Lost Letters by Mary, Queen of Scots

 

Euan Ward, "Lost Letters by Mary, Queen of Scots, Uncovered by Amateur Code Breakers,"  New York Times, Feb. 8, 2023.  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/world/europe/mary-queen-of-scots-letters.html

Deep in the archives of France’s national library, an assortment of coded letters listed as Italian texts lay untouched for more than 400 years. But when three code breakers — a German pianist, an Israeli computer scientist and a Japanese physicist — stumbled upon them, they discovered something remarkable.

They were, they found, not Italian texts at all.

Instead, they were part of the secret prison correspondence of Mary, Queen of Scots, whose tragic life and tangled role in the lethal dynastic and religious politics of 16th-century Europe have long fascinated writers and historians. One leading biographer of Mary described the discovery as the most significant in the study of her life for more than a century.

“We found treasure lying in plain sight,” said George Lasry, the Israeli computer scientist who led the yearlong project, which was released to the public on Wednesday, the 436th anniversary of Mary’s death.

COMMENT
A classic tale of finding hidden treasure, with the twist that a library cataloging error made the letters invisible. 

 

Democracy's Data

 Dan Bouk. Democracy's Data the Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them.  Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.

I had read about this conference and seen it mentioned in many places as I began studying the 1940 Census.  In the context of later controversies, particularly over a question about income, this conference was frequently invoked to justify the census's decisions, to show that they had been made by expert, responsible men.  Yet for the first couple of years of my research, I found no detailed records from the conference.  I dug through file after file, box after box in the National Archives, to no avail.  I did not think I would ever discover what actually happened in that room.  Then, in what would be my final trip to that archives, in the summer of 2019, I was working my way through Director Austin's papers, and there it was, the summary minutes of the meeting, one that (although it was not a complete transcript) would allow me to reconstruct, more or less, how the Question Men built the data's frame.   pp. 33-39

One day in the National Archives, I stumbled upon  a silence in Price's paper itself.  Working through a box of bureau records, I found a folder titled "Negro Enumeration of 1920" containing a typed reply to a scholar who had, in 1922, made a reasoned case for a significant undercount of African Americans.  This surprised me.  I had never heard of serious scientific estimates of such undercounting before Price, and Price's paper hadn't said anything about Black researchers who had previously uncovered this.  Price's paper hadn't prepared me for Kelly Miller. 131

 

COMMENT

Imagine the astonishment and joy at finding the missing document after years of searching!  One thing that stands out in this story is, the meeting was well known, and known to be important.  It just wasn't well documented. 

The second story illustrates the way that information errors propagate through time.  Price's paper is frequently cited as the first research about undercounting Black people in the census.  It turned out that Miller, a Black mathematician, had already detected Census undercounts and explored the underlying causes, but since Price hadn't cited Miller's research that scholarship had been neglected. 

The Disinformation Machine

 Nancy McLean. The Disinformation Machine. Orion Magazine, 2022.  https://orionmagazine.org/article/koch-network-climate-change-misinformation

In 2013, James Buchanan died at the age of 93, and I was able to gain access to his unprocessed archive at George Mason University (GMU), his last institutional home. In his records going back to the 1940s, I found my developing understanding of all this confirmed—in a way that had me again and again reminding myself to breathe. Just one example: in his private office, I found a pile of documents stacked on a chair that exposed how Charles Koch and some of his most trusted operatives—GMU economics faculty, the dean of the law school, the president and provost, and a politically appointed Board of Visitors presided over by Ed Meese III, Ronald Reagan’s long-time ally—had collaborated to establish a basecamp for a political project at a public university, just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C.

COMMENT

Uncataloged archival material provide evidence for how billionaires and right wing politicians created a political disinformation machine.  This well-funded torrent of science denial has become a serious problem for librarians.  It's alarming to realize just how much political power and money are stacked against our information literacy lectures. 

 

Lots of People Want to Check Out this Library

 Kate Dwyer. "Lots of People Want to Check Out this Library", New York Times,  January 16, 2022, p. ST3. 

After Dr. Mackesy's death, a SWAT-team-like group of librarians and conseravtionists spent three weeks combing through his book-filled, 7,400-squre-foot house to select 35,000 volumes to add to the university's libraries. 

Surprise discoveries included an 18th century Rousseau text with charred covers (found in the kitchen), a "pristine" copy of a rare 1950s exphibition catalog showing Wassily Kandinsky's paintings, posters from the May 1968 protests when stuents in Paris occupies the Sorbonne, a hand-drawn Christmas card from the filmmaker John Waters and the orginial recordings of the thorists at that 1966 structuralism conference. 

"For years, everyone had said, 'There's got to be recordings of those lectures,'" said Liz Mengel, associate director of collections and acadmic serivices for the Sheridan Libraries at John Hopinks.  "Well, we finally foudnd the recordings of those lectures.  They were hidden in a cabinet behind a bookshelf behind a couch."  Several first editions by 20th-century poets and novelists sat on a shelf in the laundry room. 

After the librarians from Hopkins and nearby Loyola Notre Dame were finished selecting their donations, the remaining books were carted away by a dealer, so Dr. Macksey's son could prepare the house to be sold. 

COMMENT

When a professor who was known to be a book collector died, libraries got first crack at his collection which turned out to be a dragon's hoarde of hidden treasure.  It was especially generous of the heirs to let the librarians pick what they wanted since they could have just gone straight to the book dealers.  It was also perceptive of the librarians to take the offer since some librarians seem to think that it's not worth their time to accept and paruse the collections of retired or deceased faculty.   

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. 

 

The Radical Feminism of a 17th-Century Priest

 Judith Shulevitz,  "The Radical Feminism of a 17th-Century Priest,"  September 2021, Atlantic pp. 94-101.

I stumbled upon Poulain at the Barnard library in 2016.  I was reading up on feminists of the past because I felt stifled by the feminism of the present, particularly the kind just then embodied by Hilary Clinton, whose presidential campaign leaned hard on the notion that she would shatter the glass ceiling -- never mind that most American women were just trying to get by.  I wasn't struggling to get by, but I wasn't soaring either. 
...

Fully forgotten by the 19th century, Poulain took a long time to resurface.  In 1902, a young French graduate student named Henri Pieron pulled Poulain's dusty books of the shelves of the French National Library, apparently by chance (the copy of On the Equality of the Two Sexes had likely never been opened, since the pages were uncut).  Pieron recognized the significance of his find: He was something of a radical himself, and precociously well read in philosophy.  In a pioneering essay, he described the experience or reading Poulain: "Sometimes the astonishment is such that you feel the need to return to the first page and make sure that the Roman numerals really do say 1673."

COMMENT

A radical feminist book from 1673 is re-discovered twice-- once by the author who feels that there is something missing from "glass ceiling" feminism, and once in 1902.  Shulevitz says that instead of crediting Poulain's ideas, other writers simply adopted them with their own modifications.  Returning to the original source re-introduces caregiving as a feminist issue and one that had been utterly  left out of much contemporary feminism until COVID exposed the lack of support for mothers and other caregivers.  

Rereading Lolita

 Ian Frazier, "Rereading Lolita" New Yorker, December 14, 2020 pp. 30-35.

As an unformed kid, I envied his self-assurance and Olympian disdain. I tried to imitate the style, dropping into conversations half-cribbed Nabokov-like phrases (“I scorn the philistine postcoital cigarette”). Once I happened upon a slim volume of his in the New York Public Library which no one I’ve met has heard of. It contained a line that I treasured like a rare archeological find. Published in 1947, the book is a short anthology of verse by three Russian poets—Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tyutchev—with Nabokov’s translations, accompanied by introductions in which he explains each poet to an American audience. In the introduction to Pushkin, he describes the poet’s end, when he received a fatal wound in a duel with the French ballroom roué Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d’Anthès, the alleged lover of his wife. About the later career of this pomaded zero who killed Russia’s greatest poet, Nabokov adds that d’Anthès went back to France, got elected to some office or other, “and lived to the incredible and unnecessary age of 90."

COMMENT

     It seems that Ian Frazier learned to write by imitating Nabokov.   While searching the library for all things Nabokov he finds a neglected volume of translated poems and actually reads the introduction (something not everyone does).  There he finds a perfect putdown for a historical nobody -- Hidden Treasure luring in plain sight. 

A Fake? Or Biblical Gold?

 Jennifer Schuessler,  "A Fake? Or Biblical Gold?" New York Times March 28, 2021, p.AR8- AR9

     Dershowitz also traveled to the Berlin State Library to look at Shapira's papers.  There, scattered in a bound volume of jumbled invoices and notes, he found something he said no one had ever noted three handwritten sheets that appeared to show Shapira trying go decipher the fragments, with many question marks, marginal musings, crossed-out readings, and transcription errors.
     "It's amazing because it give you a window into Shapira's mind," Dershowitz said.  "If he forged them, or was part of a conspiracy, it makes no sense that he'd be sitting there trying to guess what the text is, and making mistakes while he did it."

COMMENT

Idan Dershowitz is a researcher trying to find evidence that a notorious forgery was actually genuine. The original documents have disappeared, but searching through the dusty boxes, he discovers evidence that at least suggests that if they were forged, Shapira was not the forger.  

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. 
 

Zara Steiner, 91, Historian Who Plumbed World War I

Neil Genzlinger, "Zara Steiner, 91, Historian Who Plumbed World War I," New York Times, March 6, 2020, p. B16.

     She went to Cornwall House in London, site of the British Foreign Office library and asked the librarian, C.H. Fine, if any archival material from staff officers existed.
     "He took me into a very dusty room and opened cabinets that had clearly not been cleaned for decades," she wrote.  "Out fell, along with bound volumes packets of papers tied up in pink ribbon, which dropped on to the floor as well as envelopes of pictures covered in dust.  "Oh dear," he said, "you had better have a look."
     "That, she added, "was how I began as a researcher."

 Comment

Hidden treasure in dusty boxes again.  Always the dust concealing the undiscovered gem.  These documents turned Dr. Steiner into an expert on what happened in England between WWI and WWII. The end of the  obituary quotes Dr. Steiner wondering how future historians will do their work in the age of Twitter and Facebook.  Without the dockets and minutes and paper trail, how will anyone ever discover what really happened.

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. 

The Library Book

Susan Orlean, The Library Book, 2018.

The story of the Los Angeles Public Library and the 1986 fire required years of research and scores of interviews with current and past library staff, deep dives into the Fire Department’s archives and the City of Los Angeles’s court records, and a lot of digging through the musty boxes of material stashed in the Library’s Rare Books Room. There I found a trove of information, including newspaper clippings about the library from the twenties; book lists from the thirties; paraphernalia from every decade; and countless, fascinating odds and ends left behind by the hundreds of librarians who passed through Central Library at some point in their careers. This material was essential to the writing of this book.  I also found a great deal of valuable material in the many books and published papers about California and library history.  [p. 315].

COMMENT

The notes on the author's research process mention those d/musty boxes again.  This time they contain ephemera of a kind that might strike some people as especially useless.   Who would consider old library book lists worth keeping? And yet here they are informing a bestseller. Interviews, government information and published books and articles are also cited as part of the research strategy.   The resulting book is the story of a community told through the lens of its public library, quite literally putting the library at the center of community and community resilience. 

A Dusty Artifact Shows the Reach of a Social Reformer

Hillary Howard, "A Dusty Artifact Show the Reach of a Social Reformer," New York Times, August 25, 2019, p. Y29.

     The trunk had sat in the library of a midtown Manhattan acting school for decades.
No one seems to have ever fully rifled through its contents save for a researcher her and there, said Whit Waterbury, an archivist and librarian at the Neighborhood Playhouse, the conservatory where Robert Duvall, Jeff Goldblum and Allison January trained.
...
     At first, he didn't think much of the dusty thing, with its fragile binding and fading yellow ribbon on the outside.  He set it aide to focus on documents more clearly related to the school and its founders... But then last spring, he actually flipped thorough its pages.  There was Eleanor Roosevelt's signature. And Amelia Earhart's. The journalist Jacob Riis wrote a nice note. So did Alfred E. Smith, a four term governor of New York.
...
     Last year, for its 125th anniversary, Henry Street Settlement introduced a permanent exhibition, which covers the history of the organization, and of the neighborhood it serves, at its headquarters.
      Officials there have plans to digitize the book and incorporate it into the exhibition. 

COMMENT

   Once again, the tale of hidden treasure in dusty archives,   The word "dust" covering the potential on unnoticed texts, in this case, a guestbook for Henry Street Settlement signed by many notable people and demonstrating the historic importance of the organization.   One person is quoted as saying, "The trunk was something out of Narnia."   Whoever put it in the trunk must have had a sense that it was worth keeping, but since it was in the box they could never have imagined how it would raise that spooky sense of touching history for people in the future.

     Now the guestbook will be digitized, which is to say, it will become an online representation of official history.  Digitization is an odd paradox.  The electronic version will be easier for more people to see, but it won't inspire comparisons with Narnia.  It's inevitable that some of the magic will be lost in translation. Digitization also means selecting the most interesting artifact out of the box, but better access for this single object paradoxically makes it less likely that someone will find something amazing and wonderful than sorting through paper objects stored in a dusty box.

All Over the Map

Betsy Mason and Greg Miller, All Over the Map: A Catrographic Odyssey," National Geographic, 2018.

Some of these maps come from museums, prestigious universities, and famous collections, but we've gone out of our way to also include maps from less vaunted sources. They've been buried in obscure government reports, long-forgotten scientific papers, private collections and dusty corders of libraries. Some are products of popular culture, such as one from the blockbuster television series Game of Thrones. Others are part of everyday life-- the kind you might expect to find in the seat-back pocket of an airplane or that you would tuck into your pocket before hitting the ski slopes. 

COMMENT

 The book All Over the Map is not an atlas, but rather a picture book of curious and interesting maps.   It could conceivably be subtitled "why digital maps suck." The wide variety of geographic representation is a reminder of how GIS makes all maps look essentially the same. In the chapter on ski area maps, cartographer Jim Niehues frets that hand-draw ski area maps could become a lost art if he retires.  His technique involves creative distortion of the terrain, orienting the layout around peaks that serve as landmarks for skiers. 

   Yet again library dust is mentioned.  It doesn't indicate worthless unused objects suitable only for the dust bin.  Rather the dust has gathered on hidden treasures waiting to be uncovered, maybe even in some of those obscure government reports lurking in the Stygian library basement (See: Autobiography of Red).

     When the database Hathi Trust digitized government reports they did not bother to digitize map supplements or oversized foldouts.  The maps they did digitize were single-pagers, not in full color.  Cartographic information was sacrificed to expedite the digitization process, probably because whoever made the decision didn't think maps were are all that important since maps are seldom a heavily used part of any library collection.  Despite such sloppiness, some librarians base sloppy decisions about what to weed on digital libraries like Hathi Trust.  If the title is online, they conclude that it has been accurately reproduced and it's just fine to throw out the library's physical copy, regardless of map supplements.  This makes me particularly mad because I live in Utah where public lands politics have been driven for years by a poorly executed Utah Intensive Wilderness Inventory (BLM, 1980).  Without good maps, the text of that particular land use document and the many, many subsequent plans are meaningless.  Even if the maps were digitized, it's difficult to see them online.  For optimum viewing, they need to be spread out on a big table.

 

   

Inside the List

Tina Jordan, "Inside the List," New York Times Book Review, Oct. 7, 2018, p. 24.

     In the summer of 1994, not long after finishing her dissertation, [1] Deborah Harkness stumbled on a long-lost manuscript in the stacks of Oxford's centuries-old Bodleian Library. "It once belonged to Queen Elizabeth I's astrologer, the mathematician and alchemist John Dee [2]. It was called 'The Book of Soyga,' and he prized it above all of his other texts. I found it, hiding in plain sight, among the Bodley manuscripts," [3] she says. Harkness -- now a historian of science and medicine at the University of California -- wove the experience into her best-selling All Souls trilogy, a rich, sprawling historical fantasy about a vampire scientist, a history professor who discovers she's a witch and an enchanted manuscript a the Bodleian. 

 COMMENT

     On Oct. 7, 2018 Harkness' novel Time's Convert was #3 on the New York Times Print/Hardcover Fiction Bestseller List. Her inspiration was a manuscript that people knew about, but up until 1994 nobody knew of any extant copy.  I can only imagine the thrill!  Finding and and holding that piece of history inspired the invention of an  entire fictional world populated by supernatural characters. 

    The most exciting thing I ever found in the stacks was a set of uncatalogued Alta Avalanche Studies recording early experiments that led to modern avalanche control techniques.  It's not nearly as exciting as finding The Book of Soyga, but I still remember the astonishment and the prickle of recognition when I realized that I was holding piece of history. I have never felt anything like that spooky sense of touching history looking at a digital reproduction. I believe that a digitized copy of The Book of Soyga might have had equal utility for writing a PhD thesis, but I doubt it would have ever inspired a series of bestselling novels. 

[1] Deborah E. Harkness, “The Scientific Reformation: John Dee and the Restitution of Nature” (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of California Davis, 1994).
[2] Deborah E. Harkness. John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
[3] The Bodley Manuscripts are a miscellaneous collection of manuscripts formed at Oxford University in 1761.

Jill Lepore, Master of Microhistories, Tackles Endeavor of a Grander Scale

Jennifer Schuessler, “Jill Lepore, Master of Microhistories, Tackles Endeavor of a Grander Scale,” New York Times, Sept. 17, 2018, p. C1-2.

Even when filing an essay spurred by a group of books, Mr. Finder of the New Yorker said, Professor Lepore will send in detailed footnotes that sometimes include primary source documents that seem to have never been cited before.  

“Her gravitation towards dust, towards opening boxes that haven't seen light for decades, as clearly never faded, “ he said. 

… 

She also vacuumed up secondary literature.

     “I wrote strictly chronologically, and for every chapter I would check out a gazillion books,” she said.  “The security guard at the library would always ask, ‘What year are you on?”

COMMENT

It’s those “dusty” boxes again. 

Professor Lepore has written a well-reviewed new history of the U.S. [1] and her attraction to dust is the specific thing that  makes her a great historian. (When librarians say "dust" they usually mean unused materials that are a target for weeding).  Mr. Finder’s comment also carries an implication  that most historians copy from each other when they cite sources. This copying can also be a side effect of keyword search engines that highlight the most popular links. Finding new primary source documents means not using the same research strategy as everyone else. 

I notice that Professor Lepore works from the print collection. Writing a book is information-intensive.  Many researchers find that reading from print is a quicker way to scan through a lot of text, slowing down to give more attention to the interesting parts. It's also a way to find things expressed in non-keyword vocabulary-- especially important since language changes over time. Online reading enforces equivalent attention to each page in a way that I, personally, dislike.  In my own research, I find that I often use ebooks for keyword searching and almost never actually read them. 

     It's interesting to me that Lepore who is clearly a library super-user mentions a relationship with the security guard but not with any librarians. Library support staff are often the ones on the front lines interacting with patrons, while librarians, hidden in their offices, miss making connections like this. I wonder how many librarians at the Widener Library knew that professor Lepore was making such heavy use of the U.S. History Collection?  I wonder if any of them cared what year she was on?

[1] Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States, W.W.Norton (2018).

A Famous Nude Gets a Face and an Identity

Adam Nossiter, "A Famous Nude gets a Face and an Identity: Historian Solves Mystery of a Gustave Courbet Painting," New York Times, Oct 2. 2018, p.C1;C6.

     The feminist art historian Linda Nochlin called the work "pornography" but also "a little masterpiece of overt sexuality."
     And now finally the matter of its sitter seems to have been solved, thanks to a chance discovery by a mild-mannered French historian toiling in the archives.
...
     Mr Schopp's breakthrough came innocently enough.  He had been working on annotation the letters between Dumas and the writer George Sand, and had long been perplexed by a passage in the old typewritten copies, where Dumas inveigh against the  "insolent" and "cowardly" Courbet, who had committed an artistic heresy, in the view of Dumas:
     "One doesn't paint with one's most delicate and sonorous brush the interview of Mademoiselle Queniault of the Opera, for the Turk who took refuge inside it from time to time -- all of it life-size, and life-size also two women passing for men."
...
     But what about that world "interview" in the typescript, and the other painting referred to?  Mr. Schopp went back to the source -- the manuscript of the Dumas letter at the National Library.
The word Dumas had actually written was "interior," not interview.  He underlined it, to emphasize that he was playing with worlds.
     "I dared to utter an inner 'Eureka,'' Mr. Schopp writes in a new book about the affair, "The Origin of the World: Life of the Model," which will be published in France this week. 

COMMENT 

The first rule of research is, when in doubt consult the original source. The name of the model for a famous (and famously risqué) painting by Gustave Courbet was unknown, even though the answer to the mystery was hiding in plain sight.  It took a researcher brave enough to admit that the transcription made no sense to go back and investigate what the original manuscript actually said.  It didn't help that Dumas had misspelled the name of Constance Queniaux, foiling a keyword search strategy.  The journalist is pleased to report that the sexy Ms. Queniaux lived long and prospered. 

Be Afraid, Jeff Bezos, Be Very Afraid

David Streitfeld. “Be Afraid, Jeff Bezos, be Very Afraid: Citing Amazon’s Dominance, a ‘Legal Prodigy’ Argues for a new Approach to Antitrust Regulation,” New York Times, Sept. 9, 2018, BU 1, 6-7. 

The dead books are on the top floor of Southern Methodist University’s law library.      

     “Antitrust Dilemma.” “The Antitrust Impulse.” “Antitrust in an Expanding Economy.”  Shelf after shelf of volumes ignored for decades.  There are a dozen tomes with transcripts of the congressional hearings on monopoly power in 1949, when the world was in ruins and the Soviets on the march. Lawmakers believed economic concentration would make America more vulnerable. 

     At the end of the antitrust stacks is a table near the window. “This is my command post,” Lina Khan said. 

COMMENT

     The photo accompanying this article shows law student Lina Kahn in law library stacks barely holding onto a toppling armload of hardbound library books.  She’s the author of a highly-cited paper [1] about the possibility of reviving and expanding anti-trust laws in order to rein in the outsized monopoly power of Big Tech. Khan is jump-starting her legal career by delving into historical legal scholarship on a topic that has been long ignored. The “dead” books she is using for her research sat on the shelf for more than 60 years but now it seems they were really just dormant, waiting for the passing of a fad for unregulated free markets. It’s a recurring library narrative -- finding intellectual treasure concealed in unused, supposedly obsolete books.  From an original research perspective, there is deep conflict with the  the commonly-held librarian notion that the most heavily used books are the most valuable.

    Big Tech, of course, is not responding passively to being labeled dangerously monopolistic.  As the article points out, Amazon has already hired its own lawyers to write rebuttals to Kahn. Shortly before this article appeared an op-ed [2] was published on the Forbes,com website (and then quickly redacted due to public ridicule) proposing that since public libraries are “obsolete” they would be better replaced with Amazon.com outlets. The idea was a logical if misguided extension of the tired old idea that public services would be more efficient if they were run like businesses. It’s hard to imagine an Amazon branded “library” outlet that would support antitrust legal research against its own parent company.  Yes, I know there’s a difference between public libraries and academic law libraries, but increasingly corporations are “sponsoring” university professorships in order to guarantee scholarship that is friendly to their own interests and political ideology. 

     Amazon really is overly powerful. Book sales statistics are not very precise, but in 2018,  Amazon sold about 1/2 of all print books, and about 80% of all ebooks (many of them self-published) in the U.S. Market. The company has been known to  promote or suppress publications, sometimes vindictively (such as the 2014 incident when Amazon attacked the publisher Hachette over ebook pricing).  It’s probably no coincidence that American democracy is in a state of crisis. A little trust-busting could be just what's needed right now. 

[1]Khan, Lina M. "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox." Yale Law Journal,  126 (2016): 710.  
[2] Mourdoukoutas, Panos. “Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries to Save Taxpayers Money,” Forbes.com, July 21, 2018 [deleted]

American Eclipse

David Baron, American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2018.

During long days at the James Madison Memorial Building, across from the U.S. Capitol, I requested box after dusty box from storage and discovered a priceless lode; faded, handwritten letters; dog-eared news clippings, telegrams and train tickets, photographs and drawings; and fragile, yellowing diaries that retained the observations, dreams and desires of people who, like me, found magic in the shade of the moon. As I read these aging documents in the sterile glow of fluorescent lights, I grew immersed in a narrative far richer than any I had imagined.  Those relics revealed a tale not just about eclipses, but about how the United States came to be the nation that it is today. [p.xii] 

COMMENT

     Libraries often measure the value of collections with use statistics. The word "dusty" typically indicates that something has not been recently moved and therefore it is obsolete and unneeded— a target for weeding in order to free up valuable space for “better” uses than “book storage” ("storage" being another word that indicates an item not actively circulating even though it is on an open shelf). By contrast, in the context of this historical archive dusty boxes are a priceless resource precisely because they have not been used. These stored boxes contained history that had been waiting unread since 1878.  Disconcertingly, the fact that an item has gathered dust might indicate a lack of value (at least within the specific community served by the library), or it might indicate an exceptional opportunity for a researcher.Librarians generally deal with this cognitive dissonance by dividing libraries into "stacks" that value usage above all and "special collections" that specifically value rare and unique items regardless of use.

      The problem is, librarians can make mistakes when they decide how to interpret dust. In one book-weeding dust-up [1] librarians tossed a set of rarely-used Chinese language books. The librarians defended their action because "the recycled volumes were not rare" and "only one or two professors... were able to read the classical language in which they were written."  Of course, all foreign language material has an inherently limited audience. The fact that the librarians couldn't read the language probably should have prompted them to defer to someone who could. Instead, they deemed classical Chinese scholarship old-and-in-the-way of a new Center for Student Life, re-purposing dusty stacks for academic offices, multi-purpose rooms and a cafeteria.While a cafeteria probably will get more use than Chinese books (everybody eats), it also replaces an opportunity for scholarship with a far less educational opportunity for lunch.

      Some librarians (I'm one) believe that in the age of the internet when many books are fairly easy to get stacks should become more like special collections. The dusty books that lack immediate value could be cleared away in order to make space for dusty boxes full of hidden treasure. The only obstacle is, in order to do that librarians would need to write an active collection policy to use in tandem with their weeding guidelines. Due to bureaucratic divisions between stacks and special collections as well as pressure from space-hungry outsiders who want to colonize library space they typically don't.  Most libraries engaged in massive weeding projects have a policy that says what to get rid of, but no policy for what is essential to keep. 

[1] Bluemle, Stefanie R., and Carla B. Tracy. "The lives of books: Legacy print collections and the learning-centered library." College & Research Libraries News 75, no. 10 (2014): 560-581.