The Toilet

If you looking to improve yourself in the New Year here is a handy guide by the author of the Suit of Armour that we blogged a few weeks ago. While that book was for boys finding their way into manhood, this one, The Toilet, is directed to young ladies trying to mature into a life that is true and good. Be thankful you didn't grow up in the 1820s...

Like the Suit of Armour, this book uses clever flaps to uncover the nature of good character, but rather than plates of armor, it is focused on all of the accoutrements of a young lady's toilet. So, a lovely image of a box of rouge superior to any sold in Paris opens to reveal "modesty" which, with its accompanying blush, makes for true and honest rouge. A bottle of a "universal and genuine beautifier" uncaps and turns out to be "Good Humour." You get the idea. All of the artifice of makeup can be naturally expressed through the most excellent virtues of a true lady.

To take a look ask for The Toilet by Stacey Grimaldi (Rare BJ1681 .G86 1821).

Vulgar Customs, Ceremonies, and Superstitions

This week's book is John Brand's Observations on Popular Antiquities: Chiefly Illustrating the Origin of Our Vulgar Customs, Ceremonies, and Superstitions (1813). Originally published in 1777, then edited and rearranged by Henry Ellis, the two-volume set lays out the British calendar year and its accompanying popular antiquities, now better known as folklore. It devotes about 60 pages to Christmas traditions, some still familiar and others rather unrecognizable.

One custom Brand lists is the hunting of the wren on the Isle of Man: "'On the 24th of December, towards evening, all the servant in general have a holiday; they go not to bed all night, but ramble about till the bells ring in all the churches, which is at twelve o'clock: prayers being over, they go to hunt the wren; and, after having found one of these poor birds, they kill her, and lay her on a bier with the utmost solemnity, bringing her to the parish church, and burying her with a whimsical kind of solemnity, singing dirges over her in the Manks language, which they call her knell; after which, Christmas begins.'" This tradition took place in other parts of the British Isles as well. It continued in various iterations long past Brand's lifetime and died out in the first half of the 20th century, before being revived more recently using a fake bird.  

To read about this and other holiday traditions, ask for Ticknor LEH B73o.

A Suit of Armour

British boys faced peril in the modern world of 1824--there were so many vices to tempt them into evil ways--but this little book offered an allegorical suit of armor to protect them through their peril. From the glorious plume on top to the brightest spurs below, each piece of armor represented and protected a noble virtue. Thus clad, a youth could navigate passage into adulthood with his good character intact to become a fine upstanding fellow fit for society capable of carrying out the hard work of empire.

Each chapter offers a bit of armory tipped onto the page to make a flap. You lift the flap and see the personality quality it protects: A Noble Helmet shields wisdom; the Strongest Breast Plate is an aegis for virtue; a pair of Excellent Gauntlets hold friendship safe.

 

While the book claims to have value to anyone who picks it up, it describes a suit:

... so light, that the most delicate of our auburn-haired English Boys may wear it for life without the slightest fatigue or inconvenience. Nay, instead of being cumberous and fatiguing, as all Armour has hitherto proved, this actually gives strength to the Body, and vivacity to the Countenance.

 

 

Come gird yourself (Dartmouth will test you!) by asking for Stacey Grimaldi's A Suit of Armour for Youth (London: Published by the proprietor, 1824), Rare N7740 .G74 1824.

Not So Wise After All

The other day, while searching for something else altogether, we stumbled across a letter written by an individual who is arguably best characterized as a celebrity villain within the small world of special collections. Thomas James Wise (1859-1937), the anti-hero of our story, was once a well-respected rare book collector who had begun amassing his own collection as a boy. He garnered an international reputation as an expert in the first printings of 19th-century English literary publications even as he continued to acquire books printed as far back as the 1500s for his private library. Wise's opinion on the authenticity of published works held such authority that in many cases his word was considered sufficient validation for newly discovered variants and privately printed editions of works by famous English authors.

As you've probably guessed, Wise was not only an astute bibliophile but an adept forger. In fact, he was so skilled at secretly printing and then selling fake editions of works by famous authors like Elizabeth Barrett Browning that he wasn't found out until he was in his late seventies. In the meantime, Wise had accumulated various honors and prestigious positions based upon his bibliographic acumen: an honorary master's degree from Oxford, an honorary fellowship from Worcester College, and the presidency of the Bibliographical Society, among others. If not for the investigative work of two fellow book collectors, John Carter and Henry Pollard, Wise would very likely have gotten away with it. However, in 1934, the two men published a pamphlet titled "An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets" that exposed Wise's decades-long deception and ruined his standing in the community. In a somewhat cheeky move, the pamphlet's epigraph is a quotation by Wise himself that avers the impossibility of creating a forgery able to elude expert detection.

In December of 1933, only months before Wise's world would be turned upside-down, he responds to a previous letter from his friend and prolific author E. V. Lucas. Lucas was in the midst of editing a centenary collection of Charles Lamb's letters and sought Wise's input. Wise replies that he owns two letters written by Lamb and thanks Lucas for dedicating the soon-to-be-published work to him. We have to wonder if Lucas ever regretted that decision, given that Wise's fame would soon turn to infamy. To see our letter, come to Rauner and ask to see MS-407, Box 2, Folder 14. We also have a large collection of his forged works. To find then out, search the catalog for "Thomas Wise Forgeries."

Camp Cookery

"The first thing to parties bent on roughing it is the selection of a tent." Maria Parloa's 1878 book Camp Cookery: How to Live in Camp begins with some general guidelines and "hints for comfort" when supplying a camping trip. She walks the reader through how big one's tent should be, how to set it up, how to select a camp stove, what to wear -- "both ladies and gentlemen should dress in flannel throughout" -- provisions to bring, and how to observe perfect cleanliness. This is all prelude to her main objective: how to cook.

Parloa's handbook makes it clear that being in the great outdoors should not come at the sacrifice of eating well. Her instructions include ambitious projects like a clam bake for "ten to twenty persons," as well as practical instructions for the less accomplished cook, ensuring that her readers know how to prepare basics like coffee and scrambled eggs. Of particular note is the large selection of puddings and baked goods, as well as various gruels for those who find themselves ill while roughing it.

After finding success with her first cookbook in 1872, Maria Parloa (1843-1909) shifted from working as a cook to a long career of teaching others. After the publication of Camp Cookery, she traveled to Europe to study additional cuisines and their accompanying pedagogies. Back home, she led classes, gave popular lectures, and published additional books. She founded her own cooking school and became a sought-after guest at other institutions. She expanded her expertise in other areas of household management and established herself as a trusted authority in the developing field of home economics. Highly successful if no longer well-known, we thought a look at her life and work would be a good way to christen the holiday week.

To look at Camp Cookery, ask for Rare Book TX823 .P25 1878.

Look What We Found!

Sometimes we "acquire" a book simply by discovering it in our collections. Every week we receive dozens of catalogs and offers from rare book and manuscript dealers. We are pretty picky about what we buy. We need to know that a book or manuscript will get used--we are not really adherents of the "build it and they will come" model of collection development. We are more focused on what do people need now and how can we build the collections to support them. Anyway, we are frequently tempted by pricey books and wrack our brains to figure how the book can do enough work for us to justify the cost.

A couple of weeks ago, a catalog came to us and we were ogling a very cool book: George Bartisch's Ophthalmodouleia, das ist Augendienst, the first work on ophthalmology from 1583. We could envision a lot of uses--we do a lot with the history of medicine--but the price was pretty steep so we were hesitant. Would the book do THAT much work for us? As we pondered, we checked the catalog, and, glory be, we already had a copy! Not only that, but all of its flaps still work and it still has its original metal clasps--so it is a dandy copy. Someone bought it for the library back in 1938 for a tiny fraction of what it costs today. A book unknown to us was sitting there all along just waiting to catch someone's eye. You can bet we will be using it now, and that it will find its way into Dartmouth classes.

 Come feast your eyes on it by asking for Rare RE41 .B3.

Today is World Digital Preservation Day!

Today we celebrate World Digital Preservation Day, which occurs on the first Thursday of every November. The day is meant to celebrate digital preservation and raise awareness of the challenges inherent in the task of recording human memory that exists in a digital format.

An interesting case for digital preservation exists in the Charles Furlong papers (Mss-197). Charles Wellington Furlong was the first American to explore the southernmost part of the Americas, the interior of Tierra del Fuego, in 1907 and 1908; we've blogged about him before. While there, he made wax cylinder recordings of the Onas and Yahgan peoples talking and singing. Obviously, there is no easy way to play a 100+ year old wax cylinder recording in the modern world. Even if there was, it is possible that the fragile, decaying media would only have one play left before it disintegrates, so one had better be prepared to capture the audio when it is being played. There is also a chance that the attempt at playing the item would destroy it before any audio could be heard.

Instead of potentially damaging the wax cylinders by playing them, we sent them to a specialist who digitized the recordings by taking extremely-high resolution photographs of the cylinders using a laser, and then played the digital file from the high-resolution digital images! Although the audio quality is scratchy and echoey, the recordings can now be heard.

The digital files for this collection include hundreds of files, including exotic file formats like .bri (used for 3-D modeling) and .trk files (used for workflows tied to proprietary and unique software packages). However, the images of the cylinders are also saved as more accessible .jpg and .tif files while the audio recordings are also available as .mp3 files. We have made all of the files, like this one for example, available online to researchers. The files are checked for viruses, re-built from scratch (in a process called recharacterization), and given a checksum by Preservica, our digital preservation system, which also synchronizes the files with our description system. 

In honor of World Digital Preservation Day, a lighthearted look at the world of intangible zeroes and ones is available by way of a physical object: a photocopied zine! They are available at Rauner Special Collections, the circulation and welcome desks of Baker-Berry library, and the Book Arts Workshop. If you'd like to examine an actual wax cylinder, come to Rauner and ask to see one from the Charles Furlong papers (Mss-197).