Vintage Points

The annual public reading of the Declaration of Independence of July 1776, the British reply to the Declaration of September 1776, King George III’s speech to Parliament of October 1776, and the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution will take place on Monday, July 4th, at 1:30 p.m. outside the Williams College Museum of Art. Williamstown Theatre Festival actors Steven Weber (appearing in Three Hotels through July 24th) and Jessica Hecht (in A Streetcar Named Desire through July 3rd) will read the Declaration and Preamble, while the British texts will be read by Lewis Black (appearing in One Slight Hitch beginning July 6th). The Chapin Library’s collection of the Founding Documents of the United States is on display at the Williams College Museum of Art until the completion of the Stetson-Sawyer project in 2014. – WGH

Archives and Special Collections and the Chapin Library will be open special hours for both Commencement and Alumni Reunion weekends. Seniors, alumni, family, and friends are welcome to visit us in our temporary quarters at the Southworth Schoolhouse, corner of Southworth and School streets.

For Williams College Commencement, we will be open from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Friday, June 3rd, and from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon on Saturday, June 4th. Selections from our fabulous holdings will be on view, and staff will be on hand to talk with visitors about special collections at Williams.

For Alumni Reunions, we will be open from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, June 9th and Friday, June 10th, and from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, June 11th. Examples of Williams memorabilia will be displayed, along with part of a special exhibition (in three places on campus) devoted to achievements by members of the Class of 1961.

Our regular summer hours apply the rest of each week.

To celebrate the resumption of the Stetson-Sawyer project, a small selection of historical images from the College Archives’ collections has been installed in the flat display case on the first floor of Sawyer Library near the Access Services desk. These pictures showcase classic spaces of Stetson Hall (opened 1923) that will be restored and reimagined. The exhibition Recalling Stetson Hall may be seen through July 1st.

Just in time for our campus celebrations, a brief article on the Chapin Library, “Rare Treasures Abound at Chapin”, has been posted on the College website. – WGH & SKB

Shown is Stetson Hall as it appeared soon after construction was completed.

The Chapin Library includes on its website an ever-growing list of useful links to online resources devoted to libraries, book collecting, manuscripts, printing, binding, papermaking, publishing, graphic design, and archival conservation, and to selected sites concerned with art, history, literature, science, and technology, especially those related to the subject matter of Chapin holdings.

New additions to this list include:

Iconclass. A classification system for art and iconography. (Compare this scheme with those used by the Art and Architecture Thesaurus and the Index of Christian Art.)

Pop-ups! They’re Not Just for Kids. A video exhibition from the Harold M. Goralnick ’71 Pop-up Book Collection at Bowdoin College. Another recent video about pop-up books, and there are many on the Web, is a how-to made by Sean McGee for the 2010–2011 Smithsonian Institution exhibition Paper Engineering: Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn.

The Virtual Library of Bibliographical Heritage. Conducted by the Ministry of Culture and the Autonomous Regions of Spain, this project aims to supply online digital facsimiles of printed books and manuscripts from Spanish historical collections.

The William Augustus Brewer Bookplate Collection. This database at the University of Delaware Library currently contains 3,040 digitized ex libris which may be browsed or searched. – WGH

The National Archives recently announced the discovery of nearly 3,000 documents written by Walt Whitman while an employee of the federal government. A resident of Washington, D.C. from 1863 to 1873, Whitman had already established himself as a poet, but to support himself and to help fund his work in aid of soldiers, he took a series of jobs, mainly as a clerk, in the offices of the Army Paymaster, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the U.S. Attorney General. The newly identified papers provide a new window into Whitman’s life during and immediately following the Civil War.

The Chapin Library also does its part in support of Whitman studies, by administering a major collection of books by and about Walt Whitman, together with memorabilia and artifacts, established in 1964 through the generosity of Mrs. Julian K. Sprague in memory of her late husband, a notable book collector and resident of Williamstown. Among much else, this includes every edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass published during the poet’s lifetime. More than five hundred items were added by Mrs. Sprague to Whitman materials already in the Library (some provided by the mother of Julian K. Sprague, Mrs. Frank J. Sprague, herself a major collector of Whitmaniana), and many further volumes have been acquired in later years.

The value of the Chapin Library’s collection to students of Whitman’s work has been proved time and again, most recently through presentations to classes taught by Professors Cleghorn and Kent of the Williams English Department. Even though only a small part of the Chapin Whitman holdings can be kept in the Library’s temporary Southworth Schoolhouse rooms, enough is on hand to show how Whitman edited and substantially enlarged Leaves of Grass from the first edition of 1855 (the Chapin has several variants) through the years to the so-called “deathbed edition” of 1892, and how he promoted his work through anonymous, self-written “reviews”. – WGH

Shown is the portrait engraving of Walt Whitman, by Samuel Hollyer after a daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison, first printed in Leaves of Grass in 1855.

For an earlier generation, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 21, 1963 was a defining moment. Those of us old enough to remember can say exactly where we were when we heard about that tragedy, and some of us with archival foresight preserved newspapers and magazines which recorded the event. The Chapin Library has recently received a cache of these, including special memorial issues of Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post, and the October 5, 1964 issue of Newsweek concerning the report on the assassination – still controversial in some circles – produced by the Warren Commission. Together with related memorabilia, these came to us from Terence T. Finn, Williams ’64, who recalls that he was in Professor James MacGregor Burns’ political science class when news of the shooting arrived.

The death of John F. Kennedy ended a hopeful if troubled administration which began fifty years ago today with one of the finest speeches in American history. Always an accomplished orator, at his inauguration President Kennedy famously encouraged his fellow Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country”, and other citizens of the world to “ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man”. These stirring phrases were only two of many written by the president together with his aide Theodore Sorensen; a recent analysis of the speech explains the keys to its success. A video and transcript of the inaugural address of January 20, 1961 may be found on the website of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. – WGH

Shown is a printed card, with facsimile signature of Jacqueline Kennedy (Mrs. John F. Kennedy), acknowledging a contribution to the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library. Preserved with its original envelope, it is part of the welcome gift to the Chapin Library by Terence T. Finn.

In 2003 the Chapin Library mounted an exhibition in honor of Jay M. Pasachoff, Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy at Williams, based largely upon his superb personal collection of rare astronomy books which are kept in the Chapin for use in teaching along with the Library’s own important holdings in the History of Science. A handlist of the exhibits may be read here. It was planned also to publish a more elaborate, bibliographical catalogue of the Pasachoff collection, including a series of essays by Jay’s friends and colleagues about the books and their significance, and this is still our intent. Circumstances, however, having delayed completion of a printed book so far, we have now posted the essays, short-title lists of the Pasachoff volumes and of selected astronomical works in the Chapin Library, a chart of Professor Pasachoff’s travels to observe solar eclipses, and a small selection of photographs on a section of the Chapin website.

We hope that these new pages will encourage members of the Williams community to explore the fascinating materials that lie behind The Heavens Revealed and which may be seen by arrangement in the Chapin Library/College Archives reading room at the Southworth Schoolhouse. – WGH

Shown is the etched title-page by Stefano della Bella for the Dialogo (1632) by Galileo Galilei, from the collection of Jay M. Pasachoff.

The talented Pauline Baynes (1922–2008), the original illustrator of the seven “Narnia” books by C.S. Lewis and of writings by J.R.R. Tolkien, also produced thousands of images for books by other authors, and for magazines, advertisements, and ephemera such as bookplates and greeting cards. Many examples of her work, including some of the finest graphic art of the 20th century, are held in the Chapin Library.

To celebrate the holiday season, a selection of Christmas cards with art by Pauline Baynes is on display on the main level of Sawyer Library. These reveal some of the wide range of styles she brought to her art, to suit a particular mood or purpose: from medieval cartoons and patterning to delicate Persian miniatures, from painters of the Northern Renaissance such as Pieter Brueghel to 15th-century books of hours, from the England of Queen Victoria to the world of nature. Some of the pictures were used first as book or magazine illustrations – one card shows a scene with Father Christmas from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis – while others were specially commissioned.

Pauline Baynes: Designs for Christmas is on view at Sawyer Library through January 3, 2011. – WGH

Shown is one of the artist’s personal Christmas cards, from the Chapin Library’s Pauline Baynes Archive (© the Williams College Oxford Programme; all rights reserved).

Once again this term, the Chapin Library and College Archives have had many visitors to the Southworth Schoolhouse from the College community. Although our excellent collections by themselves attract students and faculty, we also have been reaching out to let people know how we can support learning at Williams, both in general and for specific courses. During Fall Term we have offered class presentations in all three divisions, not only those departments which traditionally have been our heaviest users – Art, English, History – but also Astronomy, Biology, Classics, Political Science, and Romance Languages. The photo above was taken during one of our most animated sessions, on the Spanish presence in the New World, conducted (in Spanish) by Prof. Miguel Martinez and using many rare books from the Chapin Library’s collections. (The large volume in the foreground is a 1513 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, open to a then-current map of the world.) Of course, we have also welcomed individual Williams students needing materials for research, or who simply want to see something ‘cool’ in the area of rare books and manuscripts, and there have been visitors as well from Bennington College and MCLA.

The Chapin Library and College Archives staffs are always happy to talk with faculty and students who wish to use our collections, and to make presentations on a wide variety of subjects. Just let us know how we can help! – WGH

Artist Herman Rosse (1887–1965) studied in his native Netherlands, at the Royal College of Art in London, and at Stanford. In 1913 he and his wife moved to the United States, where Rosse was a prolific architect, designer, and teacher. He first made set and costume designs for theatre while living in California. Later, in Illinois, he did further work for the stage in conjunction with Ben Hecht, Kenneth Macgowan, the Goodman Theater, and Mary Garden’s Chicago Grand Opera; and in New York, he was involved with drama, vaudeville, and musicals. He also worked in theatre in London and the Netherlands, and was an artist or art director for several films, including Frankenstein (1931) and The Emperor Jones (1933). In 1948 he was appointed Resident Stage Manager at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey, a post he held for a dozen years. In 1949 he designed the medallion for Broadway’s Tony Award.

A large part of Herman Rosse’s design archive has come to the Chapin Library since 1988, due to the generosity of members of his family. A selection of (mostly unlabeled) scenic designs by Rosse, from a 2008 gift by his son, Dr. Michael D. Rosse, is on view on the main floor of Sawyer Library through the end of October. – WGH

Shown is an unidentified set design (1920s?) by Herman Rosse.

As we conclude the month of Ramadan and celebrate Eid al-Fitr, the Chapin Library is pleased to announce the acquisition of an Ottoman manuscript Qur’an from the mid-19th century, written and decorated in a style which some consider to be the brightest flowering of Arabic calligraphy, and comprising 302 leaves of supreme reverence of the sacred text of Islam.

This fine example is available to see and consult in our temporary quarters at the Southworth Schoolhouse, together with several printed editions of the Qur’an. Among these is the first edition published in the United States, The Koran, Commonly Called the Alcoran of Mahomet, translated from the original Arabic into French by the Sieur De Ryer and then into English by Alexander Ross, printed in Springfield, Massachusetts by Henry Brewer for Isaiah Thomas, Jr. in October 1806.

As mentioned in a previous post, another Qur’an from the Chapin collections is on display on the second floor of the Williams College Museum of Art, as part of the exhibition The Matter of Theology. Written probably in Teheran, by a scribe who has signed at the end Monhany he wrote it 1249 Finished, this beautiful and reverently prepared manuscript thus dates from 1249 A.H. (or 1833 C.E.).

Together with other items from the Chapin Library, it is accompanied at WCMA by a Muslim prayer book from the late 18th century, written in Arabic in the Persian scribal tradition on polished ivory-toned paper and decorated with fine filigree patterns in colors and gold, and our thousand-year-old Megillah or Book of Esther, a vellum scroll partially unrolled. Though it is associated with the holiday of Purim rather than the new year celebration of Rosh Hashanah, the story of Esther and the Babylonian Captivity of the Jewish nation for centuries has been the most widely circulated Jewish biblical text among the general population. – RLV

Shown is a spread from the Chapin Library’s mid-19th-century manuscript Qur’an, with part of its wallet-style binding.

Update (September 14): The exhibition The Matter of Theology at the Williams College Museum of Art has closed. The Chapin Library’s exhibits are available to see in our reading room on request.

Update (September 22): An article about the Chapin Library’s new Qur’an appeared today in the Berkshire Eagle and North Adams Transcript.