The Rare Books and Manuscripts Library and the William Charvat Collection of American Fiction are proud to join their colleagues from the Hilandar Resaerch Library and the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute Library in becoming the new Special Collections department at the newly renovated William Oxley Thompson Main Library at the Ohio State University Libraries. Operating from the Jack and Jan Creighton Reading Room, the newly merged Special Collections will again offer full public service to our faculty and students in addition to international scholars and friends and supporters of Special Collections. Within our new department, each library will retain its own identity as both Rare Books and Manuscripts and Charvat American Fiction remain distinct administrative units with individual budgets and individually defined missions in terms of collecting and programming.
Special Collections is now located on the first floor of Thompson Library overlooking the grand oval and iconic Mirror Lake: perhaps the best location in this most splendid of new buildings. We welcome you to visit and experience this new facility.
Geoffrey D. Smith (Ph.D.), Professor and
Head, Rare Books and Manuscripts Library
October 13th, 2009
As OSU employees consider an annual contribution to the Campus Campaign we’d like to take this opportunity to point out that gifts may directed to funds that support the Charvat American Fiction Collection and/or several areas within the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. Fund code numbers are included below for your convenience. We’d be happy to your questions about any of these!
- Bennett Avant Writing Collection - 660398
- Charvat American Fiction Fund - 309347
- Keenan Library of Astronomy Fund - 604183
- Meek Thurber Endowment - 604829
- Rudolph Children’s Science Endowment - 606234
- Wing Rare Books Endowment - 667645
April 15th, 2009
The Rare Books & Manuscripts Library is pleased to announce the completion of an ambitious project to digitize the seventeenth-century manuscript commonplace book of Sir Henry Bellingham. The project is live at http://library.osu.edu/sites/rarebooks/bellingham/. This project was researched, designed, and created by Sarah Shippy, a graduate student in OSU’s Department of History. Essentially scrapbooks of useful knowledge, commonplace books were privately produced notebooks in which readers recorded valuable and practical extracts from books that they read. Bellingham’s commonplace book offers researchers a fascinating look into Sir Henry’s personal reading habits and sheds light on the wide variety of topics—including history, religion, law and government, literature, science, and domestic affairs—that were popular with readers during the mid-seventeenth century. In addition to including a full digital reproduction of the manuscript, the website also includes detailed background information on the manuscript itself, its historical context, and the life of Sir Henry Bellingham.
December 17th, 2008
The recently published catalog, Visual Poetry in the Avant Writing Collection has received very positive reviews in three key publications: Umbrella, June 2008, says the book is “beautifully printed and designed, [and] belongs to every art as well as literature collection…anywhere”. The book review journal Rain Taxi, Winter 2008-2009, calls it a “stunning catalog” and discusses several aspects of it at some length; and the Small Press Review/Small Magazine Review, Nov-Dec 2008, calls it “a key vispo publication”, discusses it at length and the reviewer concludes that he would “be shocked if any other poetry publication of 2008 is half as important for poetry”.
Edited by John M. Bennett, the catalog is available for $30 at the RBMS Library, or can be seen as a PDF on the RBMS webpage, http://library.osu.edu/sites/rarebooks/, click on “Visual Poetry in the Avant Writing Collection” in the column on the right.
December 16th, 2008
Blue Lion Books has just published a book by John M. Bennett, SPITTING DDREAMS. SPITTING DDREAMS consists of 2 books written in the late 1970’s through early 1980’s, “Spitting” and “Ddreams”, never before published. “Spitting” includes poems from Bennett’s “Spitter” period, and employs various lunatic repetitive and anaphoric techniques. “Ddreams” is very different: a series of minimalist visions, ranging from the bizarre to the mundane, arranged in an over-arching symmetrical pattern. The book includes 2 groups of visual poems from the period.
Available as a printed book on-demand or as a free download from http://www.lulu.com/content/4718619
December 16th, 2008
Throughout November I had the privilege of working with our modest, but very impressive, collection of medieval manuscripts as I prepared for a series of lectures on medieval books and manuscript production and began surveying our holdings in relation to a variety of other possible projects (research, conservation, acquisitions strategizing, digitizing, etc.). As I worked with these magnificent materials, I began to think it might be nice to share them with our online readers. So, in an effort to familiarize you all with our medieval manuscripts, I decided to start an irregular and informal series of blog entries highlighting aspects of our holdings. This series won’t necessarily follow any set structure—instead I’ll just offer up bits and pieces at random and see where that gets us. In the meantime, feel free to contact me if you have any questions or would like to see or hear about something in particular.
Writing supports—a technical term for any substance or object used as a surface for writing—have taken many shapes throughout history. The most familiar writing surface today is, of course, paper; but past scribblers have used papyrus, pottery shards, clay, slate, tree bark, wood, leaves, metal tablets, stone, wax, cloth, and many other materials to record information. Although medieval people used all of these substances, including paper (although it wasn’t widely used in the medieval west until the late-fourteenth/early-fifteenth century), the most popular writing support of the period was parchment, or animal skins (usually made from calf and goat skins). Parchment making was a long and tricky process, but essentially it consisted of soaking skins in a lime solution (to loosen the hair and any remaining flesh) followed by a lengthy period during which the skin was mounted on a frame (called a “herse”), methodically stretched (a process called “drying under tension”) and repeatedly scraped in order to smooth the skin, remove remaining hair, fat, and other tissues, and force the skin’s cells to realign themselves into a smooth, sheet-like structure that can be written on easily and absorb ink. Once dry, the skin would be cut from the drying frame and trimmed, providing a piece of parchment ready for the scribe’s pen.
Due to the difficulty and expense involved in making parchment, medieval scribes often had to deal with imperfections in the skin. Some of these flaws might be accidental punctures or tears made during the scraping and drying processes, while other blemishes could be vestiges of the skin’s pre-parchment life. OSU’s manuscripts collection is valuable, in part, because of the variety of defects it includes, all of which help teach us about the related processes of parchment making, writing, and book production. I’d now like to describe some of the more common imperfections inherent in manuscripts written on parchment, illustrating the descriptions with examples from OSU’s own collections.
If you look closely at most manuscripts (or not so closely if the parchment in question wasn’t prepared carefully), you can distinguish between the “hair side” (the external surface of the skin from which hair once grew) and “flesh side” (the internal surface of the skin) of single parchment leaves, or pages.
The flesh side is usually smoother and lighter than the hair side, while the hair side, in addition to being darker and rougher, is distinguishable by its visible follicles and former hair patterns (seen in the illustrations above). Such imperfections could be worn away or obscured with more rigorous—and expensive—preparation during the manufacturing process.
Parchment wasn’t always trimmed to conform to regular shapes. Often a scribe would use pages that on first glance might seem to include strange, rounded or curved cuts at their corners or in their margins.
Such “cuts,” however, weren’t the result of a parchment-maker’s shaky hand. Rather, they are neck or shoulder contours showing where the skin previously had been connected to leg or neck skin.
Another common imperfection, but one usually seen in “uterine vellum” (parchment made from unborn calves) or parchment produced from very young sheep and calves, is veining (visible in the top right corner of the photo below) . Such marks are the impressions or outlines of vein trails in skin in which there wasn’t much fatty, connective, or muscle tissue in the immediate subcutaneous layers of skin.
Scarring, or partially healed wounds, also left their mark on parchment. In some cases, medieval scribes would simply write over existing scars while in other instances the scar tissue might be too rough, thin, or even torn, to allow the scribe to write effectively on that portion of skin.
Holes in parchment that weren’t the product of scarring or wounds usually were the result of accidents during the manufacturing process. Such mishaps might include cutting the skin while scraping it, or overstretching the skin while it dried.
Regardless of whether tears or holes were the product of weak skin, scarring, or industrial accidents, however, parchment makers and scribes found ways to work around such imperfections. Tears could be sewn together or patched, and in the worst circumstances a scribe would simply write around the hole.
Understanding and seeing imperfections like these can help provide us with a more immediate and apparent understanding of what it was like to make books in the Middle Ages. In future installments of this irregular series on OSU’s manuscripts I hope to offer further insight into how we can learn about medieval book culture through the close, material analysis of medieval texts. Until next time…
Eric J. Johnson, Associate Curator
December 1st, 2008
Savants throughout history (along with a fair number of quacks and hucksters) have interpreted comets streaking across the sky as heralds of doom or harbingers of great change. Perhaps had we here at OSU’s Rare Books Library been wearing our divinators’ hats earlier this month we would have associated the arrival on our doorstep of an extremely rare seventeenth-century book about comets with the current world financial crisis (doom indeed?) or the imminent 2008 Presidential election (great change?). Prophets and soothsayers we are not, however, and the book that sped through the ether from New York to Columbus (courtesy of FedEx—one of the Prime Mover’s many tertiary subordinates) hopefully heralds no changes other than the influence it might have on the research agendas of scholars interested in historical astronomy. The book in question—Hypographe: Flagelli Saturni & Martis. Das ist: Beschreibung des erschrecklichen Cometsterns, welcher im Octobri, Novembri und Decembri des 1618…, published in Leipzig by N. & C. Nerlich in 1619—is a small quarto volume consisting of 12 leaves of black-letter German text and a woodcut vignette on the title page depicting the comet and its tail. The author, Paul Hintzsch—a German doctor and astronomer, provides modern researchers with a tidy summation of the astrological and astronomical observations of and discussions surrounding the appearance of the “Great Comet of 1618”, also known as “the Angry Star” due to its extremely long tail, reddish hue, and lengthy duration (it was visible to the naked eye for over seven weeks in late 1618 and early 1619, even remaining discernible during the day). Astronomers across Europe commented on the cosmic phenomenon, astrologers everywhere excitedly interpreted its meaning, and doomsayers and pessimists from Scotland to Sicily witnessed portents and prodigies in its fiery tail. Even King James I of England wrote about it, penning a poem that reminded its readers that even if the comet were a celestial sign, it would remain unintelligible to mere mortals:
Yee men of Brittayne wherefore gaze yee so,
Vpon an angry starre? When as yee knowe
The Sun must turne to darke, the Moone to
bloode,
And then t’will bee to late to turne to good.
O bee so happy then whilst time doth last,
As to remember Doomesday is not past:
And misinterpret not with vayne conceyte
The character you see of Heauen’s heighte:
Which though it bringe the World some newes
from fate,
The letter is such as none can it translate:
And for to guesse at God Almighties minde
Were such a thinge might cosen all mankinde:
Therefore I wish the curious man to Keepe
His rash imaginations till hee sleepe…
Perhaps we should all remember the gist of King James’s lines when trying to predict who will be the next President or how the world’s financial ship will right itself. As for me, I’ll limit my “rash imaginations” to dreaming of the books that in future will become part of OSU’s rare book constellation.
Eric J. Johnson, Associate Curator
October 28th, 2008
Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, was one of sixteenth-century England’s most influential religious and political figures. Best known, perhaps, for writing and compiling the first two editions of the Book of Common Prayer, the summation and embodiment of the Reformed English liturgy, Cranmer also wrote a variety of other treatises, including a text that OSU has recently acquired and added to its outstanding Reformation collection. Cranmer’s Defensio verae et Catholicae doctrinae de Sacramento corporis et sanguinis Christi Seruatoris nostri…, is a later Latin translation of his English exploration of the controversial doctrine of the Eucharist (A defence of the true and catholike doctrine of the sacrament of the body and bloud of our Saviour Christ, 1550). Cranmer’s English original was translated by Sir John Cheke, one-time tutor to Edward VI, secretary of state, member of the Privy Council, and noted author in his own right. OSU’s copy is a 1557 second edition of Cheke’s translation, and unlike the first edition—originally issued in London in 1553—it was published abroad (in Emden, Germany) because of the catholic Queen Mary I’s accession to the English throne, her regime’s hostility toward Protestantism, and her imprisonment and execution of Cranmer in 1556. As the title page states, Cranmer revised and approved this second edition from his prison cell: “ab autore in vinculis recognita & aucta”. Bound in with Cranmer’s text is a Latin work by John Foxe (of Book of Martyrs fame) printed ca. 1580 by John Day. The book, Syllogisticon hoc est: Argumenta, seu probationes et resolutiones…De re et Materia Sacramenti Eucharistici, is a treatise consisting of a series of brief arguments and responses discussing various contentious points lying at the heart of the Eucharistic controversy that dominated Catholic and Protestant polemic alike throughout the Reformation.
Our conjoined copy of these two texts is bound in contemporary English calf with oval arabesque ornaments in the center of both the front and back covers. As an extra bonus, the sixteenth-century binder was considerate enough to include a pair of very interesting parchment end-leaves that had previously seen life as part of a glossed thirteenth-century Latin Psalter. The leaves bear text from Psalm 89 and its corresponding gloss. Also included is a heraldic bookplate revealing that this volume was once part of the private library of Hugh Cecil Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale (1857-1944), first president of England’s National Sporting Club, Arctic explorer, friend to Kaiser Wilhelm, and flashy man-about-town famous for his liaisons with some of the more famous actresses of his day.
All in all, I think it’s safe to say that this is an interesting book…
Eric J. Johnson, Associate Curator
October 9th, 2008
The Rare Books and Manuscripts Library has acquired this past summer a complete run of The Paris Review from its very first issue in 1953 through the Spring issue of 2008. The Paris Review is arguably the most pretigious and influential literary journal of the latter half of the twentieth century. Its contributors form the pantheon of twenthieth-century iconic writers and include Nobel Prize, Pultizer Prize and National Book Award winners in addition to winners of virtually every international literary award. A select, very seclect list of those writers will indicate the distinction of The Paris Review: Samuel Beckett, Ernest Hemingway, Gabrial Garcia Marquez, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, Vladimire Nabokov and Harold Pinter. And, I reiterate, these are just a few of the hundreds of contributors to The Paris Review over the past 55 years. In addition to the writing, the decorative design of the literary review is remarkable and will please students of the book arts. The collection, which is in very good condition, was acquired from Ralph Sipper Books in Santa Barbara, California.
October 9th, 2008
Another new acquisition has just arrived:
Serious Reflections on the Dangerous Tendency of the Common Practice of Card-playing; Especially of the Game of All-Fours, as It Hath Been Publickly play’d at Oxford, in this present Year of our Lord, MDCCLIV. In a Letter from Mr. Gyles Smith, to his Friend Abraham Nixon, Esq; of the Inner Temple. London: Printed for W. Owen, at Homer’s Head near Temple-Bar, [1755].
This nifty little 24-page octavo pamphlet offers a humorous attack on the popularity of card games and card-playing by students at Oxford. Describing card-playing as a “heinous and crying Sin” and cards themselves as “the Devil’s Books,” these Serious Reflections lament the popularity of cards with all segments of society, from dukes to porters, and from “the Duchess in the Drawing-Room, to the Cinder-Wench on the Dunghill.” The author calls for some form of official “discouragement” or sanction—preferably passed by Parliament—to be imposed on card games because they “manifestly tend to corrupt the Principles and Morals of the People, to subvert all Order and Authority, and confound the Notions of Right and Wrong.” Additionally, the author laments, card games supplant education: “It is a melancholy Thing to think, how much all good Learning hath suffered by this unaccountable Attachment. The Arts and Sciences are either entirely neglected by us, or pursued only in Subordination, or Subserviency to it.” Lest the reader be confused, however, the author takes pains to point out that he is by no means attacking the gentlemanly pursuit of gaming, or betting, a pastime he defends by stating that every gentleman “hath a Right of disposing of his Lands, Tenements, and Monies, in what Manner he pleaseth, and of transferring them to another, upon any Terms and Conditions which may be agreed upon between them.”
A contemporary reader identified the pseudonymous author as Benjamin Buckler, writing this name toward the bottom of the title page in the copy we have just acquired. Buckler was bursar of All Souls College, Oxford, beginning in 1752, and was a prominent local Tory. He was the author of A Complete Vindication of the Mallard of All-Souls College (1750), and he may have been the author of A Philosophical Dialogue concerning Decency (1751; ascribed to Samuel Rolleston), a scatological work exploring different cultural habits in lavatory use. In 1777, Buckler was elected Keeper of the Archives of Oxford University, and he died in 1780.
Eric J. Johnson, Associate Curator
September 30th, 2008
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