A 21st-Century Emily Dickinson Finds a Home in the Archives

 Jennifer Schuessler, "A 21st-Century Emily Dickinson Finds a Home in the Archives", New York Times, December 10, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/arts/television/emily-dickinson-archive-harvard.html

Now, a show that emerged from the archives is returning whence it came, for — as Dickinson might have put it — all Eternity.

The series, whose three-season run will come to an end on Dec. 24, is donating dozens of costumes, period furnishings and props to the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Mass., where they will be used to flesh out the sense of her daily life at the Dickinson homestead.

And in a twist, it is donating its production archive of scripts, costume and set designs, and paper props to Harvard University’s Houghton Library. Included in the haul: the show’s painstaking re-creations of Dickinson manuscripts, which will be housed alongside more than 1,000 of the Real Thing.

...

The donation to Harvard’s Houghton Library is the library’s first acquisition from a television show, according to Christine Jacobson, an assistant curator of modern books and manuscripts.

Jacobson first started following Smith on Twitter in 2018, after she got wind of the show when the production requested permission to reproduce a portrait owned by Harvard. They struck up a virtual friendship (bonding over a side passion for Russian literature), and last summer, when Smith asked if Houghton wanted materials from the show, she jumped.

 COMMENT

The show used archival materials for it's creation, and returns the fruits of that creative effort back to the library.   The library was able to aquire the materials due to a personal relationship between an astute librarian and the shows creators. 

Why beavers were parachuted into the Idaho wilderness 73 years ago

 Lucy Sherriff. "Why beavers were parachuted into the Idaho wilderness 73 years ago," National Geographic,     Sept. 16, 2021. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/why-beavers-were-parachuted-into-the-idaho-wilderness

“I’ve found it,” the voice on the other end said conspiratorially.  “You found what?” Clark asked, recognizing the voice of Michal Davidson, a collections archivist who worked in the Idaho State Archives.  “The beaver film,” she responded. It had been six years since Clark first learned of this now-infamous film which shows beavers parachuting from the sky in 1948 as part of a Fish and Game experiment to relocate them into remote wilderness.  She couldn’t wait to screen it.

…

Clark, who has worked in Fish and Game for 33 years, was determined to unearth that footage.   “It was the most fascinating story I’d ever heard.  I had to find it.”  She phoned the state archives and checked back roughly every six months to see if the film had turned up.  Finally, in 2014 she received the call.  The documentary had been mislabeled and misfiled. The old film was dry and the archivist worried it would fall apart if removed from the canister. They had to wait several more months for an expert to digitize the film before they could watch it.

COMMENT

A multi-faceted tale of superhuman librarianship-- the initial reference question led to a six year search for a missing film.  When it was finally located in the wrong place, it had decayed and was in need of digital preservation. 

 

Invasive Species

 Rebecca Mead. "Invasive Species"  New Yorker July 2021, pp. 20-24.

In the late nineteen-eighties, Finnish researchers, led by a zoologist named Pekka Niemela, gained unusual access to a rare manuscript in the collection of the Vatican Library, "De Arte Venandi cum Avibus," or "On the Art of Hunting with Birds." The book, attributed to Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, was made between 1241 and 1244. The Vatican's manuscript, which is in two volumes, was compiled by Frederick's son Manfred more than a decade later, after the original work was lost during the Battle of Parma.  The manuscript passed though the hands of several eminent noblemen and intellectuals before entering the papal collection in 1622. [p.23]

...

Thanks to the intercession of Simo Orma, an academic at the Finnish Institute in Rome, Niemela and a zoologist were granted permission to see the manuscript, under the watchful eye of the head librarian.  The scholars concluded that the four images were of the same bird, and, by examining the remains of pigment on the ancient pages, they ascertained the original creature's coloring.  They could also make an educated guess at the cockatoo's gender: female, as indicated by reddish flecks in the iris of its eye.  [24]

COMMENT

 The presence of an Australasian cockatoo in a one-of-a-kind ancient book reveals historic trade connections.  The picture was detailed enough so that researchers could determine the color of the actual bird, something that they probably could not have learned from a digital image.   Since the Vatican Library is not public, researchers needed special permission to see the book.

Ken Sleight, an inspiration for ‘The Monkey Wrench Gang,’ loses personal archive in Utah wildfire

 Zak Podmore, "Ken Sleight, an inspiration for ‘The Monkey Wrench Gang,’ loses personal archive in Utah wildfire" Salt Lake Tribune, June 16, 2021,  https://www.sltrib.com/news/2021/06/16/ken-sleight-an/

Not a scrap of paper from Sleight’s boxes survived the blaze. Metal filing cabinets melted in the heat and the roof of the steel hut warped. The lettering was peeling from road signs in the ranch named after Abbey’s work — Desert Solitaire, Seldom Seen, Abbey Road — and great swaths of trees were burned. Four homes in Pack Creek Ranch were destroyed, and five others were damaged. Six outbuildings, including Sleight’s hut, were lost, according to Utah Wildfire Info.

Sleight’s nearby home and the rental cabins scattered throughout the ranch, which he bought with his wife, Jane, in the mid-1980s, were spared from the fire. But the loss of other homes in the neighborhood and the historical material that Sleight hoped to use for a book project and to donate to a university archives is devastating.

COMMENT

 A wildfire sparked by a campfire destroyed the historical archive collected by Ken Slight, a long-time environmental activist in southern Utah.   Slight, who was working on a book, had intended to donate the material to a University archives, but instead, due to a careless camper a valuable trove of regional memory went up in smoke.   Librarians could never assemble such a collections of records, letters and photographs associated with a person who is deeply involved in his community.  The archive would have been utterly unique. 

Oh, Dewey, Where Would You Put Me?

 Jess deCourcy Hinds, "Oh, Dewey, Where Would You Put Me?" (Modern Love) New York Times, June 6, 2021, p.ST5.

I was busy starting a new library from scratch for a public school in Queens. Wondering is Stefan would support my career, I joked to him that my weekends were "booked."  He smiled and offered to help.  Our first excursion took us to a deceased professor's estate in western Massachusetts, where we spent 14 hours loading 3,000 dusty books into a fleet of U-hauls to bring to the new library. 

...

My school library grew, and I cataloged thousands of volumes in Dewey.  Melvil Dewey, creator of the  1876 classification system, was no hero, having withdrawn from the American Library Association after numerous accusations of sexual harassment. He was forced out of the New York State Library for racism and anti-Semitism. 

...

Before I moved in with Stefan, I donated books that reminded me of my exes to my school library.  I donated film books from my filmmaker and actress girlfriend of almost four years, and the nautical books from my boatbuilder boyfriend who lived in a lighthouse.  I let go of old heartbreak by setting my exes books free among thousands of other volumes in my library to circulate.  Every few years, I bump into them like old friends and reflect on how loving this man and woman prepared me to love Stefan, who knew my story from the beginning and always accepted me.  

COMMENT

This tale of Modern Love is by a bisexual woman who wonders where she fits into "queer"  after marrying a man.  She describes building and cataloging a school library based on book donations.  This used to be a common way to build libraries, but in the digital age, many libraries decided that older print books weren't worth the trouble.  This particular librarian, however, finds personal value in donations that represent memories of past lovers.  Since her home bookshelves are no longer an appropriate place to preserve such memories, she keeps the memories safe in the library.  This access to books that are part of one's past is an important function of library collections.   You never know when it might be time to revisit something you thought you'd never read again. 

South Africa wildfire burns University of Cape Town, library of African antiquities

Lesley Wroughton "South Africa wildfire burns University of Cape Town, library of African antiquities", Washington Post, April 19, 2021 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/04/18/south-africa-fire-university-cape-town/

Officials from the University of Cape Town, known as UCT, said the Jagger Library, which houses priceless African studies collections, was among the buildings that burned.

“At this stage, we can confirm the Reading Room is completely gutted and thankfully the fire detection system in place triggered the fire shutters, thereby preventing the spread of the fire to other parts of the library,” Ujala Satgoor, executive director of UCT Libraries, said in a statement.“Some of our valuable collections have been lost,” she said. “However a full assessment can only be done once the building has been declared safe and we can enter.”

The library houses printed and audiovisual materials on African studies as well as 1,300 sub-collections of unique manuscripts and personal papers, and more than 85,000 books and pamphlets on African studies including up-to-date materials and works on Africa and South Africa printed before 1925, according to the UCT website. It also contains one of the most extensive African film collections in the world, the website added.

The university’s vice chancellor, Mamokgethi Phakeng, confirmed that some parts of the African Studies Collection were destroyed.

“The library is of course our greatest loss,” she told CapeTalk radio. “Some of these cannot be replaced by insurance, and that is a sad day for us.”

COMMENT 

As with the 2018 fire at the National Museum in Brazil, the loss of library archives is a severe cultural loss.  Other buildings can be rebuilt, but once one-of-a-kind endangered information is lost, it is lost for good.  Since the African studies collection contained documentation of non-literate cultures, the loss of archives makes it that much harder for African scholars to research cultural identity. 

Mary Ellen Moylan, Acclaimed Balanchine Dancer, Is Dead at 94

 Roslyn Sulcas "Mary Ellen Moylan, Acclaimed  Balanchine Dancer, Is Dead at 94" New York Times April 14, 2021 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/arts/dance/mary-ellen-moylan-dead.html?auth=login-google 

Ms. Moylan had become “the first great Balanchine dancer." And yet her death, almost a year ago, went largely unnoticed in the dance world. Even a collection devoted to her in the archives of the University of Oklahoma School of Dance makes no mention of her death; neither do various biographical sketches of her online. Word of her death, however, began to trickle out through social media, and her daughter-in-law, Carol Bailes, recently confirmed it: Ms. Moyland died on April 28, 2020, in Redmond, Wash. She was 94. The family said she had had dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.

COMMENT

An obituary of an influential dancer is also a commentary on the importance of journalism.  When Moyland died nobody reported it.  The library archive, dependent on published sources, had no record of her death.  In an age when journalism is in danger, so is the historical record held by libraries. 

Personal Jesus

 Vinson Cunningham, "Personal Jesus: What Thomas Jeffereson did to the Gospels," New Yorker, January 4 & 11, 2021,  pp. 77-80. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/what-thomas-jefferson-could-never-understand-about-jesus

"The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth" was brought to public attention in 1895 by Cyrus Adler, an observant Jew from Arkansas, who was a librarian and a curator of religious items at the Smithsonian.  Nearly a decade earlier, as a doctoral student searching the private library of a wealthy family, Adler had happened upon a set of Bibles that Jefferson had owned, with key passages of the Gospels snipped from their pages.  Now, charged with mounting an exhibition on American religion and still mulling over that discovery, Adler finally figured out where the missing passages had gone: into Jefferson's little book, which was hidden away in the library of Carolina Ramsey Randolph, Jefferson's great-granddaughter.  Adler bought the book from Randolph for four hundred dollars and promptly put it on display in the Capitol, where in Jefferson's time, it would almost certainly have been a scandal. Now it was met mostly with affectionate enthusiasm, as another example of Jefferson's wide-ranging brilliance.  [p.80]

Comment

     A librarian/historian solves a puzzle of why Thomas Jefferson cut up his Bible and tracks down the missing pages.  This story has all the elements of librarian heroism, recognizing and saving an important historical document. The fact that he put it on display illustrates a sense of triumph which I have felt myself upon discovering hidden treasure. 
 

Across the Years the Pages Come Alive

Jennifer Schuessler, "Across the Years the Pages Come Alive," New York Times, February 19, 2021, p. C12.

Julie Carlsen, a librarian and cataloger who curated the exhibition with Lomazow, called his collection “endlessly fascinating,” if a bit daunting to sort through in search of a clear narrative line. “It’s encyclopedic, as is Stephen’s memory of it,” she said. “He has highbrow material, but also oddball one-off material. It’s wonderful to page through.”

COMMENT

The librarian helped curate a display of  first issues of magazines. 

 

 

Readers Have Many Opinions on How to Cull Your Book Collection

Stephanie Merry. "Readers Have Many Opinions on How to Cull Your Book Collection and Also Why You Never Should." Washington Post. August 2, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/readers-have-many-opinions-on-how-to-cull-your-book-collection--and-also-why-you-never-should/2020/07/31/c5a6d044-d26f-11ea-8c55-61e7fa5e82ab_story.html

It’s a dilemma all collectors of books face at one time or another,” writes commenter RBSchultz. “When I last moved, I gave away to the local library my vast collection of World War II and Vietnam War books so that others might enjoy them. After I moved, I decided that my collection of photography books was too heavy and large in volume. These went to my local Friends of the San Francisco Library where the sale proceeds supported the library. My vast collection of polar and mountaineering books will ultimately go to auction.

...

When Jacques Caillault complained that the local library had no interest in a personal library, commenter gareilly offered some helpful alternatives:
“I don’t suppose you would be willing to ship your books here, to The Friends of the Temple Public Library, in Temple Texas. When our world isn’t falling apart, we have two sales a year of donated books. The money funds a book mobile (we are saving to buy a second one), kid and adult programs in the library and special needs, such as installing a “Free Little Library” at a local elementary school. If you aren’t willing to reward us with your stash, search online for a library group closer to home. Talk to them, not the main librarian, who probably has more on their plate than we know. A volunteer group would have the members to sort your stash. Once, we got thousands of books from a chess master who passed on. That donation, properly marketed brought our group thousands of dollars, but I am sure the head librarian would have turned it down if she’d seen the specialty chess books in the collection. Our group had the resources and time to make sure those books found good homes.”

COMMENT

     Libraries that accept donations and hold book sales perform an essential public service.  People who like to read inevitably acquire too many books.  The books have to go someplace. 

    With Friends of the Library providing volunteer help, book sales can help with funding. However, many librarians, overly focused on money, have failed to grasp the public service aspect of accepting book donations.  The librarian prejudice against book sales is so strong that one such volunteer suggests avoiding the librarians all together.  

The Love Song of T.S. Eliot

Maria Cramer, "The Love Song of T.S. Eliot," New York Times, January 6, 2020, p. C3.

   As planned, his estate released the statement on Thursday, coinciding with Princeton University Library's announcement the more than 1,100 letters the poet had written to Hale were finally available for public viewing.

     Hale gave the letters to Princeton in 1956 with the instructions that they be opened 50 years after both she and Eliot had died. ([Emily] Hale died in 1969, four years after Eliot).
     The relationship between the two has long been a source of speculation among literary scholars, who have known for decades of the letters' existence.  the letters were freed in October from wooden boxes bound with copper straps and ties before a small group of Princeton professors at the university's Firestone Library.
...
     The letters in the collection, which also includes photographs, ephemera and a brief narrative in which Hale describes her relationship with Eliot, are available for viewing only at the Firestone Library and will not be published online until at least 2035 when they are no longer under copyright.

COMMENT

     These days it's astonishing to think of someone writing 1,100 letters on paper and mailing them to someone.  Hale knew the letters had value since Eliot was famous in his own time.  Scholars have been waiting for 50 years to open those boxes and start the search for hidden treasure. 

    The library made a small ceremony of the opening, and also made the New York Times.  Having famous, mysterious materials is good publicity for a library.  Nonetheless, copyright prevents digitization.  If you want to read them, you'll have to go to Princeton. 

Robert Caro's Papers Find a Home

Jennifer Schuessler, “Robert Caro’s Papers Find a Home,” New York Times, January 9, 2020, p. C1. 

     The books are already monumental.  And now Mr. Caro is getting monumental treatment himself.
     The New-York Historical Society has acquired Mr. Caro’s papers  — some 200 linear feet of material that will be open to researchers in its library.  And just a as important to the 84-year-old Mr. Caro, it will create a permanent installation int its museum galleries dedicated to showing how he got the job done.

...

     The archive will be among the largest of an individual in the historical society's collection.  It includes research notes, drafts, annotated news clippings, correspondence, and other documents, from once-classified memos excavated at the L.B.J. Presidential Library to at least one artifact literally coaxed out of a secret trunk. 

COMMENT

     The article describes an archival collection acquired by a special library.  The collection originates from a research strategy that includes library research as well as other kinds of documentation.

     The article also describes Caro’s research process as “a kind of museum of a vanishing analog world.”  As a consequence of his careful gathering, his research materials can now be used by other historians.  This kind of idiosyncratic individual collecting stands in contrast to automated approval plans the mean every library buys the same things. There’s a photo of a typewriter, and the article says he has more than one just in case he needs spare parts. 

Barbara Testa dies at 91

Katherine Q. Seelye, “Barbara Testa Dies at 91: A Discovery in Her Attic Rocked the Literary World,” (Obituaries) New York Times, January 3, 2020, p. A21.

    The story began in the 1880s with her grandfather, James Fraser Gluck, a lawyer who was also the curator of the library in Buffalo N.Y., now called the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.  He was a collector, and he aggressively solicited autographs and writings from contemporary authors, all of which he donated to the library.    Over the years, he had collected manuscripts from some of the biggest names in 19th-century letters, among hem Walt Whitman, Henry James and Louisa May Alcott.  He also had snippets from Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, Poe, Keats, Shelley and Dickens.
     Mr. Gluck established a pen-pal relationship with Samuel L. Clemens — better known as Mark Twain — and at one point asked him for the manuscript for “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” a novel that had shaken the rafters of the literary world when it was published in 1884.

COMMENT

    Long story short, Clemens sent Gluck his handwritten manuscript, but half of it was lost until Testa found it in the Attic in 1990.  She was in need of money and wanted to sell it, but the library filed suit, arguing that Clemens gave the manuscript to the library.  Still, the library paid $1 million to settle. 

    This is another collection development story in which a librarian follows a personal obsession rather than following an arbitrary standard of popularity or high circulation.  I believe that libraries should do more to deliberately support this kind of personal collecting which can produce extremely valuable and unusual collections.  One possibility would be to assign each librarian a small personal collection development fund to be spent on whatever they think would be good to have in the collection. 

Life Goes On

Thessaly La Force, "Life Goes On" (Notes on the Culture), T: The New York Time Style Magazine, August 18, 2019 p. 98-

     Unbeknownst to [Judy] Chicago, Mary Ross Taylor, one of the administrators who then ran Chicago’s feminist nonprofit, Through the Flower, which had raised funds for the work’s completion and later it’s resuscitated tour, wrote to the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art asking if it would be interested in acquiring the research material relating to the piece ["The Dinner Party"].  They declined, finding the material of no interest. Today, Chicago’s archives are stored across three libraries: the Schlesinger Library of the History of Women in America, which is part of Harvard University; the National Museum of Women in the Arts; and Penn State University.  She is also working with these institutions to build a digital portal of her complete oeuvre, which she plans to unveil later this year.

COMMENT

     It always makes a good story when a library turns down material that turns out to be historically important.

Selling Treasure Chest of Black History

Julie Bosman, "Selling Treasure Chest of Black History: The Auction of Ebony and Jet Magazines' Photo Archive Has Scholars Worried," New York Times, July 17, 2019, p. B4-5.

     "It keeps me up at night, thinking about the future of this archive," said Tiffany M. Gill, associate professor of Africana studies and history and the University of Delaware.  "You can't really tell the story of black life in the 20th century without these images from the Johnson archive.  So it's important that whatever happens in this auction, that these images are preserved and made available to scholars, art lovers and everyday folks."
      Several museums have expressed interest, and the obvious candidates are the Schomburg Center from Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library; The National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
     Another possibility that is feared by scholars: A private collector buys the archive and stashes it away. 

COMMENT

    The photo archives from Jet and Ebony document a cultural history of African Americans in the U.S., but the like many other print periodicals, these once-popular magazines are victims of the Internet.  The photographic archives are set to be auctioned to whomever can pay for them.  That is likely to be one of the world's billionaires, but it's impossible to say whether they will be friend or foe to the interests of scholars.  On the other hand, if a library or museum buys them it will open up a whole new world of images; if a private buyer gets them they may be off-limits.

      Libraries, in other words, are a kind of public space in more ways than one.  It's not just the physical space but the information space where things like these photographs can be made accessible to the public.  One frequent library story is about finding hidden treasure in dusty boxes.  These photos no doubt contain such treasure if anyone is ever allowed to go looking for it.

Vivian Perlis Dies at 91

Anthony Tommasini, "Vivian Perlis Dies at 91: Oral History Project Captured Music's Giants," New York Times, (Obituaries) July 15, 2019, p. B7

     Ms. Perlis came to run the project accidentally, after taking a job as a research librarian at the Yale School of Music in 1967.  She had become involved there with the library's extensive Charles Ives collection and one day she made a visit to New York City to pick up some additional materials donated by Julian Myrick, who had been a pattern with Ives in an insurance business.
     Thinking that he might have some recollections to share, Ms. Perlis brought along a portable tape recorder
...
     She became a harpist with the New Haven Symphony while working the library job at Yale that led to her founding the oral history project.
     For years Ms. Perlis essentially had to secure funding for the project on her own. The Yale School of Music provided office space and work-study students to assist with the endless task of transcribing interviews. But she often felt "like and orphan," she said, as she labored in her basement headquarters.
...
From the start Ms. Perlis buttressed the collection with existing recorded interviews acquired from radio stations and historians, building it into one of the most extensive oral history archives in America. 

COMMENT

     This obituary makes me happy and sad at the same time.  In the 1960's Ms. Perlis wanted to do a Ph.D in musicology but Columbia University refused to give her the flexibility to take care of her kids.  Instead she became a pink-collar academic librarian and  got to do the project of her dreams collecting oral history from famous musicians, albeit with no professional recognition and almost no institutional support. The the library gave her space in the basement with no air conditioning while PhD musicologists derided her collection as "pipsqueak stuff."  I can only imagine how much her librarian colleagues must have resented her getting to spend time on her pet project that nobody cared about.  Until somebody did care, that is. 

    This tale is all too familiar in the world of academic libraries.  Administration actively discourages librarians from "niche" work that seems out of line with organizational priorities.  Yet that often turns out to produce the most unique and most valuable collections.  In this case the librarian built a collection worthy of an obituary in the New York Times.  I will bet the the people who tried to shut her down never accomplished anything even half as notable. 

     

Once Upon a River

Diane Setterfield. Once Upon a River: A Novel. 2018.

     The character of Henry Daunt is inspired by the magnificent real-life photographer of the Thames Henry Taunt. Like my Henry, he had a houseboat kitted out as a darkroom. In the course of a lifetime he took some 53,000 photographs using the wet collodion process His work came close to being destroyed when, after his death, his house was sold and his garden workshop dismantled.  On learning that many thousands of he glass plates stored there had already been smashed or wiped clean for use as greenhouse glass, a local historian, Harry Paintin, alerted E. E. Skuse, the city librarian in Oxford. Skuse was able to stop the work and arrange real of the surviving plates for safekeeping. I note their names here out of gratitude for their swift actions. It is thanks to them that I have even able to explore the Victorian Thames visually and weave this story around Taunt’s images.  [p.461]

COMMENT

  This anecdote describes the preservation function of the library.  It's not just a “book museum,” but a multi-media museum as well. As is often the case, the librarian stepped in to rescue a valuable history collection only after part of it had already been destroyed. While librarians are sometimes criticized as "gatekeepers," it is also true that outside of bookish professions people may not recognize the value of media artifacts. 

The heroic librarian is specifically mentioned by name since the rescued photographs were the basis for a novel. Unlike Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, this novel doesn't reproduce any of the  historic images that inspired it.  The but the images are only represented in the writing. This kind of output from library materials is so much more imaginative than the carefully documented scholarly communication and undergraduate term papers we tend to associate with library research.  

   There are a number of books about Henry Taunt and his photographs.  In his day, he even wrote a river guide-- A New Map of the River Thames (1872), which inspired interest in recreational boating including what is possibly the best river-trip book ever written, Three Men in a Boat (1889).  

  

Lessons in Printing

 

Klancy Clark de Nevers, Lessons in Printing,  Scattered Leaves Press, 2018.

      She was a reader. She read all the time. The Seattle Post Intelligencer accompanied her breakfast of coffee with sugar and cream skimmed off the top of the milk bottle. The evenings Aberdeen Daily World enlivened cocktail hour. Magazines like Time, Saturday Evening Post, or Life engaged her as she sat in her chair to the right of the fireplace. Stretching out on the couch after the housework was done, she devoured novels from the library, mysteries, the latest arrival from the Book-of-the-Month Club. She often reread her favorite book, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. My sisters and I also reread it often, recognizing the heroine, Cassandra Mortmain and our mother as kindred spirits. Cassandra also was sensible, outgoing and a doer. 

...

     I wonder whether he kept a dry eye as he tried to comfort his readers: "There is no need to shed tears for a vanished institution..." and promised to preserve the Post's Morgue as a valuable historical reference.  He knew that morgue would be cared for.  The fifty-seven volumes of news and features are still accessible, in large part because of the newspaper's glossy book stock holds up and displays photographs well.  The full collection is maintained by the Aberdeen Timberland Library, on microfilm by the state of Washington, and in both forms in my guestroom closet.

COMMENT

     Here’s a recurring library theme— reading habits as a reflection of a person’s true self.[1]  In this instance, the mother’s personality is reflected in the heroine of her favorite book.  Her daughters love the book, too, in part because it reminds them of  mom. 

     Mom's reading habits are a combination of subscriptions and library books. The description is from the days when libraries didn't usually circulate periodicals.  If you wanted to read them you had to sit in the library reading room.  

  The defunct newspaper was the Gray's Harbor Post which ceased publication in 1961.  The paper recorded a history of small-town life.  The demise of the paper was related to a declining economy related to resource extraction.  Once the newspaper was gone, there was no longer anyone to tell the story.

[1]See: He Didn't Just Like Her Profile Photo. He Understood It; The Stack; Taking Notes on How Bibliophiles Flirt.

He Didn't Just Like Her Profile Photo. He Understood It.

Tammy La Gorce, "He didn't Just Like Her Profile Photo. He Understood It," New York Times, April 14, 2019, ST11.

     In posting the Tifa shot, she had unwittingly sent up a smoke signal to a kindred spirit: "I wanted to show that I was actually a real-live nerd," said Ms. Nastasi, who is the associate manager of book conservation at the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
...
    Ms Nastasi, by contrast, was not sure what she wanted her professional life to look like, but she knew it would have to satisfy her appetite for frequent and meaningful change. "I like to try new things and I like to go big," she said.  That explains her shift from AmeriCorps to her stint as an event manger for Saucy by Nature, a catering company in Brooklyn, and eventually to the Thomas J. Watson Library.  There she acts as a sort of air traffic controller for rare and damaged books, ensuring they are properly tagged an labeled after being repaired and recirculated.

COMMENT

   This librarian's OKCupid profile had a photo of her in the costume of an obscure anime character.  When a man complimented her cosplay and not the sexiness of her costume, reader, she married him.

  The  librarian's occupation is interesting enough to that the writer that it is described twice in the profile.  It is taken as representing her commitment to social justice,  her appetite for meaningful change and her cultural involvement -- in  short,  evidence of her desirability as a partner for a smart, nerdy man.

"Fandom," incidentally has been identified as a trend by the Center for the Future of Libraries.

Genevive Oswald [Obituary]

Marina Harss, "Genevivie Oswald, Innovative and Eclectic Dance Archivist, Dies at 97," New York Times, March 31, 2019, p. 25.

      In 1944, armed with a fresh undergraduate degree in music, Me. Oswald came to New York to study singing. At first she supported herself with a job selling train tickets at the old Penn Station, but before long she was working at the New York Public Library.
     Ms Oswald began by cataloging the 375 dance-related books and three dozen boxes of dance programs and clippings then held in the music division at the library's main building on 42nd Street.
     She became curator when the dance collection was formally established in 1947, presiding over a room on the library's ground floor.  In 1965 the dance collection moved into a new branch of the library at Lincoln Center.  This year it celebrates there 75th anniversary of the beginning of that tiny collection, which had grown to more than 41,000 books, 26,000 films, 2,700 prints and many other things.
.....
     Sometimes those records become a vital  link to a tradition in peril.  As the dance historian Lynn Matluck Brooks described in a 2011 essay for Dance Chronicle about Ms. Oswald, recordings made of the Classical Khmer Ballet of Cambodia at there Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1971 later became teaching tools for Cambodian dance teachers who had survived the massacres of the Khmer Rouge. The regime had attempted to obliterate all traces of Khmer culture, including dance.

COMMENT
     An obituary for a New York Public Library archivist shows how the methodical, longitudinal work of librarians and archivists can have a profound impact on community.  A small archival collection started 75 years ago has become one of the world's major dance archives through years of collecting and preservation.  It strikes me that it would be difficult to sell this kind of specialized project to contemporary library administrators who would no doubt find it too expensive, too specialized, too space-intensive and insufficiently "cutting edge" (i.e. technological). Yet I've used this collection myself to write about dance for  Catalyst magazine  in Salt Lake City, Utah.

     The deep cultural importance of the dance archive is captured in the story of how the collection facilitated cultural restoration in Cambodia after a horrific genocide.  It's hard to overstate how important it must have been for survivors to know that these dances had survived. It's an extreme instance of how library collections can serve to support community resilience by preserving a record of how things were before the disaster.

    The obituary describes the problems of preserving the ephemeral art of dance which depends on years of specialized training and disappears into the moment.  Gegi Oswald said that she was "collecting around the absence of the dance itself."[1]   Perhaps in a way, that is not so different from other library and archival collecting where the historical moment recedes into memory leaving only traces behind.

    I have long thought that libraries should give all librarians at least a little money and space to collect their own obsessions.  Who knows what one person might be seeing that everyone else has missed?

[1]See, An Effort to Save the Masterpieces of Modern Dance

 
   

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