2008-2009 Research Library Awards (The Rellas)

I spent the 2008-2009 academic year reading and taking notes in many research libraries throughout the nation, and came to appreciate all of their various delights, horrors, and quirks. The awards below were determined after much musing about my own experiences, and in consultation with other scholars (whose anonymity, like the Phantom Gourmet, will be protected).

Best Parking

Virginia Historical Society (Richmond, Va.)

Because the VHS is also a public museum, its parking lot is large, tree-shaded, and most importantly, free. Most research libraries are in city centers or dense suburbs with copious parking restrictions and insanely expensive parking garages (ahem—Cambridge—ahem) and therefore require long commutes via public transportation or lots of cash on hand. VHS and other institutions in outlying areas may require a drive, but at least they don’t make you pay for it.

Best Reading Room with a View

Boston Athenaeum (Boston, Mass.)

The ten reading nooks (supplied with tables, lamps, chairs, and outlets) on the 5th floor boast views of either the Massachusetts State House or the Granary Burying Ground. If you need a break and it’s spring or summer, you can saunter out onto the balcony, which is sublimely vertiginous and home to a family of red-tailed hawks. Get there early, though; by 10:00 a.m., the 5th floor nooks will be snapped up by local writers, Suffolk law students, and the Beacon Hill intelligentsia.

Best Pencils

Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston, Mass.)

Never underestimate the importance of a sharp pencil at a research library. I’m not sure who is in charge of pencil provisioning at the MHS, but whoever it is deserves a raise. Always sharpened, with fresh erasers, these pencils are also all miraculously the same length. With long and complicated call slips to fill out for each request, the excellence of these pencils becomes even more delightful.

Most Comfortable Desks and Chairs

Maine Historical Society (Portland, Me.)

The MHS renovated its reading room this year and this process included rigorous research into the optimal height of desks and chairs for laptop use. The chairs are padded and their low backs allow for vigorous arm-stretching exercises when one starts to cramp up. The desks are lower than is typical, rendering the whole desk-chair complex pleasingly ergonomic. Doing daily research in this reading room will leave you feeling pretty good, rather than stiff, sore, and needing a chiropractor.

Coldest Reading Room

Center for the History of Medicine, Countway Library, Harvard Medical School (Boston, Mass.)

As befitting a school with frigid lockers for cadaver storage, Harvard Medical School’s special collections reading room is kept at a chilly 60 degrees. I had to wear my scarf over my chin and nose during much of my time there, and wished fervently for a pair of fingerless gloves. You know it’s bad when leaving the library and stepping out into the Boston winter air seems if not pleasant, then at least familiar.

Best Library Staff

American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, Mass.)

The curators and librarians at the AAS achieve that elusive trifecta of cheerfulness, helpfulness, and interest in your research subject. Staff members will ooh and aah over sources you have found with genuine enthusiasm, and pull books or graphics that they think might interest you, even after you leave. I still receive emails from AAS staff members, forwarding references and images that they have discovered in the stacks. Is it any wonder that former fellows and researchers continually rave about their time there?

Daniel Spiegelman Award for Most Stringent Security Measures

Houghton Library, Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass.)

There are two layers of security before you even enter the reading room at Houghton: they check you in. They check you out. They buzz you in. They buzz you out. All loose-leaf papers are stamped, and your laptop is inspected before you leave for the day. You could try to steal something, but rest assured you would be trapped inside one room or the other before you could make a run for it.

Daniel Spiegelman Award for Shockingly Lax Security Measures

South Caroliniana Library (Columbia, S.C.)

For a library with such fabulous resources, the South Caroliniana is remarkably unconcerned about keeping any of them in the reading room. There are no lockers; you bring your bags right in and nestle them in the chair next to you or at your feet. No one checks you in. No one inspects your bags or files on the way out. About the only thing that would frustrate a would-be thief is the reading room door, which was installed in the early nineteenth century; its narrowness requires a sideways sidle that would make bolting difficult.

Best Lunchtime Ritual

The Huntington Library (Pasadena, Calif.)

At 11:30 a.m., the staff members at the Huntington ring a bell, and at the sound, researchers rise from their tables, turn in their materials, and leave. Instead of furtively eating a handful of peanuts in the locker room, researchers actually take a lunch break, breathe some fresh air, and converse with other people until 1:00 p.m. With your library privileges comes the ability to wander the spectacular Huntington gardens at will, and you can eat lunch in various designated areas within the grounds. It may be Pavlovian, but it is a civilized tradition that ensures that you won’t pass out from hunger or dehydration at the end of your research day.

Pinching Pages

Some books have really been around. An article in today's Washington Post profiles the well-traveled volume one of W.F.P. Napier's four-volume set, History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France (1842). The book’s earliest history is not known, but in June 1864, it was quietly sitting in the shelves of the Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) Library. But then, on a warm summer day the book became part of the national traffic in wartime souvenirs when Pennsylvania soldier Charles S. Gates, participating in General David Hunter’s Lynchburg raid, came along and stole it. Gates, thinking the library belonged to the Virginia Military Institute (a school that still remembers and proudly resents its burning at the hands of Hunter’s men), stole the book and wrote a note in it, erroneously identifying the text as the property of VMI and subsequently, war booty.

That Gates stole this book is not all that surprising. Wartime book theft was actually quite common. During all four years of the Civil War (but especially during the large-scale raiding campaigns of 1864-1865), Union soldiers stole all kinds of things from southern homes: books, clothes, candlesticks, silver plate, sewing needles, watercolor paintings, musical instruments, private letters. Most of these objects were not useful to soldiers on the move; they stole for emotional pleasure rather than for monetary gain. Most importantly, looting was an act of vengeance; Union soldiers stole southerners’ property as punishment for secession. It also probably gave Gates a thrill of satisfaction that he stole a book on military strategy from what he thought was a southern military academy.

Stealing was also about class status. Many northern soldiers were literate but working class; the massive libraries of southern planters and their universities were symbolic of their elite status. Class resentment provoked some soldiers to destroy books in addition to household objects like pianos and massive mirrors, objects that represented the wealth and taste of the southern upper class. Gates may have lugged this book around for a while in his knapsack but he probably sent it home to his family as soon as was practicable. At this point, it ceased to be a symbol of southern class status or identity and became a tangible reminder of the significant events of the war for Gates, and evidence of his participation in them. Hence his inscription in the book—he writes his own wartime experiences into its history.

That volume one of the History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France found its way back home the Washington and Lee Library is also not surprising. In the years after Reconstruction, book returns were part of the reunion effort that submerged narratives of emancipation and sectional division into a post-war afterglow of brotherhood. Many southern libraries have collections of these texts, all of them with inscriptions similar to Gates’ and all of them valued not for their content but for their context. 

Handwriting Games and Indian Converts

At SEA, Laura Leibman told me about some great resources she's been involved with developing on the Reed College website. Here is a picture of a fun game you will find on the Early American Handwriting website.


Then check out the Indian Converts Collection, a great website with "information about life on Martha's Vineyard for both Wampanoags and white settlers." The online archive contains more than 600 images and documents that contextualize Experience Maynew's 1727 Indian Converts, or Some account of the lives and dying speeches of a considerable number of Christianized Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, in New-England (new edition edited by our Ms. Leibman, UMass Amherst 2008). Beautiful work, Laura!

from original to print...and back again

While compiling the Drawings Inventory for the AAS website I came up with this vivid Romantic (capital R) image in my head of nineteenth-century artists flocking to the great outdoors to draw from nature and of the AAS amassing this collection of amateur art spawned either from the sublime or from the creator’s imagination. I was so transfixed by this thought that the sheer idea of to-be-artists copying from prints never entered my mind – until I found attached to the back of an 1850s drawing by Mary A. Ladd Wilcox a note saying the drawing was “probably copied from an engraving.”

Needless to say, I set out to find this “alleged” engraving. For sure, Mary Ladd had parked herself down, sketch pad in hand, in front of Mount Vernon and created her art, right? Especially since it was so large? And so real? I (smugly) couldn’t find anything until I looked in an uncatalogued folder of Mount Vernon views and found an engraving by Archibald Dick – all thoughts of Wilcox traveling from Sharon, Vermont to our first President’s abode to be a Romantic-artist quickly diminished.

The Dick engraving was published for the Christian Family Annual out of New York; this got me thinking about not just copying from prints, those large published pieces which were framed and displayed, right? But of something smaller – the book illustration and even more “minor” – the periodical illustration. Following this new obsession I looked to a popular female periodical to find clues. Godey’s Lady’s Book of September 1831 states that yes, “in prints, which are taken from paintings, there is always a degree of strength given to the engraving” and that the artist, to produce such a drawing, is to make “an imitation, not a copy; – an exercise of the same process” suggesting how regular a practice this one. The drawing is definitely not one limited by national boundaries (though of an American-nation subject) – the “original” painting was created by a British artist and the final item we have was an “original” chalk drawing by a rural New Englander. Furthermore, Wilcox’s art continues to be part of this circular print culture where you can’t tell where one source ends and another begins.

My-self-made linear system between subject and artist (Wilcox sitting and looking at Mt. Vernon) that I had created in my head suddenly disappeared – it seems more likely that the painting was created of Washington’s home and tomb (by W.H. Brooke of England) followed by a British engraving by W.H. Capone, followed by an American engraving by Archibald Dick which was then circulated in a periodical(s) by the Christian Family Annual which was then picked up by Wilcox and drawn with variants of size and details (in accordance with conditions produced by periodical literature and/or drawings manuals?).

After the Wilcox piece, I wanted to find more of these examples of distribution and I am eager to figure out a way to document this successfully. Right now I have this odd kind of page (and I welcome suggestions on how to make it "work") where I try to trace the genealogy of certain drawings – but they don’t fit into a neat flow chart of material – making it all the more hybrid-ish and I think (yes...) cool.

The Scope of the Artifact

I'm just back from the fabulous Society of Early Americanists conference in Bermuda. Here is a completely gratuitous photo (thanks, Jeremy!) of I site that I didn't even see and that has absolutely nothing to do with this posting.

So, one day when I wasn't wandering the beach (sadly, I never did get to the beach) I had the pleasure of hearing a paper delivered by Jonathan Senchyne who is currently completing his dissertation at Cornell University. Senchyne presented on rag content in early modern paper and the textual evidences of that material reality in the poetry of Anne Bradstreet. (Take another look at "Author to Her Book," and you will begin to see that presence!) During his presentation, Senchyne offered us the startling image of a page from the Library of Congress copy of Tenth Muse with a piece of unprocessed rag still clearly visible in the paper. One of the great pleasures of doing book history scholarship in the archive is that there are still such revelations to be granted by the artifact. As Senchyne presents it, the rag in the page at the Library of Congress is beautiful emblem not only of the dependence of the paper industry upon domestic sphere but also a reminder that Bradstreet was – like other early modern readers and writers – savvy about the international, material contexts of print production.

The image of this book put me in mind of another artifact. The American Antiquarian Society owns a 1678 Boston imprint of Bradstreet’s poems, and the covers of this volume are stiffened with printer’s waste paper. Clearly visible within the stretched leather edges of the inside cover are the discarded pages of what appears to be an Algonquian language catechism. Here we see Bradstreet’s poems, originally printed in England, now reprinted in New England with posthumous additions, all bound up in the materiality of European-Indian encounter and the rising local print economy. To me, this volume has always served as a material emblem of the early history of New England printing.

Hearing Senchyne’s account of the rags in the page, I was reminded that there are many such material emblems out there to tantalize our historical imagination. I began to think more about the role of the artifact in book history approaches to literary scholarship. Specifically, how do we deal with the serendipity and idiosyncrasy of the material archive? How broadly can we make claims based on individual cases? How do we put two disparate emblems – rags in a book and a book bound in an Indian language catechism, for example – into dialogue with each other? How do we theorize the meaning of what is extant and, more problematically, what is no longer extant?

Just some thoughts in my post-Bermudian, post-SEA glow. Chime in if you wish.

O Brave New World!

I ran across this photo recenty. I took it in the summer of 2007 when I was spending 3 weeks of intensive archive time in Boston. On my laptop is an image of a wonderful, crumbling, 17th-c New England notebook full of original devotional poetry. The laptop is in the gorgeous reading room in the old building of the Boston Public Library. (It's a summer evening, mind you, and a lovely breeze and street noise are drifting through the great windows.) I had taken shot after shot of the notebook at the New England Historical and Genealogical Society earlier in the week, the patient, be-gloved manuscripts librarian taking lots of time with me and eventually getting involved in puzzling out the handwriting herself. (The poetry notebook is an extraordinary demonstration of the poet in action. The writer drafts poems on the left-hand side and puts a relatively fair copy on the right.)

I don't have much to say about it. It's just irresistible to gaze at the layers and the contrasting technologies (pen and ink to blog composing software). I also really had a wonderful time that summer, running from archive to archive for three weeks and figuring out new directions for my book project. Nothing wrong with nostalgia. Or a cool photo to spruce up the blog.

A Little About My Project

This week I began my long-term fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society, and yesterday I gave the following short talk to the staff. I don't intend necessarily to post regularly on my sermon project (though I'm sure it will pop up), but this short description gives a good overview, especially of the manuscript aspects of my project. Friends and family still ask for an explanation of "that book you're writing." So here you are...

Dan Shea once referred to early American literature as “notoriously sermon ridden.” I think this characterization is absolutely true, especially in the seventeenth century. In fact, I’ve long taken this characterization as a kind of challenge. My initial question was what caused the incredible popular demand for sermons in seventeenth century New England. Famously, the Massachusetts Bay Colony had to restrict the number of sermons that could be preached on a weekly basis, and one historian of religion has estimated that the average person would have spend 15,000 hours in his or her lifetime listening to sermons.

And yet I also see the scholarship suffering from what I call the “pathologizing” instinct. The question “what drove popular demand for preaching?” quickly becomes “what was wrong with people that they wanted to hear so many sermons?” Or something to that effect.

The problem is that sermons are a literature of disproportion. These are people who distinguished themselves by saying that faith alone is enough for salvation. So why did they spend to much time in the pulpit and pew? Why did they spend months explicating a single verse of scripture? They also thought of the Bible as a perfect book – in a sense the only book that really counted. So why did they make so many more in their own imperfect human language? (I’ve long since relished a New England sermon, part of a larger “sermon cycle,” which fully explicates the word “thus.” Recently, at the Folger Library, I ws delighted to discover a sermon which begins with a close explication of the punctuation of the scripture verse.)

In my work I try to understand the relationship of the individual hearer, reader or writer to sermons through what we might call a grass roots approach. In other words, instead of simply picking apart the fine points of theology or analyzing the weird logical and rhetorical terms the ministers employed – what we might call the intellectual history of the sermon – I look into the prefaces of sermons, to strange metaphors that describe the act of hearing sermons, to letters and to autobiographical writings in which both the ministers and the lay people talk about their personal, idiosyncratic relationships with sermons. How did the hearing of sermons effect their daily lives, and how did their life experiences affect how they wrote and heard and represented sermons?

I begin the book with an discussion not of the print sermon but the notes taken by those listening to the spoken sermon. This is not to reconstruct an exact account of what content was being preached. To some extent I want to know what sermons sounded like, but even more I want to know what each individual heard. My work with sermon notebooks so far has shown that auditors heard in many different ways. One auditor might try to write down every single word the minister says, while the next records only date, place, scripture verse and doctrine. One auditor might carefully recorded every major point, recreating what might have been very close the minister’s own sermon notes, while another would record only the most beautiful and striking phrases, regardless of where they fit in the argument. Clearly the way the individual heard the sermon affected the way in which he or she recorded it, but conversely an individual’s recording style affected how he or she heard the sermon.

Part of my interest in sermon notes extends to the physical aspects of the book itself. Most books are small, leather bound volumes, but some are larger (such as one here at AAS a big vellum bound book more the size of a family Bible) or quite a bit smaller and handmade (such as one at the Houghton Library, just a handful of oblong sheets stitched together at the top with thick twine.) How notetakers organize the material in their books is also illuminating. Some might keep provide indexes for themselves. Or separate out sermons preached by their main minister from those preached by visiting clergy. Or include extraneous material, such as letter drafts and accounting records. The relationship of “part one” and “part two” of books is also illuminating. John Dane of Ipswich recorded sermons in one direction in his book and flipped it over, writing in the opposite direction to record his own spiritual narrative and original poetry, a provocative demonstration of how the studious transcription of seemingly formulaic sermons intertwines with original articulations of subjective, spiritual experience.

Ownership marks are important, too, not only for evidence of who took notes and when and where, but for evidence of what notetakers thought they were doing when they recorded what they heard the minister say. That small notebook of a handful of pages bound on one end by thick twine, for example, has pen testing throughout – “Michael Metcalfe his book,” “Michael Metcalfe, his book.” These kinds of ownership marks are typical, of course, but this notetaker also writes prominently “this is the second volume of this kind I have made.” Through investigation of notetaking practices and organizing principles, it becomes clear that the writers thought of themselves as creating books, and that these books were very material texts created both by the words received from the minister and by the efforts of the auditor who recorded them.

There are examples of sermon notes being recopied for preservation and circulation as well. One volume at the Massachusetts Historical Society is marked on the outside only by its makers name and the date of creation – “John Templestone, his book February 14, 1687.” In the center of this hand made booklet is a manuscript copy of a printed execution sermon by Joshua Moodey. On the pages folded around that center sermon are a copy of notes taken at a sermon by John Cotton, Jr. The Cotton notes literally envelope the Moodey sermon, and both texts are bound up by Templestone’s assertion of ownership and creation, confounding our sense of separable roles of author and book maker, owner, creator and reader.

My interest in the circulation of sermon notes and manuscript copies of sermons extends beyond my intuition that the production of texts in seventeenth-century New England is a distinctly communal effort. The emotional meaning of plain style preaching is also at stake in these handmade, idiosyncratic material texts. Today we look at the outline of a sermon – its bare statements of doctrine, numbered branching systems or reasons, questions, answers and applications – as intellectualized formulae. Like instructions on Puritan shampoo bottle for the soul: open scripture, explicate, apply, repeat. But the effort it took to keep notes, to recopy them, and to circulate them suggests that even the structure of a sermon itself held deep spiritual and personal meaning. We think that sermon notes were discussed within families. We know that memories of sermons long since preached play a pivotal role in conversion experience, affecting the listener or reader years after the original encounter. Auditor notes famously provide the raw material for formal sermon publication, both authorized and unauthorized printings, but handmade volumes also seem to be part of a gift economy. In 1605 in England, Henry Borlas apologizes to his mother for any imperfections his copy of notes he took while listening to ten sermons at Oxford, explaining that he was also producing a volume for his grandmother at the same time. In 1660 in New England, Nathaniel Foster similarly apologizes: “Dear Brother there may Be some Errors & Blunders in the Transcribing of this But I trust you will Be able to Correct’em & Excuse’em for it has been a tedious piece of work to me to pick it out.” Nor is the print sermon the end of the story. Readers continue to annotate their books, and authors continue to mark up print version with corrections and additions.

In “Letter and Spirit” I suggest that there is not a hierarchy of the sermon from the words of the minister to the ears and hearts of the laity. Not a straight line progression from oral performance to printed texts. Rather, the world of sermon literature that I am uncovering is more like an ecosystem in which oral, aural, manuscript and print texts each effect the production of the other. It is a world where clergy and laity alike continue to instruct and learn form each other in larger project of producing sermon literature. These practices of reading and writing sermons influence all genres of Puritan writing of the period, from sermons to autobiography to history to poetry. Ultimately, seventeenth-century New England may be even more “sermon ridden” than we once realized.