Hanukkah card sent to Marshall Meyer by Débora Benchoam, November 1981. From the Marshall T. Meyer Papers.
The Hanukkah celebrations of 1981 were especially meaningful for Débora Benchoam and Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer. Benchoam had just been released from four years of brutal imprisonment during Argentina’s “Dirty War,” thanks in large part to the efforts of Meyer. She sent this card to Meyer on 26 November 1981. The card and the letter it contains have been digitized and are available for viewing in Duke’s Digital Collections.
Thanks to all of the students who came to the Rare Book Room for our special study hall yesterday! We hope the golden light and monumental tomes inspired you. And don’t forget to grab a cookie or two at tonight’s study break in the Perkins lobby!
Photo by Kate Collins, Research Services Librarian.
At the same time, we are working on the finishing touches of the Elna Spaulding Papers, the largest collection that Duke is contributing to the CCC Project. Look for more updates on these collections in upcoming blog posts on The Devil’s Tale.
For this month, we wanted to highlight a photograph that conveys the holiday spirit. We recognize that it is the season for peace on Earth, good will toward all, and (toy) firearms.
Photograph taken by Jim Thornton for the Durham Herald-Sun, undated. Women-in-Action for the Prevention of Violence and Its Causes Records, Box 11, Folder 1: wiams11001036
If we were giving out year-end awards for the CCC Project, this photograph has to win the “Most Ironic” trophy. Normally, at this point, we would provide context that would explain exactly what this spokesman is trying to convey. Unfortunately, all that we know about this photograph is that it appeared in the Durham Herald-Sun and the photographer was Jim Thornton. The fact that this photograph appears in the Women-in-Action records indicates that the event was some sort of anti-violence demonstration that perhaps encouraged parents to avoid purchasing violent toys for Christmas. However, this explanation is at best an educated hypothesis.
No matter the explanation, this photograph and the rest of the CCC materials are quite thought-provoking. And our final thought for this update: Happy Holidays from the CCC Staff!
To learn more about the CCC Project, please visit CCC on Facebook.
The grant-funded CCC Project is designed to digitize selected manuscripts and photographs relating to the long civil rights movement. For more about Rubenstein Library materials being digitized through the CCC Project, check out previous progress updates posted here at The Devil’s Tale!
Post contributed by Josh Hager, CCC Graduate Assistant.
Wilhelmina Reuben-Cooke, Nathaniel White, Jr., and Mary Mitchell Harris, the first African-American undergraduates to receive degrees from Duke University. From the University Archives Photograph Collection.
Fifty years ago, Duke University first admitted African-American students into its undergraduate classes. Drawing upon the collections of the Duke University Archives, “The Road to Desegregation at Duke” uses historic photographs, correspondence, flyers, newspapers, and more to tell the story of how Duke became a more diverse university.
The exhibit examines the contributions of African Americans at Duke prior to integration, the process of desegregation at the University, and the ways in which black students have shaped Duke since 1963.
Part of a larger, campus-wide commemoration of this milestone anniversary, “The Road to Desegregation” is a thought-provoking look at why Duke changed, and what it meant to become a truly integrated university.
If you’re not able to visit the Duke University Libraries to see the exhibit, please have a look at the online exhibit!
Post contributed by exhibit curators Valerie Gillispie, University Archivist, and Maureen McCormick, Isobel Craven Drill Intern.
Date: Monday, December 10th, 2012 Time: 1:00 PM to 12:00 AM Location: Rare Book Room suite Contact Information: Amy McDonald, amy.mcdonald(at)duke.edu
Need we remind you, dear busy students, that next Monday is the final Reading Day before exams begin? The Rubenstein Library is convening a very special study hall to help relieve at least the stress of finding a library studying space (you’re on your own for your chemistry final).
We’ll be opening the Biddle Rare Book Room’s double doors promptly at 1:00 PM and leaving them open until midnight. You’ll be able to read over your notes on our comfy couches, review your flashcards next to the Audubons, and finish up your final paper under the History of Medicine Collection’s ever-watchful glass eyeballs. The rooms were designed to look like the library of an 18th century English manor house, so yeah . . . study like it’s 1799. With wi-fi!
And it’s your chance to say “so long” to the Rare Book Room suite before it closes for renovation on December 17th. (Wondering what renovations will take place in the Rare Book Room suite? Check out our Rubenstein Renovation FAQ!) Rubenstein Library staff will also be around to answer questions about the renovation and what research at the Rubenstein Library will look like over the next few years.
Space will be available on a first-come, first-served basis, and no food or drink will be permitted (there ARE still rare books in the room’s bookcases, after all).
There might even be a pop quiz . . . .
Biddle Rare Book Room, ca. 1950s. Party hats not included.
Between December 17th, 2012 and January 6th 2013we will be closed while we relocate our workspaces and collections to our new space. We will reopen to the public on January 7, 2013 in our new temporary reading room: the third floor of Perkins Library!
Staff will have been relocated by January 7th, but our collections will be moving until February 17th, 2013. Access to collections and reference services will be limited while we finish moving them.
If you’re planning a research trip we strongly encourage you to come after February 17th. If you just can’t wait and need to come between January 7, 2013 and February 17, 2013, please contact us at least four days before your visit so we can make sure we have the material you want to use.
We’ll miss you while we’re closed, but we’re excited to have you visit us in our new home! If you have any questions about our move or the library renovation in general check out our Information for Researchers and Visitors and our Renovation FAQ, and if you still have lingering questions let us know.
As a new research services librarian at the Rubenstein Library, it’s been fascinating to explore what we have in the library. People have this idea that our collections are made up of only old books and paper, but our holdings are far more diverse than that, as I’m sure our blog readers know. Recently, a researcher was looking at a box from the Julian Shakespeare Carr Papers and when they returned the box I noticed it was oddly light and also labeled as fragile. Curious, I opened the box to find strange dark brown lumps sealed in plastic bags.
Box 2 of the Julian Shakespeare Carr PapersTobacco Twists
Fortunately there was small piece of paper in the box explaining that I was looking at tobacco twists from 1885 that were made in Durham, N.C. by the W. T. Blackwell & Company, which Julian Shakespeare Carr became a partner of in 1871. Tobacco twists were made by braiding and twisting tobacco leaves together into a sort of rope that could then be knotted or coiled, like these examples. While tobacco twists are strange looking today, they were one of the most common forms of tobacco in the 1800s. Consumers could cut off as much tobacco as they needed, whether it was headed for their pipe for smoking or straight into their mouths for chewing.
Bull Durham Cigarettes
However, in the late 19th century Americans began to move away from chewing tobacco and pipes toward cigarettes. This box contains another Blackwell & Company product: Bull Durham cigarettes. These cigarettes are still wrapped in their paper pack, so you can’t get a good look at them, but if you could you would find filterless, hand-rolled cigarettes. At this time the cigarette production hadn’t been mechanized so it was an incredibly time-consuming and labor-intensive process. Even the best factory workers were only able to roll 4 or 5 cigarettes a minute.
Blackwell’s competitor and Durham neighbor, W. Duke, Sons & Company pioneered the use of the recently invented cigarette rolling machine in 1884, enabling them to produce up to 200 cigarettes a minute from one machine and sell those cigarettes at a substantially lower cost. By the end of the century W. Duke, Sons & Company became the dominant tobacco company in Durham and the country, and Blackwell & Company and its Bull Durham brand eventually ended up as part of the Duke’s growing tobacco empire.
Post contributed by Kate Collins, Research Services Librarian.
Date: Friday, November 30th, 2012 Time: 3:00 PM Location: Biddle Rare Book Room, Perkins Library, Duke University Contact Information: Kirston Johnson, kirston.johnson(at)duke.edu
Please join us this Friday at 3:00pm for a screening of The Extravagant Shadows,David Gatten’s new work of digital cinema. Gatten is an award-winning filmmaker and Guggenheim fellow, and is currently a Lecturing Fellow and Artist in Residence with Duke University’s Program in Arts of the Moving Image. Earlier this year he was named one of the fifty best filmmakers under fifty by Cinema Scope magazine.
Still from The Extravagant Shadows
Fourteen years in the making, The Extravagant Shadows is a film concerned with libraries, reading, letters, and lovers. It premiered at the 50th annual New York Film Festival and has received widespread acclaim.
Still from The Extravagant Shadows
“David Gatten’s first digital work, The Extravagant Shadows, undertakes the head-scratching question of what it would mean for a film to be of its textual sources. A historical narrative of love separated across space and time is embedded in various codes and correspondences, all of it pocked by ellipsis and obscurity, never unfolding so much as digressing, disclosing, doubling back.” – Max Goldberg, Fandor
“Gatten […] lays long excerpts, condensations, and re-writings of text upon the image itself, so that looking at the image is as much about seeing as it is reading—if these two activities can even be separated. The text tells a looping, broken and elliptical tale of love across distances, love missed and time passed, of communicating via letter, manuscript, telegraph, […] notes, novelization, monologues and memories across and within these spaces. Of the lost meanings, allusive facts and fixtures, of the supreme ambiguity of purposes, of a sense of time, of narrative to be found between, around and inside text and its transmissions to the reader.” – Daniel Kasman, “Love in the Painted Image,” MUBI
As we sit down to our Thanksgiving dinners, I leave you with a few images from a recent acquisition of thirty-four medical prints collected and donated by William H. Helfand. The posters date mainly from 18th century Paris, but the earliest dates to 1695 (the Kospter poster below) and the latest to 1991. They are all beautiful prints–heavy with political satire and caricatures, quack doctors and alchemy. But they also serve as wise reminders to eat in moderation this season. Happy Thanksgiving from the Rubenstein Library!
Maleuvre, “La Ribotte a nos chants”, color lithograph, Paris 1823Cheret, J., “Kola Marque,” color lithograph, Paris, c. 1895Dusort, Cornelius, “Hopster,” engraving, Holland, 1695Grandville and Forest, “Memento Homo Quia Pulvis…”, hand color lithograph, Paris, 1833Langlumé, “L’indigestion” from Album Comique, color lithograph, 1823
Post contributed by Joanne Fairhurst, Technical Services Intern and doctoral candidate in the Classical Studies Dept.
Dispatches from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University
