Today, archives and other cultural heritage institutions across the country will be celebrating MayDay, our annual reminder to re-examine our strategies for protecting our valuable collections in the event of an emergency. To honor the day, we’re posting this picture of a range of pH-neutral archival boxes and papers, just waiting to house our new acquisitions. Proper housing is one of the many steps that the RBMSCL takes to ensure that our collections will be around for generations.
Today is Free Comic Book Day, which means that comic book shops all over the world will be giving away free comics.
But every day is Free Comic Book Day at the RBMSCL, where everyone can use all of our 56,000 comic books (in the Edwin and Terry Murray Comic Book Collection) for free! You can’t take them with you, but you can spend as much time with them as you want in our reading room.
If you do want to take home some free comics (and who doesn’t?), the closest participating store is Ultimate Comics on Ninth Street in Durham.
A photo of Rodin's Psyche et l'Amour. From the Dawson Family Papers.
All of the hoopla surrounding the grand opening of the North Carolina Museum of Art’s expansion this past weekend, including the unveiling of 29 sculptures by Auguste Rodin, reminds us of a few items in the RBMSCL stacks: a 1911 volume of Rodin’s conversations with Paul Gsell entitled L’Art, inscribed by Rodin to Warrington Dawson, and two caches of Rodin letters.
Warrington Dawson (formally, Francis Warrington Dawson, Jr.) was an American novelist and journalist who lived in Paris for most of his life. He tells of how he came to know Rodin in a 1913 letter to James Brand Pinker, printed in Duke Professor Emeritus Dale B.J. Randall’s volume Joseph Conrad and Warrington Dawson: The Record of A Friendship:
I first met him [Rodin] in 1899. . . . I called as a newspaper correspondent to write an article about his work, but he was struck by my comments and invited me out to his house at Meudon. He told me that I had the knack of expressing in words just what he had expressed in stone or bronze. . . . Some ten or eleven years ago I was first privileged to see his notes, and I recognized their great value; I proposed to him then that he should allow me to prepare them for publication. He promised me that I alone should do this work when he was ready for it, but did not feel that the time had yet come when the public was prepared.
This collaboration was never completed, and the friendship dissolved, but Dawson’s transcriptions and translations of Rodin’s French notes and his correspondence with Rodin survive in the Dawson Family Papers here at the RBMSCL. The papers also include a few striking contemporary photographs of Rodin’s sculptures.
There are also seventeen letters from Rodin to Marie Hopkins, dating from 1904 to 1915, in the Field-Musgrave Family Papers. Rodin’s gorgeous penmanship in many of these letters is a lovely and understated accompaniment to his epic sculptures now on display down the road in Raleigh.
Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections.
On this day in 1800, Congress approved the creation of the Library of Congress (here’s the birthday blog post from the Library of Congress Blog). By 1814, the collection numbered some 3,000 volumes, many of which burned when the British army invaded the capital city in in August.
On 30 January 1815, Congress and President James Madison turned to former President Thomas Jefferson to help rebuild the library’s collection. Jefferson was offered $23,950 for his Monticello library of 6,487 volumes.
That very week, on February 3rd, Francis Calley Gray and George Ticknor arrived at Monticello to pay a visit of a few days to their friend Mr. Jefferson—a visit which Mr. Gray meticulously recorded in his diary, which we hold here at the RBMSCL.
Francis Calley Gray's diary. Nice handwriting!
The morning after a welcoming dinner—complete with silver goblets engraved “from G.W. to T.J.”—Mr. Jefferson had prepared a special treat for his guests, both bibliophiles and collectors. As Gray wrote in his diary:
Mr. Jefferson gave me the catalogue of his books to examine + soon after conducted us to his library, + passed an hour there in pointing out to us its principal treasures. His collection of ancient classics was complete as to the authors but very careless in the editions. They were generally interleaved with the best English Translations. The Ancient English authors were also all here + some very rare editions of them. a black letter Chaucer + the first of Milton’s Paradise Lost divided into ten books were the most remarkable. . . . Of all branches of learning however relating to the History of North + South America is the most perfectly displayed in this library. The collection on this subject is without a question the most valuable in the world. Here are the works of all the Spanish [travelers?] in America + the great work of De Brie in which he has collected latin translations of the smaller works published by the earliest visitors of America whose original publications are now lost. It is finely printed + adorned with many plates. Here also is a copy of the letters of Fernando Cortes in Spanish, one of a small edition, + the copy retained by the Editor the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo for himself, but given by him to the American Consul for Mr. Jefferson.
On February 27, following his friends’ departure, Mr. Jefferson wrote to bookdealer Joseph Milligan (letter provided by the Library of Congress) to request his assistance in transporting the entire collection to Washington, D.C. These 6,487 books, some of which Mr. Gray had the good fortune to see, now belonged to the American people.
Sadly, an 1851 fire destroyed much of the Library of Congress’ collection, including two-thirds of Jefferson’s library. Which prompts us to remind everyone that MayDay is coming!
Thanks to Crystal Reinhardt, University Archives Graduate Student Assistant, for helping with this post.
The Trial of Sylvia Likens by Kate Millett, 1978. Photo by Mark Zupan.
For the first time since its initial exhibition in 1978, Kate Millett’s chilling installation, The Trial of Sylvia Likens, has been reassembled. On Monday, the staff of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture and Art History instructor Laurel Fredrickson joined with filmmakers Sophie Keir-Thompson and Mary Beth Ross to film the piece for a documentary about Millett’s life. The installation forms part of the Kate Millett Papers, which are held by the Bingham Center.
The installation marks Millett’s response to the horrific 1965 torture and murder of sixteen-year-old Sylvia Likens by the Baniszewski family and their neighborhood friends. Called “the most terrible crime ever committed in the state of Indiana,” the story of the murder and subsequent trial transformed Millett, laying the groundwork for her revolutionary work, Sexual Politics. Fredrickson writes, “For Kate, the case of Sylvia Likens exemplified in a very potent way how women are taught to accept punishment for real and imagined digressions from the cultural and social roles imposed upon them by patriarchal societies.”
In the photo essay below, Kelly Wooten, the Bingham Center’s Research Services and Collection Development Librarian, narrates Monday’s recreation.
The first step in reconstructing The Trial of Sylvia Likens was locating all the various mannequin parts, clothing, and panels, and then loading everything onto book trucks to convey to Room 217 in Perkins Library.
Once we delivered all the materials to Room 217 and the filmmakers set up their equipment, it was time to assemble the five defendants and get them dressed for court. Technical Services Archivist Megan Lewis and Art History instructor Laurel Fredrickson are putting on Johnnie’s jacket.
After all of the characters were ready, filmmakers Mary Beth Ross and Sophie Keir took shots of each mannequin in front of a green screen. This is Gertrude Baniszewski.
Filmmaker Mary Beth Ross prepares to capture images of the mannequins seated at the table.
For the original installation, Kate Millett created a death mask of her own face and dressed a mannequin in her own clothing to be arranged on a mattress as an embodiment of empathy for the victim, Sylvia Likens, who was found on a mattress in the family’s basement.
The trickiest part of this re-creation was hanging the panels that formed the backdrop in the original courtroom scene without damaging the library walls. Fortunately, Laurel Fredickson’s partner, Brad Johnson, is the Chief Preparator at the Nasher Museum of Art and had the time and the tools to hang the large newspaper reproductions.
Ferdinando Fasce: Department of Modern and Contemporary History, University of Genoa “JWT Italy between Reconstruction and the First Oil Shock, from the late 1940s through the 1970s”
Eva von Wyl: Social and Economic History, University of Zurich “Rationalization, Self-Service and American Way of Life: American Eating Habits in Postwar Switzerland (1950-1970)”
Faculty Recipients:
Shannan Clark: Department of History, Montclair State University “The Creative Class: White-Collar Workers and the Making of America’s Culture of Consumer Capitalism”
Liza Featherstone: Journalism School, New York University; School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University “Behind The Mirror: Focus Groups and What They Reveal, 1930s to present”
Michelle Ferranti: Division of Fine and Performing Arts, Marymont Manhattan College “History of Women’s Motivations for Douching following the Medicalization of Birth Control in the U.S.”
Ann McDonald: Department of Art Design, Northeastern University “The Role of Publically Displayed Information Visualization in Eliciting Individual and Communal Action”
Ari Martin Samsky: Global Health Studies Program, University of Iowa “Working Through Responsibility: Advertising, Medicine and The Social Good, World War II-the Present”
Student Recipients:
Abby Bartholomew: College of Journalism and Mass Communications, Advertising Department, University of Nebraska-Lincoln “JWT’s Application of Psychological Principles to Advertising, the Work of John B. Watson and his Behaviorist Theories”
Rebecca Burditt: Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, Department of Art and Art History, University of Rochester “Seeing Difference: Postwar Hollywood and the Commercial Delay”
Berti Kolbow: Institute for Economic and Social History, Georgia Augusta University Goettingen “Transatlantic Transfers of Marketing Concepts between Eastman Kodak and Agfa, 1880-1945”
Shawn Moura: Department of History, University of Maryland “Target Market Brazil: Postwar Advertising and Consumer Culture in the Country of the Future”
Cory Pillen: Department of Art History, University of Wisconsin-Madison “WPA Posters: A New Deal for Design, 1936-1943”
Elizabeth Spies: Department of English, University of California, Riverside “Advertising Stigmatas: The Evolution of Poetic Advertising throughout the Twentieth Century, 1890-1980”
Watch The Devil’s Tale for news about upcoming discussions with several of the travel grant recipients from the Hartman, Bingham, and Franklin Research Centers.
Our technical services archivists have created a veritable deluge of new finding aids for some of our older collections. All of the following collections are open for research. Please contact the Special Collections Library at special-collections(at)duke.edu with any questions.
400 vividly-colored Japanese matchbox labels are mounted in a contemporary paper album and housed in a custom-made cloth box. Unfortunately, the name of the person who created this marvelous collection is unknown.
Master and use copies of Jeff Storer’s oral interviews with Ann Atwater, an African-American civil rights activist based in Durham regarding her friendship with Ku Klux Klan leader C. P. Ellis.
The papers of this drama critic, journalist, and author of works on American and European drama and on children’s literature includes correspondence with giants of the turn-of-the-20th-century theater, including Eugene O’Neill, Percival Wilde, David Belasco, and Margaret Anglin.
The papers of this Virginia surgeon, said to have pronounced the death of abolitionist John Brown, shed light on the practice of medicine in the 19th century. Of particular interest are documents detailing Settle’s own medical service for the 11th Virginia Cavalry.
Above, Abigail, who is on loan to us from the Internet Archive, begins our Scribe scanning project. Over the next few months, we’ll be digitizing our collections of Utopian Literature and Confederate imprints—and so much more! Remember to visit The Devil’s Tale often for more news about the Scribe.
This month, we’ll be watching the “Pedagogy Panel.” The full list of speakers, which include RBMSCL Research Services Librarian Elizabeth Dunn, is available on the online symposium schedule. Desserts will be provided!
We’ll miss you if you can’t attend, but—just in case—videos for all three panels are also available online.
Dispatches from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University
