet and adorned in brass Tudor roses, you could only fathom the way Queen Elizabeth I poured over those pages. It took a minute before I looked up to see the wall of 82 First Folios. It is still hard to explain the overwhelming emotion that washed over me as I saw this epic display, a sight only a few fortunate librarians and library staff have seen. Each book was unique like a fingerprint, sharing individual stories leading up to their gathering in this one room. After I took a few deep breaths, we headed below ground to see the majority of the collection. From Gloucester’s sword carried by Edmund Kean to original costume designs by Percy Anderson, the collection at the Folger will always be a highlight. And to top it off, this all happened on my 23rd birthday.

What do you personally collect?

My collecting habits have changed over time. The constant collecting point is books about books. While I love the classics (Carter, A.E. Newton, and everything in between) I cannot get enough of books about book forgeries or thefts. Anything I can get my hands on is an absolute joy. I have The Map Thief, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, and The Thieves of Book Row as great pleasure reads on my shelf. I've seen just about every documentary and movie surrounding this topic. A dream would be to have one of these forgeries in my collection one day. But that's extremely difficult since these items are taken out of the collection market. But maybe one day I'll be lucky!

What do you like to do outside of work?

I love growing in my yoga practice, practicing embroidery and crochet, and exploring homeopathic medicine options -- all of which also has evolved into a book collecting area. I have a family that takes up a lot of my free time as well.

What excites you about special collections librarianship?

I love that one is constantly learning about new topics in different areas of academia, culture, history, and more. Some may argue that you find that in all librarianship, but special collections is different. One minute you may be consulting a collection of etiquette books and the next day, you're going through anatomy books. You become a well-rounded individual which has a big impact on how you view your own role in the profession. Now that my role is outside of the special collection realm, I still use a lot of the tools I learned in my special collections roles. The biggest piece of wisdom imparted on me was from my mentor Joel Silver, Director of the Lilly Library. He is the most knowledgable and giving academic I've met. He made a point to never hoard knowledge or make others feel unworthy of knowledge. Now that I'm in a medical library setting, I see medical students holding their questions in, for fear of asking the wrong question. And I always think back to Joel and his willingness to share everything he knew (and I'm pretty sure he knows everything about everything). There are many things I have to thank Joel for, but that core effort of sharing knowledge will never leave me.

Thoughts on the future of special collections librarianship?

I do wonder how this current shift to an online environment will shift the way we use technology with rare books. We all know that while two copies of the same book exist, those two copies are in no way the same. Not much that I am aware of mitigates this exploration digitally. So I am curious to learn more about how this will be addressed through technology. I also would love to see the continued dissemination of knowledge within the field. There is no point in hoarding our knowledge (re: Joel Silver) so I'd love to be a part of those conversations a bit more.

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

The Medical History Library here at Yale is incredible. I've only ever seen one other similar collection in person (The Wellcome Trust in London), but the collection here has an unfathomable breadth and depth. Melissa Grafe, the John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History, does an amazing job with her staff in utilizing the collections in a number a ways. There is a constant rotation in their art print collection in the hallways of the library. They work tirelessly digitizing materials that many researchers have found useful near and far. Personally, I am drawn to the macabre, creepy, and unusual items. The item that ticks those boxes for me in our historic collection are toxicology reports mounted in fancy wooden display boxes. They are for two different murder cases in the late 1800s in New Haven where two women were both poisoned in very similar manners. It was the first case to use toxicology as a form of evidence. I am reading a great book called Arsenic Under the Elms and it recounts the timeline and characters involved in the crimes. I'll stop there before I start diving into the countless copies of Andreas Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem in the collection. It's a dream.

Any upcoming exhibitions at your library?

I am hoping to work with the Historic Library at The Cushing/Whitney to curate an exhibition looking at the transformation of medical education. So keep an eye out!

Literary memorabilia has long been a fixation of mine, and so far, 2020 has been a banner year for the sale of objets once owned by famous writers.

Once of the most striking items in this category is Jack Kerouac’s 9” wall-mounted crucifix, which sold at an online auction on June 24 for a mere $750. Kerouac was Catholic, and, according to the auction house, the bronze cross was “said to be one of his favorite objects of devotion.” The Beat writer's Rolex went for much more, but somehow seems less personal.  

P.G. Wodehouse’s pocket watch, though, that one screams mid-century English author. It sold earlier this spring for $4,375, one of the top lots in the collection of Philadelphia collector William Toplis.

Another busy week coming up in the auction rooms:

Sotheby's sale of Music, Continental Books and Medieval Manuscripts ends on Tuesday, July 14. The 165 lots include a second issue copy of Newton's Principia (1687), which made its way to Italy shortly after publication and is estimated at £280,000–350,000. A copy of Wynken de Worde's second edition of the "Saint Albans" version of Caxton's Chronicles of England, with Higden's Description of England (1497–98), from the library at Spetchley Park, Worcestershire, is estimated at £30,000–50,000. An autograph prose draft of Richard Wagner's opera "Wieland der Schmied" could sell for £30,000–40,000. A 1579 signed Wittenberg binding with painted stamped portraits of Luther and Melanchthon is estimated at just £200–300.

Another Sotheby's sale ends on Wednesday, July 15: The Collection of a Connoisseur: History in Manuscripts, in 136 lots. Two lots share the top estimate in this one at £40,000–60,000: a 1501 scribal document signed by both Ferdinand and Isabella ordering the expulsion of Muslims from Granada, and the original 1799 royal patent by King Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies creating Lord Nelson the Duke of Bronte. An autograph album created by collector E. Lonsdale Deighton to raise money for ex-service members following WWI is estimated at £30,000–50,000: the album contains more than 520 autographs, drawings, quotations, &c. by leading figures of the early 1920s. Among several lots of Queen Victoria material is one set of fifteen letters to her friend Lily Wellesley, the wife of Victoria's chaplain.

And on Thursday, July 16, three sales to keep an eye on, including the Fine Books, Manuscripts and Works on Paper auction at Forum Auctions. The 236 lots include a copy of the 1475 Latin Cosmographia, printed by Hermann Liechtenstein at Vicenza, in a nice contemporary binding (£150,000–200,000). Also to be had are the Honeyman copy of Johann Schoener's Opera mathematica, printed at Nuremberg in 1551 (£30,000–40,000); the editio princeps of Lucian of Samosata's Dialogoi (Florence, 1496, estimated at £20,000–30,000); and a copy of Bruce Rogers' 1935 Oxford Lectern Bible (£10,000–15,000). Several lots (129–145) will be of interest to students of nineteenth-century publishing history, and there is an annotated copy of the 1680 Compleat Catalogue of all the Stitch'd Books and Single Sheets Printed since the First Discovery of the Popish Plot (Sept. 1678) to January 1679/80 (estimated at £500–700).

Ending at Christie's on Thursday is their Eureka! Scientific Breakthroughs of the 20th Century sale, in 58 lots. These include a rare M4 four-rotor Enigma Machine (£200,000–300,000); a collection of fifty original Nikola Tesla patents (£120,000–160,000); and a whole bunch of Einstein material.

Swann Galleries' Illustration Art sale rounds out Thursday's auctions. The 250 lots include N.C. Wyeth's original title page illustration for Robert Louis Stevenson's The Black Arrow ($150,000–200,000); a 2014 color drawing of Eloise with a valentine by Hilary Knight ($25,000–35,000); and a group of six pencil studies of Max and the monsters from Where the Wild Things Are done by Sendak in 1982 to be used for bean bag doll patterns ($20,000–30,000).

An early nineteenth-century board game that heads to auction in London later this month casts the religious pilgrimage in a playful light. Thought to derive from Germany, the game consists of a folding, linen-backed hand-colored engraving (the ‘board’) on which vivid scenes depict camels, deserts, mosques, and bazaars. Seventy-two numbered squares are marked by captions in German and French. Players roll the dice and move around the spaces in a spiral form, dodging wild animals, shipwrecks, and pirates until they arrive at #73, the center destination: Mecca.

The game, in its original paper-covered box, is a rarity. Sotheby’s says it has been “unable to trace another example.”

The auction estimate is £2,000-3,000 ($2,500+), conservative considering both its scarcity and the newfound appeal of board games in real life and in collecting circles. In our spring issue, columnist Ian McKay reported on the mid-nineteenth-century board game, Game of the Star-Spangled Banner, or Emigrants to the United States, which sold for $4,500 at Forum Auctions in late November. At that same auction, a game by the same maker, Edward Wallis, called New Game of Genius, or Compendium of Inventions connected with the Arts, Sciences and Manufactures was also on offer and sold for $5,000. Another example of that one turned up earlier this summer, again at Forum, selling for $7,620, as did one called the New Game of Wanderers in the Wilderness, which you’ll read more about in our next issue.

Alcott completists, take note: Though she died in 1888, Little Women author Louisa May Alcott is back with a new story. Entitled "Aunt Nellie's Diary" this incomplete novella was rediscovered among her archives at Harvard's Houghton Library by Strand Magazine editor Andrew Gulli, who published the piece in the latest issue of the magazine. 

Composed in 1849 when Alcott was a teenager, the 9,000-word story focuses on a tale as old as time: a summertime teenage love triangle, here told from the perspective of the 40-year-old title character whose niece feuds with a friend over the affections of a boy. Though the piece is incomplete and penned nearly twenty years before Little Women, Gulli maintains that Aunt Nellie seems to serve as inspiration for Jo March had she never wed.

Alcott scholar Daniel Shealy provides an introduction and context to the piece appearing in the Strand. Additionally, the magazine launched a contest challenging readers to come up with an ending to the story. Contest rules will be sent out to magazine subscribers and to those who purchased this issue. 

Published quarterly, the Strand Magazine has made a name for itself over its sixty-issue history by publishing obscure or forgotten works by major authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Mark Twain alongside interviews with some of today's bestselling authors.

Back in February the Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, opened a major new exhibition Gabriel García Márquez: The Making of a Global Writer, which had been our radar for months if not years. We knew it was something we’d want to cover and so found a local literary journalist Michael Schaub to check it out. Literally just days before his visit to tour the exhibition, the Ransom Center had to close due to the coronavirus. Instead, Schaub relied on photos, documents, and an interview with the curator to write this piece for our summer issue. We hoped the health crisis would be over by summer and the article would serve as an appetizer for anyone wanting to go see ‘Gabo’ for themselves.  

Because the Ransom Center has been so proactive about sharing material online, the story still does do that. It not only points us toward the virtual version of the exhibition, but to the deeper digital archive, particularly the scrapbooks.

And still there are more resources to mine. You can browse the Nobel Prize winner’s manuscripts or read the exhibition guide or watch this eight-minute interview with curator Álvaro Santana-Acuña, which reveals more about García Márquez and how his novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, transformed him into one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century — this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the novel in English.

Once the Ransom reopens, the physical exhibition will remain on view through January 3, 2021.

The Pratchett Project is a collaborative team of researchers from Trinity College Dublin, Senate House Library (University of London), and Liverpool University which since 2018 has been studying the life and work of writer Sir Terry Pratchett (1948-2015), author most famously of the Discworld series of humorous fantasy novels and also adjunct professor in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin.

Registration is now open for the inaugural Pratchett Project Conference 2020, originally intended to be a ‘normal’ conference but which has nimbly leapt online. Attendance at the two-day event on September 17 and 18 is free, though donations are welcome and will go towards research into Alzheimer’s Disease from which Pratchett suffered.

The scope of the research is wide – taking in neuroscience, translation studies, and cartography – and the organizers of the conference hope it will lead to the beginning of a new interdisciplinary and collaborative field of Pratchett Studies.

Split into four sections over the two days, the conference will focus on The Space of Ideas, Translation and Humour, Ethics and Identity, and Research and Teaching. Scheduled sessions include The Big Wahoonie: Ankh-Morpork as Cross-Media Urban Imaginary; Translating Pratchett into Ukrainian: Strategies and Challenges; The Move from Fantasy Parody to Moral Complexity and Literary Fiction in the Ankh Morpork-novels; and 'Lies to children': From folk to formal science in Terry Pratchett's Discworld.

More details are available in the conference booklet and signing up details are available at Eventbrite.

Pictorial or armorial, bookplates provide booksellers and book collectors with literal paper trails when trying to decode a volume’s provenance. But they can also be fascinating pieces of visual art that captivate collectors all on their own.

The vast collection headed to auction in New York on July 9 provides proof of this mania, an endearing offshoot of the “gentle madness” of book collecting. Comprising more than 750 eighteenth- and nineteenth-century engraved bookplates, ownership labels, and booksellers’ tickets organized and mounted in two volumes, the collection once belonged to Washington, D.C., collector Pickering Dodge, a “renowned 'Ex-Libris' collector and advocate,” according to Swann Galleries. Mostly American in origin, the examples present many different styles: Early Armorial, Jacobean, Chippendale, Ribbon and Wreath, Pictorial, Name Labels, etc. Engravers are often identified.

The auction house’s “brief and very much not in-depth accounting” of owners reveals some Declaration signers and Major Joseph Bloomfield, a Revolutionary War soldier and later governor of New Jersey. There’s also De Witt Clinton, John Quincy Adams, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, H.L. Mencken, and numerous other authors, statesmen, politicians, aristocrats, libraries, and societies, as well as a “very nice selection of women's plates.”

The collection is estimated to reach $2,000-3,000.

Our Bright Young Librarians series continues today with Ashley Cataldo of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts:

What is your role at your institution?

I am the Curator of Manuscripts at the American Antiquarian Society. AAS has a fantastic collection of American book trades manuscripts and New England diaries and account books, but they often get less attention than our printed collections. We often say that we want one copy of everything that was printed in what became the United States before 1877 (with some exceptions), but we also actively acquire manuscripts. So we purchase and accept through donation New England family and business papers, diaries, and United States book trades manuscripts, all generally within our pre-20th century time frame. I’m primarily responsible for seeking out and bringing those collections to AAS. Once those collections come through the doors, I process and catalog them with help from a few dedicated volunteers. I also work closely with the fellows, of whom we have about 50 each year, researchers, and class visits and present on the manuscript collections at conferences and other venues. Additionally, I serve as the institutional archivist, which means I do lots of filing and, more recently, deal with digital archives and email. And because curators wear many hats, I also handle rights and reproductions requests for the Society.

How did you get started in special collections?

As I was completing a Master’s in English from Clark University in Worcester, I visited the AAS often for class and research visits. Like a lot of visitors, I fell in love with everything about AAS--the people, the collections, the space, the scholarly community. So I had my sights on a job at AAS from the very beginning of my academic career and decided to pursue a PhD in American history at Clark to remain close to AAS. At the time I planned to write a dissertation on eighteenth-century printing history and worked closely with the Printer’s File, a catalog of biographical data on printers, publishers, bookbinders, and booksellers operating before 1820. By some stroke of luck, I was offered a job working with the newspaper collection at AAS after a couple of years into the PhD program. During my second year working at AAS, Michael Winship, who was in residence as an NEH long-term fellow, turned me onto bibliography and the materiality of the book. Over the years I’ve worked in almost every library department except conservation, so I’ve cataloged books, worked in digital expediting with some of our vendors, and spent time in both the reference and graphic arts departments. Now I’ve landed in the manuscripts department, where I’ve been for the past 5 years.

Favorite rare book / ephemera that you've handled?

I’ve always been partial to bindings, and I’ve written about late eighteenth-century American bookbindings for Cathy Baker and Julia Miller’s Suave Mechanicals series. Many years ago, I spent my summer weekends working with a binder near Cambridge, so I have some hands-on experience doing leather binding. My favorite books are probably the several copies of Charlotte Smith’s 1795 Sonnets in the AAS collections that were published by AAS founder and printer/publisher/bookseller Isaiah Thomas. When you look at the copies together, you can see the range of bindings in which Thomas offered and sold the title. Early American trade bindings are a neglected area of study, but when you have access to collections like AAS’s, you really start to understand the nature of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American trade bindings. We also have the business records and correspondence of Isaiah Thomas at AAS, so we can study the manuscripts that discuss his printing or binding of a book and then go right to the shelves to look at his personal copies in their original bindings. Sometimes I feel like I’m in Thomas’s own warehouse or bookshop.

What do you personally collect?

At AAS we are prohibited from collecting in our library’s area of specialty, which prevents staff from collecting American books and other printed materials produced before 1900. I’ve always been a reader and have a rather large collection of books, but I became interested in collecting rare books when I picked up a copy of Daniel Carson Goodman’s 1913 book Hagar Revelly. Mitchell Kennerley, his publisher, was arrested by Comstock for this supposedly obscene novel. Goodman was also involved in early film production, and that whole period of 1910s film history is really interesting to me, so I collected Goodman titles and association copies for a while. After a period of time, I became more interested in Kennerley and the Kennerley typeface by Goudy, so I started collecting some Kennerly titles and examples of Goudy’s printing. The Kennerley typeface was used in the first edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Renascence in 1917, and for some years I’ve been focusing solely on Millay, mostly editions of Renascence, and works from writers in her New York circle. My copy of the first edition, laid-paper issue of Renascence was owned by the African-American singer Muriel Rahn. I love the titular poem of Renascence, there’s an interesting history to the Harper reprints of the Kennerley editions, and there are bibliographies by Daniel Boice on Kennerly and Tom Tanselle and Karl Yost on Millay. It’s always fun to work with a good (or bad) bibliography.

What do you like to do outside of work?

Since I was a teenager I’ve played the guitar. I’m not a technically great (or even particularly good) player, but I have fun trying to learn something new about music every time I sit down to play. Now that there are so many YouTube tutorials on learning almost every song under the sun, I’ve become less interested in learning or perfecting songs. For me it ‘s about figuring out something new about the way notes interact with each other. On any given weekend you can find me sitting around for hours, listening to a song, and trying to figure out how it was made. I have a nice collection of tube amps and instruments that belonged to my father, who was a mainframe engineer. He was always building new electronic equipment to produce new sounds. I never learned anything about engineering from him, but when I sit down to play I feel like he’s there with me. I think there are lots of ways we can bring the dead to life, and playing music and working with old books and manuscripts is one way I do that. And, honestly, it’s just nice to escape from words every once in a while. I’ll also add that I really like just wasting time with my family and friends.

What excites you about special collections librarianship?

Most definitely the community. Watching a group of researchers or fellows gather around a table to look at an item, knowing that one of them will write that collection and that moment of intellectual discovery into history, is very exciting. I particularly love working with vernacular manuscripts because they tell the story of everyday life. Collecting histories of everyday life is something AAS has been committed to for years, and nothing can compare to watching those stories come to life in the reading room in vibrant discussions

Thoughts on the future of special collections librarianship?

For years we’ve been trying to figure out how to make our collections more available, visible, and accessible in the virtual realm, but the pandemic has forced us to make more progress in a few months than we might otherwise have made in a few years. I hope we continue to utilize these tools after the pandemic. We’ve also made some baby steps in making the special collections world more inclusive, but it’s still hard for a working class kid to make his or her way into special collections. I’d like to see that change. What’s gotten the American Antiquarian Society through 200 years of war, pandemics, economic depression, and unrest is the commitment to tell stories by protecting and sharing America’s history. As long as special collections librarians focus on telling the most inclusive stories from their collections in the most inclusive way possible, then I think we will survive.

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

How do you pick out one collection in a library full of unusual or interesting material? AAS has a collection of racy newspapers, the composing stick that Isaiah Thomas used to set type, a copy of the 1663 Eliot Indian Bible, the only known copy of Benjamin Franklin’s 1740 edition of Pamela (and countless other only known copies, for that matter), a copy of the first anthology of African-American poetry from 1845, and even coffee beans from the desk of Ulysses S. Grant. But at the present moment I’d like to point out the James Fenimore Cooper Collection. AAS has long collected editions of Cooper to aid with the MLA scholarly edition of the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper, and it’s one area in which we buy far outside of our geographic and chronological scope. We have German, Russian, and Italian editions from well into the twentieth century, some of Cooper’s manuscripts, the papers of James Franklin Beard (who edited the Cooper Edition before his death), and even a collection of Cooper comic books. Along with the editors of the Cooper Edition, I am helping to plan a two-day conference at AAS next year before the American Literature Association conference in Boston. We’re planning to focus the mini-conference on radical textual editing and ideas about who gets to make a book. This conference will hopefully help us to rethink and remix authorial authority when it comes to book production, in particular the scholarly edition.

Any upcoming exhibitions at your library?

AAS recently organized a traveling exhibition called Beyond Midnight: Paul Revere. Before the pandemic, the exhibition was shown at the New York Historical Society and returned to Massachusetts to be jointly presented at the Worcester Art Museum and Concord Museum. Unfortunately the pandemic cut short the exhibition’s run in Massachusetts and made its summer journey to Crystal Bridges impossible. But we’ve produced an online exhibition based on Beyond Midnight, and we’re always producing other online exhibitions and online content. And while AAS does not have an exhibition space in the building, visitors are welcome to come to Worcester for a behind the scenes tour of the stacks when we resume public tours.