ATTN: Friends and fans of the Cartoon Library!

In partnership with The Wexner Center for the Arts, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum will be kicking off a docent program for tours of our incredible new space in Sullivant Hall. Becoming a Cartoon Library docent is a great way to get more deeply involved with our collections, and to share your passion for comics and cartoons with visitors from all over the world.

These are exciting times for us, and the future is bright for comics in Columbus – we hope you’ll sign up to join us in our mission to preserve and promote the history of cartoon art! Find out more about The Wexner Center docent program here, and in the announcement below:

Conservation treatment enables long-term preservation of items.  It also makes access to the items easier, including digital access.  For instance, producing a readable digital version of this newspaper from 1929 would be impossible in its initial state.  But after repair with Japanese heat-set tissue, it can be digitized and shared online.

James Wilgus, 1888

We recently had the chance to peek at the University’s early student life, thanks to Peggy Wymore, granddaughter of James Alva Wilgus, an early OSU graduate who also taught here briefly before leaving to study at Harvard. Wymore graciously donated a number of items from Wilgus’ time here as a student, including a class tie, some of his class essays, some memorabilia from student groups to which he belonged, and some of the exams he gave undergrads when he was teaching history here.

Our resources on individuals who attended OSU before 1900 are unfortunately slim – student directories, early Makios (which were more like literary magazines back then), and if the person became very famous or successful in his or her field, an obituary. So we never really know what happened to students from this era – what did they do after graduating? Where did they go? What were their lives like?

Wilgus’ tie, c1887-1888

Thanks to Peggy Wymore, we not only have mementoes of Wilgus’ time here, but she also was kind enough to fill in a lot of the details of his life after OSU – and that of his wife, Flavia, also an alum.

Wilgus was born on a farm near Conover, Ohio, in 1866. He attended a rural school and worked on his father’s farm until age 16 when he entered Ohio State in 1882 as a preparatory student, which meant, like many students coming to OSU at the time, he had to complete a number of prerequisites before becoming an official freshman. Such prerequisites included Latin, Algebra and Physics. He entered as a freshman in 1884, taking a wide range of classes like Latin, Botany, History and Physical Labor.

Brochure for Horton Literary Society event, 1886

 Meanwhile, Flavia McGurer – the future Mrs. Wilgus – entered Ohio State as a Preparatory student in 1887. Her courseload included German, Trigonometry and Physical Geography. According to the 1889 Makio, the Columbus resident had entered OSU as a freshman and was listed as class historian of the Class of ’92. But she never graduated. That’s because she married Wilgus on Christmas Day in 1889, then traveled with him after he earned his master’s degree, to Harvard University where he was a Thayer Scholar from 1891-1892.  He was reappointed at Harvard for a second year, but his failing health prevented him from taking the appointment.

The traveling continued, however: The couple moved to Minnesota in 1894 where Wilgus was hired at the State Normal School in St. Cloud to finish out the term starting in January of that year. In September, OSU President William H. Scott asked Wilgus to do a small amount of teaching in history, and Wilgus returned to Columbus to serve as assistant of History from 1894-95. On January 3, 1895, Wilgus received a telegram from James Chalmers, professor of the Platteville (Wisconsin) Normal School, asking him to “accept the history professorship” there. (The name later changed to the Wisconsin State Teachers’ College – Platteville.)

Wilgus accepted, and the couple moved to Wisconsin, where he spent the rest of his career at the State Teachers’ College as a professor of History and Social Sciences. He taught there until his retirement June 6, 1939. He died in Platteville shortly after that – July 24, 1939.

Flavia McGurer Wilgus, 1888

Upon moving to Platteville in 1895, “Mrs. Wilgus at once identified herself with the Platteville Normal. The Wilgus home became a place where students as well as faculty members spent many happy hours. As the years passed, the family circle became larger. Curtis came, then Dorothea, and finally Wallace . . .  Mrs. Wilgus continued to live in her beautiful, helpful way.” (from the June 23, 1926, issue of “The Exponent,” the Platteville State Teachers’ College newspaper).

Flavia also was involved in many activities and societies at her church; she was a member of the Eastern Star as well as other women’s clubs and civic societies. In 1903 she even had a small mail-order business. During World War I she contributed monthly to “The Fatherless Children of France.”

According to Wymore, Flavia was a loving mother, devoted to her children and active in their lives – their studies, play, training, and even in making  many of their clothes: In Dorothea’s letters to home from the University of Wisconsin, she would draw a picture of what she wanted in an outfit, and Flavia would sew it up for her.

On June 21, 1926, 31 years after she and her husband moved to Platteville, Flavia died suddenly and unexpectedly after complications set in from an emergency operation.  In her obituary it stated, “Mrs. Wilgus was a beautiful life. Forgetful of self, . . . writing upon every page of the book of her life . . . All who approached her were received with that simple grace that bespoke the true woman. . .”

We’d like to thank Peggy Wymore most sincerely for not only preserving such important tokens of her grandparents’ lives, but for sharing some of them with us, as well as her grandparents’ stories. Thank you, Peggy!

Horton Literary Society, back of brochure, 1886

Exam questions from Wilgus’ Roman History Class at OSU, 1888

We love this one-shot by cartoonist Ike Morgan, from the June 8th, 1902 Chicago Record-Herald, illustrating the age old tradition of cartoonists borrowing jokes, as totally bizarre as this one might be. We don’t have a lot of information on Morgan, and he appears to have mostly done one-shots other than his short running daily “The Kids of Many Colors”. As early as 1897, Morgan was also contributing political cartoons to The Times-Herald in Chicago.

Morgan would go on to illustrate a number of books, most notable of which were American Fairy Tales and The Woggle-Bug Book, written by the one and only L. Frank Baum — author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. What is additionally fascinating about Morgan, despite the lack of information on him, is the key role he may have played as a catalyst in bringing together the stage production of The Wizard of Oz. During the time that he knew L. Frank Baum through their book collaborations, he also happened to be roommates with composer Paul Tietjens. The two were introduced at Morgan’s wedding reception, and the writer and composer then began their talks for adapting Baum’s illustrated novel for the stage.

While this kind of marginal insight on Ike Morgan can be gleaned from the biographies of Baum and W.W. Denslow (illustrator of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), substantial biographical information on the cartoonist seems to be lost to obscurity in the early 20th century. We know that Morgan also illustrated books for Grace Duffie Boylan, including Young Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boylan’s adaptation for children of the Harriet Beecher Stowe novel), but if any of our readers know more, we hope you’ll share!

CALL # QE1 .G34413 no.494 Text & cd-rom.
TITLE GSA Special Paper no.494 entitled, New perspectives on Rio Grande rift basins :
from tectonics to groundwater / edited by Mark R. Hudson, U.S. Geological Survey,
Box 25046, Federal Center, MS 980, Denver Colorado 80225-0046,
USA, V.J.S. (Tien) Grauch, U.S. Geological Survey, Box 25046,
Federal Center, MS 964, Denver Colorado 80225-0046, USA.
IMPRINT Boulder, Colorado, USA : The Geological Society of America, Inc., 2013.

CALL # TD404.5 .P955 2005 Text & cd-rom.
TITLE Aquifer storage recovery : a guide to groundwater recharge
through wells / R. David G. Pyne.
IMPRINT Gainesville, Florida : ASR Systems, 2005 + 1 CD-ROM.

CALL # TD426 .S68 2005 Computer file.
TITLE 2005 source water protection symposium [electronic resource] :
January 23-26, 2005, Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.
IMPRINT Denver, CO : American Water Works Association, c2005.

The Journal of Library Administration has an interesting article in its January 2013 issue:  Posner, Miriam.  “No Half Measures: Overcoming Common Challenges to Doing Digital Humanities in the Library.” V. 53 (1), 43-52.  http://miriamposner.com/blog/?p=1393

The author has some thought-provoking things to say about the role of the library in digital humanities:

• “I assumed a model of DH support common to many fledgling DH programs, in which a scholar (usually a faculty member) conceives an idea for a DH project and approaches the library for help in accomplishing it.”  p. 45
• “Many of the problems we have faced ‘supporting’ digital humanities work may stem from the fact that digital humanities projects in general do not need supporters – they need collaborators.  Libraries need to provide infrastructure (access to digitization tools and servers, for example) to support digital humanities work, but they need thoughtful, skilled, knowledgeable humanists to actually work on it.” pp.  45-46.

An Entrepreneurial Stance towards Education for Information Professionals

It’s not uncommon for practicing librarians to whine about what is being taught in library school.  This article by Elizabeth Liddy at Syracuse rises above that argument and talks about the need to adopt an entrepreneurial mind-set.  How does she define that:  “be alert, stay attentive, receptive, willing to risk, able to recognize and sustain competitive advantage and most of all – be agile.” (p. 131).  She goes on to talk about her experiences at Syracuse noting that “our 3 fastest growing curricular areas of focus, research and attraction were not in existence just a few years ago – namely Social Media, Information Entrepreneurship and Data Science.” (p. 132).  And finally an interesting statistic – “we began offering online programs 17 years ago, and today approximately one third of our masters degrees are earned fully online, and of our main campus students, approximately 65% of them took at least one online course in the last 2 years.” (p. 135)

Liddy, Elizabeth D.  “An Entrepreneurial Stance towards Education for Information Professionals.”  Information Services & Use 32 (2012), 131-135.

The Future of Library Systems

Just last week we migrated to a new III platform for our ILS, Sierra.  Much is changing in how integrated library systems are being provided.  Carl Grant has written a nice summary of the various platforms and how they differ from each other technologically.  The first part of this is a little technical but it becomes more interesting about p. 7.

Grant, Carol.  “The Future of Library Systems: Library Services Platforms.”  Information Standards Quarterly 24 (4), Fall 2012, pp. 4-15.  http://www.niso.org/publications/isq/2012/v24no4/grant/

Libraries, Discovery and the Catalog

If you read this blog, you know I read almost everything that Lorcan Dempsey writes.  Much appears in his blog or through presentations, but a recent article length work appeared in the EDUCAUSE Review.  This article talks about the renaissance in interest in the library catalog and its data, but also the potential disappearance of the catalog as an individually identifiable component of library service.  In essence, we need our high quality data about resources and their availability to more seamlessly appear to individuals who can have access to it in the places where they already search, rather than forcing them to come to a library catalog to search.

Dempsey, Lorcan.  “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Libraries, Discovery, and the Catalog: Scale, Workflow, Attention.”  EDUCAUSE Review (Jan/Feb 2013).  http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/thirteen-ways-looking-libraries-discovery-and-catalog-scale-workflow-attention

Data Management

If you have read nothing else about data management, a recent publication by EDUCAUSE is a great summary.

Fary, Michael and Kim Owen.  “Developing an Institutional Research Data Management Plan Service.”  EDUCAUSE ACTI (January 2013).  http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/developing-institutional-research-data-management-plan-service

Rooms 150A&B – Libraries General Meeting, 9 – 11:30 a.m.

On the latest hardhat tour of our soon-to-be home in Sullivant Hall, the carefully calculated rooms now had walls, the cement flooring had settled, and the windows were all in place. The dream home dreamt up since the 1970s is now almost fully realized, with just a little over a month left before the moving process will begin.

We were joined on this final hardhat tour by the great Jeff Smith and Vijaya Iyer of Cartoon Books, our other mighty alliances in the comics city of Columbus. Below, they are pictured in our large new seminar room, named for Will Eisner.

And now we invite you, dear readers, to join us on a virtual walk through of this incredible structure dedicated to the largest cartoon and comic art collection in the world. As you follow along, we hope you’ll envision yourself in here with us, cocktail in hand (but not near the artwork!), for our Grand Opening Festival this coming fall.

As you click through the images below, you will be walking through the north entrance to Sullivant Hall, which is the main entrance into the lobby of the Cartoon Library, shown in the architectural rendering here. To your right, the entrance to our reading room, separated from the lobby by a beautiful, large stained-glass window of Billy Ireland cartoons. To your left, the entrance to our offices and collection processing areas, where you will first be greeted by a receptionist in our waiting room. Directly in front of you, on the outside wall of one of our many massively expanded state-of-the-art collection storage areas, is a staircase leading up to the galleries, seminar room, and other public areas. The open second floor walkway wraps around, as seen in the top right photograph.

Although the details may all be hard to visualize when staring at photos of these wide, open spaces, the images below should give you an idea of the enormity of our new home. Our hearts and imaginations soar far wider than these camera angles can capture. Taken on the first floor of the building, the images below (in order) show a portion of our processing space that leads to our offices, the main (but not only!) collection storage area, and a gaze out into our reading room:

On the east side of Sullivant Hall, there is an entrance to the building through a gorgeous rotunda with an additional staircase leading up to our second floor. Up here, our three cartoon art galleries, exhibit prep room, seminar room, more storage, and a massive theater to be shared with the other departments. Below, a small portion of the rooms found along the second floor walk:

There is so much more to see, but we hope that for now this will wet your appetite for what’s to come for us at the end of the summer. As construction reaches a close, we are busy putting the finishing touches on our plans for relocating the collections, and arranging our exhibits and grand opening. These are busy and exciting days for all of us at the Cartoon Library, and we can’t wait to share the bounty of all of this hard work with you in the fall!

If you have not marked your calendars already, be sure to plan on joining us for the Grand Opening Festival on November 14th-17th. We know you are anxiously awaiting the details, and your patience shall soon be rewarded! Keep up with our blog for more information this summer as we pack, plan, and prepare to party in celebration of the world’s greatest home of cartoon art.

Below, two of the main people who could not be happier about this new era for the Cartoon Library; Founding Curator Lucy Shelton Caswell, and her former student at OSU, cartoonist and hard-hat-decorator Jeff Smith.

Cartoonist Jeff Smith and Founding Curator Lucy Shelton Caswell

Creative Commons (CC) is one of the major providers of standard licenses for copyright holders who want to allow certain kinds of reuse of their content. The Libraries makes it easy for OSU faculty, staff, and students to apply CC licenses to their content archived in the Knowledge Bank, or published through the publishing program, and our own faculty and staff make use of CC-licensed materials in our writings, presentations, and classes.

If you want to learn more about CC licensing, I suggest checking out their recently released report, “The Future of Creative Commons,” linked above. It does a nice job summarizing why and how Creative Commons works, and provides a glimpse into the organization’s future. There is also a wealth of information and resources available through the main Creative Commons website, including videos, FAQs, more detailed background information, and a tool for searching CC-licensed content.

Brian will be recognized at the OSU Libraries’ Faculty awards ceremony that is currently scheduled for July 25.

Johannes Borer original from “Punch”. From the International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

Borer was born in Zwingen, Switzerland in 1949 and has been working as a cartoonist, illustrator, and gag writer since 1973. His work has appeared in over 100 newspapers and magazines worldwide, including Punch and Reader’s Digest.

Image by GrungeTextures on flickr, CC-BY-NC

Disclaimer: I’m biased. I think that scholarly blogging is a good thing, and that more academics should do it. I’m bringing up some arguments against blogging partly so I can refute them. That said, it’s important to think about the possible downsides of so public an activity. Some of them can be avoided; the ones that can’t…well, at least you were warned.

Unlike traditional databases, there’s no dump-to-file button to click on, so I’m making use of a Node.JS tool that I’ve found at: https://github.com/mallocator/Elasticsearch-Exporter

Even though it is called an “Exporter”, its equally valid as an “Importer”, just reverse the flow of data.

// Move ElasticSearch data from A: production, to B: localhost

node exporter.js -a production-elastic-1.example.edu -b localhost

Let it run for a while, and eventually you start seeing messages like:

Processed 1066100 of 23643742 entries (5%)

We will be closed on July 4 for Independence Day and July 5 for carpet shampooing.

Local artist, writer, and comics scholar Kirk Taylor came by the Cartoon Library last week to donate the brand new Abrams ComicArts book “Bazooka Joe and his Gang”, for which he co-authored the introduction with Nancy Morse. Kirk had spent some time in our library in 2012 while piecing together his research for the book, and during that visit he shared with us a fascinating story about his personal connection to Wesley Morse, the unsung cartoonist who created Bazooka Joe. During Kirk’s recent visit, we chatted about his process and involvement with the project, and how he was able to use the Cartoon Library as a resource.

What is your connection to Wesley Morse?

Kirk: My great aunt Avonne Taylor passed away in 1992, and hidden away in her storage locker in California my family discovered a series of 80 illustrated love letters of, and for, her by Wesley Morse. They were on his personal stationary, with his address listed at the Hotel Des Artistes, a noted artists cooperative on 67th street in Manhattan. At the time I discovered these, nothing was published about Morse, so I held on to them for years before I understood the history. In 1996, “Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in America’s Forbidden Funnies” came out, with an introduction written by Art Spiegelman. In it, Spiegelman mentions that he could recognize the hand of a cartoonist named Wesley Morse as one of the artists in the old Tijuana Bibles, and that was where I first made the connection with who this man was from my great aunt’s letters. Based on the drawing style in the book, I knew it had to be him.

“How It Seemed To Talk With You Today — Wednesday Night” Illustrated letter to Avonne Taylor from Wesley Morse. Image courtesy of Kirk Taylor. From the Wesley-Morse Collection.

How did Avonne and Wesley know each other?

Kirk: Although she never talked about it with family during her life, my great aunt was a Ziegfeld Follies dancer in the 1920s, and kept exhaustive scrapbooks from those days. In 1922, during her time there, Wesley Morse was an illustrator for the Follies, long before entering the world of comics.  Morse was a peer of greats like Alberto Vargas–one of the famous painters from the Ziegfeld days–and his murals were even painted on the walls of the New Amsterdam Theater lobby where the Follies were held at the time. The main photographer of the Follies was Alfred Cheney Johnston, who also had his studio in the Hotel Des Artistes, and the dancers would be coming and going all the time. It’s likely that they met there. My aunt stayed on with the Follies until 1925, and then went on to have success in film. Morse seems to have faded from employment with them in 1924, which is when he started emerging in comics.

Wow, so after you made the Tijuana Bible connection, how did you start discovering more?

Kirk: In 2007 I was able to track down Wesley Morse’s son, Talley Morse, through cartoonist Jay Lynch. Jay is also a fan of his work, and during exhaustive online searches to find more information, a comments thread on an art blog popped up in which Talley’s wife Nancy Morse mentioned that she was married to the son of  the cartoonist who created Bazooka Joe, that cartoonist being Wesley Morse. Jay contacted Talley through Nancy, who was eager to talk to me about his father and my great aunt, and that is when ideas for working on a book first began. Jay Lynch, Talley and myself met up in New York and were able to visit the Topps headquarters, where the young artists on the creative staff were all excited to meet the son of the man whose cartoon character became a national icon. They all said that they looked specifically toward Morse’s work for the drawing style of the Bazooka Joe characters – he was totally celebrated at Topps.

When did the Bazooka Joe book start to come together?

Kirk: In 2009, I was put in touch with Charlie Kochman of Abrams Books, and told him about our ideas. Charlie had been interested in doing a series of books with Topps, Wacky Packages being the first one. By 2012, we were ready to work on it, and throughout the time leading up to that I was doing more and more research. I had made connections with people all over the world to learn more about Morse, including bubble gum historian Jeff Shepherd, much of whose collection of memorabilia is included in the Abrams book.

How did you come to use the Cartoon Library collection during your research?

Kirk: After working for the Follies, Wesley Morse started making comic strips for Hearst, including a feature written by slanguist H.C. Whitwer titled Switchboard Sally. The Cartoon Library has a run of the strip, so I began my research there to study his style. Being able to see these old strips was like being one step closer to the original art,  and it was also informative to see how Morse’s line developed over the years as he went from working in illustration to the sequential comics format. I even think his cartoons of Sally were reminiscent of my great aunt! I was also able to connect Morse with the work of his contemporaries while at the Library. I knew that when he was living in New York in 1925 he was roommates with Chic Young [Blondie] while they were both working for King Features. At the time, Young was working on Dumb Dora, and I wanted to see if there were similarities in their style, as they were both finding their way in the comics form, still immature in the format. This research, and some of the strip collections themselves, will come into use for my next project which is underway right now with the Morse family — a comprehensive biography of Wesley Morse, which will ultimately be the most extensive one written on him. Currently, the piece in the Bazooka Joe book is the most that has ever been documented on this extremely prolific artist.

Wesley Morse and H.C. Whitwer’s “Switchboard Sally”. From the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum (click to enlarge)

To keep up with the progress of Kirk Taylor’s upcoming book on Wesley Morse and view some of the gorgeous illustrated love letters sent to Kirk’s great aunt Avonne from the Taylor-Morse Collection, visit: http://taylormorsecollection.com/

1919 Cane Rush

(“Long Gone Campus Traditions” is a continuing series of posts where we explore some of the more unusual, sensational and even violent student traditions that have been obsolete from OSU’s campus for quite some time.)

The Cane Rush was undoubtedly one of the most brutal student traditions to ever taken place on OSU’s campus.  In fact, some have described the event as a mixture of rugby, football and WWF wrestling.

The Cane Rush, which originated in the 1880s, was a contest between classes of undergraduate men.  The object of the game was to find and obtain the rival’s walking cane and move it across the opponent’s goal line.  The teams, which often numbered in the hundreds, could be quite brutal.  Students tackled each other, wrestled one another on the ground, and tore each others clothes, all in an effort to obtain the cane.

The Cane Rush in 1894 was so violent that one Lantern reporter wrote:

“If our young men are to do that for which in the ordinary walks of life they would have to answer to the law of the land, it is high time that the iron hand of discipline be imposed. University history should not be blotted by the record of many such affairs as occurred last Thursday.”

The first presidents of the university and many of the faculty agreed that the Cane Rush disrupted classroom activities.  The competition was normally an unplanned event and the early rushes had few rules or authority figures involved.  One Cane Rush in 1889 reportedly lasted for an hour and a half.

President Thompson holds the cane, 1920

However, when William Oxley Thompson became president in 1899, he confronted the controversy of the Cane Rush head-on.  Rather than waiting for the event to begin spontaneously, Thompson organized the event himself.  The President said that as long as the students conducted the event in an orderly manner, he would allow it to continue. Under his direction, the competition had official rules, a specific date and location, and a set time of 20 minutes.    

The Cane Rush became a beloved student tradition under Thompson’s administration and in 1908 it reportedly drew some 10,000 spectators.  Because of its reputation, students even began charging admission to the event.

The popularity of the Cane Rush began to decline in the late 1920s and by 1932 the event was no long held. Lack of interest, the shift away from class as the focus of student life, and the fact that Thompson retired, were some of the reasons that caused the demise of the Cane Rush.  There were efforts to revive it in the 1930s and 40s, but those efforts never took off.

Cane Rush on the Oval, 1891

Students pose with cane in front of University Hall, 1894

1919 Cane Rush