Category Archives: From Our Collections

From Our Collections, New at the Rubenstein Library, Rare Books

10 Days, 10 New Acquisitions: Day Ten

Today, we’re wrapping up our celebration of the beginning of a new fiscal year with our last feature on one of the notable items that arrived here at the RBMSCL in the past year. Get ready for announcements of many more exciting acquisitions in 2011-2012! We’d like to thank Mark Zupan, the Libraries’ graphic designer, and everyone in the Digital Production Center for their help with the images for these posts.

Le Premier [Second] Volume des Plus Excellents Bastiments de France by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, 1576 and 1579.

A major document of Renaissance Europe, Androuet du Cerceau’s survey of French buildings includes nearly 150 engraved plates.  In two volumes, 36 palaces, castles, and other major buildings are beautifully illustrated by detailed plans and views.  In some cases, the buildings no longer stand or are now vastly different than they appeared in 16th-century France.

For more photos of our new acquisitions (and other materials from the RBMSCL’s collections), check out the “From the RBMSCL’s Collections” set on the Duke University Libraries’ Flickr photostream.

Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections.

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Bingham Center, From Our Collections, Instruction

Today is Zine Library Day!

Making Zines at Girls Rock CampAnd we’ve been celebrating by making zines!

Future rock stars at NC Girls Rock Camp made zine pages in a workshops led by Kelly Wooten, Tali Beesley, and Alex Krensky of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture; Erin Hammeke, conservator for Special Collections; and Rosemary Davis of the Duke University Archives. This is the fifth year our librarians have led zine workshops for NC Girls Rock Camp!

A Completed Zine PageYou can celebrate our anniversary and Zine Library Day by downloading the Bingham Center’s fun new mini-zine and making your own!

You’ll find more pictures from this year’s workshops—and past ones, too—at the Bingham Center’s Flickr photostream.

Learn more about Zine Library Day on this wiki.

Post contributed by Kelly Wooten, Research Services and Collection Development Librarian for the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture.

Archive of Documentary Arts, From Our Collections, New at the Rubenstein Library, Rare Books

10 Days, 10 New Acquisitions: Day Nine

We’re celebrating the beginning of a new fiscal year by reviewing some notable items and collections that arrived here at the RBMSCL in the past year. Get ready for announcements of many more exciting acquisitions in 2011-2012!

Photo of Gaza from Photographs of the Holy Land

Photographs of the Holy Land: Sinai and Palestine; Lower Egypt, Thebes, and the Pyramids; Upper Egypt and Ethiopia by Francis Frith, 1863.

In 1856-57, when the science and art of photography were still young and developing (pun intended), the Englishman Francis Frith traveled to the Middle East to photograph the great sites of antiquity.  A work of monumental proportions and importance to the early history of documentary photography, Francis Frith’s Photographs of the Holy Land includes some of the earliest published photographic images of Jerusalem, as well as iconic views of Egypt’s monuments and ruins, some now lost or much more decayed. The 111 albumen photographs are mounted in three folio volumes, and the set acquired by Duke this year is notable for the fine condition of the photographs.

From the Archive of Documentary Arts.

For more photos of our new acquisitions (and other materials from the RBMSCL’s collections), check out the “From the RBMSCL’s Collections” set on the Duke University Libraries’ Flickr photostream.

Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections.

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Bingham Center, From Our Collections, Manuscripts, New at the Rubenstein Library, New Finding Aids

10 Days, 10 New Acquisitions: Day Eight

We’re celebrating the beginning of a new fiscal year by reviewing some notable items and collections that arrived here at the RBMSCL in the past year. Get ready for announcements of many more exciting acquisitions in 2011-2012!

Annotations and Manuscript by Brigid Brophy
Brigid Brophy Collection, 1937-1953

Brigid Antonia Brophy, Lady Levey (1929-1995), was an English writer of novels, biographies, essays, and other works, and a major feminist and pacifist voice of the 1960s and beyond.  She was greatly influenced by Freudian psychoanalytic theory, and this collection shows her engaging with Sigmund Freud’s texts: marking passages of interest to return to, jotting notes to capture moments of inspiration.  In one volume she laid in an untitled manuscript on telepathy.

From the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture.

For more photos of our new acquisitions (and other materials from the RBMSCL’s collections), check out the “From the RBMSCL’s Collections” set on the Duke University Libraries’ Flickr photostream.

Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections.

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Franklin Research Center, From Our Collections, New at the Rubenstein Library, Rare Books

10 Days, 10 New Acquisitions: Day Seven

We’re celebrating the beginning of a new fiscal year by reviewing some notable items and collections that arrived here at the RBMSCL in the past year. Get ready for announcements of many more exciting acquisitions in 2011-2012!

Cover of Carpet Bag Rule in Florida

Carpet Bag Rule in Florida: The Inside Workings of the Reconstruction of Civil Government in Florida After the Close of the Civil War by John Wallace, 1888

John Wallace (1842-1908) was born a slave in North Carolina, served in the Union army during the Civil War, and settled in Florida at the end of the war.  He served in the Florida state House of Representatives and Senate during the Reconstruction era as a Republican, the longest political tenure of any black man in Florida; however, his book, published in 1888, is very critical of his fellow Republicans and Reconstruction rule.  Doubts about Wallace’s authorship emerged quickly, both because of his race and his stance against the Republicans, but proof that the book is not by him remains unfound.

From the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture.

For more photos of our new acquisitions (and other materials from the RBMSCL’s collections), check out the “From the RBMSCL’s Collections” set on the Duke University Libraries’ Flickr photostream.

Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections.

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Archive of Documentary Arts, From Our Collections, New at the Rubenstein Library

10 Days, 10 New Acquisitions: Day Six

We’re celebrating the beginning of a new fiscal year by reviewing some notable items and collections that arrived here at the RBMSCL in the past year. Get ready for announcements of many more exciting acquisitions in 2011-2012!

Page from Mildred Hoover's Photo Album

“My Siberian Trip,” 1919 May-1920 August by Mildred E. Hoover.

Mildred Hoover was an American Red Cross nurse. Her photo album records two trips that Hoover took with Red Cross commissions, to Russia in May 1919 and Europe in February 1920, in 440 black-and-white photographs. While in Siberia, the commission worked at various camps and hospitals for the American Expeditionary forces, but Hoover included photographs of local inhabitants, soldiers of various countries, and provided rare images of a Russian submarine. During their travels in Europe, the commission stopped in London, Antwerp, Warsaw, Krakow, Switzerland, and Paris. There are also photos of Warsaw’s celebration of Poland’s victory over the Bolsheviks at the Battle of Warsaw.

From the Archive of Documentary Arts.

For more photos of our new acquisitions (and other materials from the RBMSCL’s collections), check out the “From the RBMSCL’s Collections” set on the Duke University Libraries’ Flickr photostream.

Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections.

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From Our Collections, History of Medicine

Medical Move Mondays: Lots of Blue Trucks

It’s week four of our series on the History of Medicine Collections‘ move from the Medical Center Library on Duke’s medical campus to the RBMSCL on West Campus.

Moving a collection in the midst of a North Carolina summer is tough.  Without our shipping and receiving department, a good chunk of this move would not have been possible. Shipping has moved over forty of these heavy, blue, bulky trucks from the Medical Center Library to Smith Warehouse or the Library Service Center in a small van, along with many other bins and items.

Book Trucks with Circulating Collection Materials

Shipping and Receiving staff, with the help of others from the LSC, have really made so much possible. On top of moving over 8,000 circulating monographs and serials to Smith Warehouse, they’ve also moved over 5,000 items to the LSC.  The items sent to Smith Warehouse were processed by the wonderful Technical Services staff and added to the circulating collection at Perkins. The items sent to LSC are now part of the RBMSCL collection. These include a large collection of sexuality books, as well as historical journals. These can be accessed via the catalog and requested by contacting RBMSCL.

For photos of the move from start to finish, visit the “HOM Collections Move” set on the Duke University Libraries’ Flickr photostream.

Next week: (New) home, sweet home!

Post contributed by Rachel Ingold, Curator for the History of Medicine Collections.

From Our Collections, New at the Rubenstein Library, Rare Books

10 Days, 10 New Acquisitions: Day Five

We’re celebrating the beginning of a new fiscal year by reviewing some notable items and collections that arrived here at the RBMSCL in the past year. Get ready for announcements of many more exciting acquisitions in 2011-2012!

Unsterblicher Tugend-Schatz durch gute Handelschafft erworben von der weyland durchleuchtigsten Chur-Fürstin … Elisabetha Amalia Magdalena verwittibten Pfaltz-Gräfin bey Rhein, und Chur-Fürstin in Bayrn …bey drey-tägiger Leich-Begängnus in einer Lob-Rede by Nicolaus Staudacher, 1710

A memorial volume produced in Augsburg, Germany, after the death of the Countess of Pfalz-Neuburg (1635-1709), showing engraved versions of the 25 giant emblematic paintings created for the funerary ceremonies by the Countess’s court painter, Franz Haagen. A very rare book, it complements the outstanding collection of German emblem books in the RBMSCL.

For more photos of our new acquisitions (and other materials from the RBMSCL’s collections), check out the “From the RBMSCL’s Collections” set on the Duke University Libraries’ Flickr photostream.

Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections.

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From Our Collections, New at the Rubenstein Library, Rare Books

10 Days, 10 New Acquisitions: Day Four

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We’re celebrating the beginning of a new fiscal year by reviewing some notable items and collections that arrived here at the RBMSCL in the past year. Get ready for announcements of many more exciting acquisitions in 2011-2012!

The Penny Pickwick by Thomas Peckett Prest. Edited by Bos, ca. 1837-42

Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836-37) was so popular that it almost immediately generated a flurry of piracies, travesties, and plagiarisms.  One of the first of these was the Penny Pickwick, so called for its being issued weekly in 112 parts, each costing one English penny.  The set now at the RBMSCL contains 108 of the 112 original parts, now very hard to find in their original state (since most sets were read and discarded or bound together).  While its claims to artistic merit are few and far between, Prest’s work nevertheless provides a fascinating glimpse of London’s popular culture at the dawn of the Victorian era and the workings of its publishers, hack writers, and illustrators.  The Penny Pickwick is also an early example of the “penny dreadfuls” that swept through England in the nineteenth century: cheap, sensational fiction aimed at lower-class audiences, and important works in the development of genres such as mystery, science, and horror fiction.

For more photos of our new acquisitions (and other materials from the RBMSCL’s collections), check out the “From the RBMSCL’s Collections” set on the Duke University Libraries’ Flickr photostream.

Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections.

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From Our Collections, Hartman Center, New at the Rubenstein Library

10 Days, 10 New Acquisitions: Day Three

We’re celebrating the beginning of a new fiscal year by reviewing some notable items and collections that arrived here at the RBMSCL in the past year. Get ready for announcements of many more exciting acquisitions in 2011-2012!

Illustration from The Story of Bunny Cortex, 1915

The Story of Bunny Cortex, 1915

2010-2011 saw the beginning of a “Literature as Advertising” collection in the Hartman Center: a group of stories, poems, and similar literary works whose primary purpose is the promotion of a product or service.  The collection includes examples from the 1880s to 1950s, featuring such characters as Santa Claus (for the Golden Rule Bazaar of San Francisco), Lewis Carroll’s Alice (selling dairy products), the “Toastie Elfins” (for Post Toasties cereal), and the Pied Piper (for Pied Piper shoes).

From the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History.

Through July 25th, find more examples from the Hartman Center’s “Literature as Advertising” collection in their exhibit, “Look Boys and Girls! Advertising to Children in the 20th Century.”

For more photos of our new acquisitions (and other materials from the RBMSCL’s collections), check out the “From the RBMSCL’s Collections” set on the Duke University Libraries’ Flickr photostream.

Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections.

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