Margarita Philosophica by Gregorius Ileisch (1504), depicting a hornbook
Long used as a primer in children’s education, the hornbook originated in England in the 15th century. The books commonly take the form of a wooden paddle inscribed with the alphabet or a piece of text, which is protected with a transparent sheet of horn. The materials of construction can vary, with the paddle made of wood, bone, leather, or stone. The text can be printed or in manuscript, on parchment or on paper. The protective transparent sheet might also be made from mica. The hornbook is referenced in literature as early as Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and is a format that was often used in both English and the American education until the late 18th century.
Woodcut vignette from the title page of Hornbyes Hornbook by William Hornby (1622)
We learned all this and more when a special edition of Andrew Tuer’s History of the Horn-Book came through the lab recently for boxing. The publisher’s use of the hornbook’s iconic shape in the decoration on the front cover and the spine label is quite appropriate.
But while this parchment case binding looks fairly ordinary, it contains quite a surprise. The front section of the book has been glued into a solid block, which is quite heavy.
The blocked section features a textile flap along the tail edge of the front flyleaf.
Opening the flaps reveals a hidden compartment with three facsimile hornbooks!
Don’t you wish every history book you picked up included little artifacts hidden inside a secret compartment? Thanks to Rachel Penniman for snapping some photos of this amazing object before it returned to the stacks in its new enclosure.
Erin Hammeke describes a wooden board repair to Mary Yordy and Rachel Penniman.
Caring for library collections often requires experimentation and ingenuity. In supporting the needs of library programs or researcher requests, we are regularly confronted with unusual objects or condition issues that have no obvious treatment solution. When you happen upon a novel or particularly effective approach to these complex treatments, it’s always nice to share what you have learned with your colleagues!
This week, the Conservation Services staff were treated to some tips in treating very large books and broken wooden boards by senior conservator Erin Hammeke. Hint: Both involve the liberal and creative application of clamps.
Occasionally an item will arrive in the lab that is so intriguing that I just have to know the story behind it. These five miniature photograph albums titled “LIFE WITH CIPE” caught my eye. The photographs were tiny but beautiful and I was curious about the meaning of the title. What is CIPE?
The photographs mostly look like candid vacation snapshots but there are also some still life and city scenes.
They are all so small and regular in size and proportion that they must have been printed from negatives as a contact sheet. One print even shows the holes from the film.
The images show a great sense of design and there is an eye to composition significantly better than your average family snapshots. They really felt more like an artist’s portfolio than a typical vacation album.
So it was no surprise when I heard back from archivist Rick Collier and Hartman Center Director Jackie Reid Wachholz that these are photographs from the personal collection of graphic design power couple Cipe Pineles and William Golden.
While the Creative Director at CBS in the 1950’s William Golden designed the eye logo still used by the broadcaster today.
Cipe Pineles (pronounced Cee-Pee) was the first female art director of a major magazine and the first female member of the Art Director’s Club of New York in 1943. Working at big name publications like Glamour, Seventeen, and Mademoiselle she created magazines directed at young working women that appealed to their intelligence and independence. She is also credited as being the first to commission fine artists like Ad Reinhardt and Andy Warhol for work in mass media publications.
In order to learn more about Cipe Pineles I borrowed a biography from Perkins Library and discovered it was written by none other than our very own conservation department volunteer Martha Scotford. Before becoming a volunteer in our lab, Martha was a professor of graphic design at North Carolina State University and is the reigning expert on Cipe Pineles. What a small world! I was so happy to be able to share this addition with Martha who recognized these albums from her visits to the Golden’s home when she was writing Cipe’s biography.
Duke Rubenstein Library also holds a collection of William Golden’s papers that I looked through for more insight into William and Cipe’s lives. One of my favorite discoveries in that collection was a letter with attached photographs that William sent to Cipe. The photos are from his time in Paris during WWII and illustrate the events he saw on VE day. The photos are the same size as the ones in LIFE WITH CIPE and I wonder if this was a precursor to the albums.
Rubenstein Library has also recently acquired a collection of Cipe’s papers too. I wonder if there are more tiny photographs there.
Some of the more intriguing objects in the collection have characteristics that show evidence of a previous owner’s interaction with them. A good example of this recently came through the lab for an enclosure.
This copy of Walter Crane’s The Bases of Design (1898) is wrapped in a protective cloth cover, likely handmade by a previous owner. The cover is signed Naomi S. Gray at the tail of the spine, so we can only assume that she was the person who made it. These kinds of home-made book jackets are not all that uncommon, but the amount of detail in it’s design and construction is pretty extraordinary. The actual design of the publisher’s binding looks like this:
The design of the titling on the spine of the case is copied faithfully onto the jacket – but rather than continue with the floral motif of the publisher’s design, a small drawing of a crane is included to represent the author. A hem and single line of stitching at the head and tail of the jacket spine was added to prevent the cloth from unraveling where it is cut. The turn-ins on the interior of the boards show an equal level of care.
Lacing with ribbon or cord in this fashion is often seen in home-made book jackets of this style. In most cases, the materials used appear to be cheap scrap. Rarely do we see hemmed turn-ins and individual stitching around the lacing holes.
The attention to detail in so many aspects of the design and construction of this book jacket tells not only a great deal about the appreciation that Naomi had for this book, but showcases her excellent hand skills. In many ways, the evidence of ownership can stir a greater connection to the object than the text itself.
We have written here a few times about teaching bookbinding skills to local Girl Scouts so that they can get their Book Arts Badge (Post 1 and Post 2) . In addition to learning about preservation activities of cultural institutions, the workshop participants learn about the components of a book, and make three different book structures. Having done this workshop a couple of times, we thought it would be nice to change up some of the types of books that we make. Luckily, the recently acquired Lisa Unger Baskin Collection provided an object of inspiration: this movable book.
Also known as a metamorphosis or harlequinade, this item was made by Elizabeth Winspear, possibly a young woman of New England, in 1799. The book is composed of a single sheet, folded in an accordion style to form 4 panels. Each panel has a flap at top and bottom. The manuscript text and drawings tell a story using biblical figures and mythical beasts, ending with a kind of memento mori. The reader is instructed by the text to turn leaves up or down to see the transformation.
Although this item was made entirely by hand, the text and imagery are a very faithful representation of the genre. Examples of these movable books can be found from both Europe and North America, dating from the 17th to 19th centuries – and the story is remarkably consistent. See for example, this version printed in England in 1650.
The beginning, progress and end of man. (outside)(inside) London, Alsop for T. Dunster, 1650. The British Library
I’ve said before that the most popular part of our Book Arts Badge workshop is the last hour or so, in which the scouts have time to decorate their books. This type of movable book seemed like the perfect format to let the scouts unleash their creativity. After talking about Elizabeth Winspear’s book and showing them how to make the folds, we let them design their own metamorphoses. Here are some examples:
(Click each image to enlarge)
The scouts had a lot of fun with this structure and we really enjoyed seeing what they could do with it. It is amazing how an item produced by a young woman hundreds of years ago can inspire young women today to create book art of their own. Watching students interact with and respond to items from the library’s collection really brings the importance of preservation of cultural heritage into focus. We will definitely make more books like this in our future workshops.
If historical movable books are a topic of interest, you can see more examples of metamorphoses like this one at Learning as Play, hosted by Penn State University. Jacquiline Reid-Walsh has also written a book on the subject, titled Interactive Books: Playful Media Before Pop-Ups (2018). You may be interested in another genre of movable books, anatomical flap books, with many examples from Duke’s collection featured in this online exhibit. Highlights from the Baskin Collection are currently on display until June of this year in the Biddle exhibit suite, located just inside the main entrance of Perkins Library.
The Rubenstein Library’s History of Medicine Collection always seems to provide the most unusual examples of illustration. This text (catalog record here) by English physician Robert Fludd, published by Johann Theodor de Bry in 1623, is no exception. The anatomical specimen is both comical and gruesome…but also strangely familiar.
Johann Theodor’s father, Theodor de Bry, was also prominent publisher and engraver, and many of his works on exploration of the New World can be found in Duke’s collection. Theordor’s 1590 engraving, The Trvve Picture of One Picte from the second edition of Thomas Hariot’s book A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, appears in the same pose.
Over the past year, I’ve looked at a lot of print advertisements for Pond’s cosmetic products. Hundreds of them at least, maybe even thousands. The ads promote the properties of “Extract Cream”, “Cold Cream”, “Vanishing Cream”, lipstick, tissues, foundation – you name it! They span over 100 years, with the earliest printed in 1884 and the most recent from the mid-1990s. The work of well known photographers, such as Edward Steichen or Baron de Meyer, appear in some of the ads.
So what is the cause of this cosmetic ad obsession?
Many familiar with the Duke’s Rubenstein Library are also familiar with the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History. One of the largest collections within the Harman Center is the selected collections of the J. Walter Thompson Company (JWT), a long-running advertising agency that has worked with many well-known American companies. The JWT collection includes a large number of domestic advertisements for the Chesebrough-Ponds company and the materials had a number of condition issues that made handling difficult for researchers and sometime dangerous for the ads. It became necessary to go through the collection, item by item, and stabilize or rehouse items as needed.
If you are curious about the name of the collection, here is a little history: Pond’s Cream was originally invented by Theron T. Pond in 1846. The original product included extracted witch hazel and was called “Golden Treasure”, but was shortly renamed to “Pond’s Extract”. The Chesebrough Manufacturing Company was founded in 1859 by Robert Chesebrough as an oil business which produced a petroleum jelly product called “Luxor”, eventually known as “Vaseline”. Chesebrough Manufacturing Company and Pond’s Creams merged in 1955, but were acquired by Unilever in 1987.
The collection is stored in 22 metal-edge boxes, and each box contains many folders. Some of the folders were too small for their contents and the advertisements were susceptible to sliding around as the box was handled. These small folders were replaced with a size that fit the box exactly to reduce the likelihood of damage during transport and shelving.
Each folder contains many magazine or newspaper advertisements, all different sizes and printed on different papers. They were likely retained by JWT as “tear sheets” and many are mounted to heavy black cardstock. Some of those black cardstock pages have many advertisements mounted in layers.
The black paper mounts include hole punches and remnants of textile tape, suggesting they were once the pages of large scrapbooks or albums and were disbound and cut down before entering the library’s collection. The advertisements printed on newsprint have become very brittle. The larger sheets were folded down to fit on the album page and many of them have cracked along the folds.
Items in this condition were repaired along the folds with thin Japanese paper, toned to match the newsprint. They were refolded along the original creases (now reinforced) and placed in clear polyester envelopes to protect them from further damage as researchers page through the folder.
Before and After repairing and refolding
Unfolded and unmounted newsprint ads were fully encapsulated in clear polyester, using our ultrasonic welder.
Before and after encapsulation
The adhesive mounting many of the advertisements to their album pages has failed. Several of them were remounted or repaired with pressure sensitive tapes, which have since oxidized and discolored the paper. Sometimes the tape adhesive had crept out from under the cellophane tape carrier and was causing the ad to stick to its neighbors. These taped items were treated by removing the tape carrier and reducing the adhesive to prevent further sticking. Unfortunately, stain reduction was outside the scope of this project.
Before and after tape removal.
Some of the ads that were detaching from their mounts had not come away completely. As a result, it was very easy for them to tear or to have parts torn off during normal use. The example below is pretty typical, where just the top-left corner is still attached to the cardstock mount. I was able to repair scarf tears, rejoin the separated parts, and/or re-adhere the page to the mount with wheat starch paste.
Many hours have gone into stabilizing and addressing the housing needs of this collection. While the treatment has been fairly low-tech and the decisions straightforward, the results go a long way to making this advertisement collection more usable in the reading room.
Two of the building’s elevator shafts are getting some renovations this week. Unfortunately they are right on the other side of the wall from the lab. So this is what it sounds like inside Beth’s office today:
While these two books look very different, they are actually the exact same edition. They were both printed with the same setting of type and on the same paper. The book on the left is in a later binding than the one on the right, with some added edge gilding. But why the difference in textblock thickness? The one on the left was pressed very hard by the binder. It’s pretty incredible how compact a textblock can become with enough pressure -and pressing is not without its downsides. These books were letterpress printed and the dimensional impression of the type, which is an artifact of the printing process, has been completely pressed out of the thinner copy.
What do you when your anatomical flap book has gone all to pieces? This book arrived with every flap piece detached from its page but all still in good condition. Having the flaps detached actually made it easier to see the usually hidden backs of those parts, but what is a flap book without a flap?
To maintain access to the individual parts but still retain the interactive and movable essence of the book, we decided not to reattach the loose parts to their pages. Instead they were put in Mylar pockets hinged to a Mylar backing sheet. So the flaps move in a way similar to what was originally intended while still allowing the back of each part to be more accessible.
Opening the flaps reveals a hidden compartment with three facsimile hornbooks!
Don’t you wish every history book you picked up included little artifacts hidden inside a secret compartment? Thanks to Rachel Penniman for snapping some photos of this amazing object before it returned to the stacks in its new enclosure.
