Special Collections & Archives Blog

Ethiopia, the oldest independent nation in Africa, has a unique Christian tradition dating back to the 4th century. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church developed largely in isolation after the Islamic conquest of Egypt in the 640′s. But Christianity remained the official state religion for many centuries, and the Ethiopian imperial family claimed to be descended directly from the Biblical King Solomon.

The Ethiopian Bible is unique, containing several apocryphal books that are preserved nowhere else. The Ethiopian Church maintained a strong tradition of manuscript Bibles and other religious texts, and illuminated Bibles were very popular from at least the 12th century onward. The 15th century was a golden age of artistic achievement in Ethiopian illuminated Bibles, and many later manuscripts contain copies of illustrations from this period. Ethiopian iconography, although it shows some influence of European and especially Byzantine artistic traditions, is as distinctive as the religious tradition from which it stems.

The Ethiopian manuscript in ZSR’s Special Collections is a psalter (a collection of the Psalms of David from the Christian Old Testament) probably dating from the late 18th or early 19th century. The printing press was not widely used in most of Africa until the mid-19th century, so a strong manuscript tradition persisted much longer that it had in Europe. The psalter is written in Ge’ez, a syllabic script traditionally used for Ethiopian liturgical texts, in red and black ink on vellum pages. Some pages, like the one pictured above, have decorative headpieces.

The psalter also has five full-page illustrations with iconography very typical of Ethiopian religious texts. The colors are bright and saturated, and the figures are outlined in black and are depicted in full face with wide eyes (in the Ethiopian as in many other African artistic traditions, only enemies are depicted in profile).

In addition to King David pictured above, there is a crucifixion scene.

Mary’s halo and the tears on her face and St. John’s were added in pencil by a later owner of the book.

Illustrations of St. George slaying a dragon and of the Madonna and child are featured on facing pages:

Both the St. George legend and the cult of the Virgin Mary were extremely important in the Ethiopian religious tradition. Illustrations of St. George slaying the dragon to rescue a north African princess were common in Ethiopian Bibles. And since the saint was also supposed to be the protector and frequent companion of Mary, depictions of George were often juxtaposed with  illustrations of the Virgin and the infant Christ.

The final illustration is a figure of an aristocratic Ethiopian man in contemporary dress holding a small book.

This is almost certainly a depiction of the patron who commissioned the psalter. The volume in his hand looks very similar to the manuscript book in the ZSR collection.

The library’s manuscript psalter is also a small book bound in dark red leather over wooden boards.

The book also has a leather cover and carrying case. This type of case, called a mahedar, is very typical of Ethiopian Bibles from this time period.

Small books like this one were intended for personal use, in contrast to larger volumes for church or ceremonial uses. The portability and personalized iconography of this psalter suggest that it was an object of private devotion and study. There is also much evidence of use by a later owner in the book itself. There are pencil notes throughout the book and extensive notes and sketches on the endpapers. At least one of the book’s owners apparently had an artistic bent:

Ethiopian manuscript texts like this one are found in libraries and private collections throughout the world. Many were dispersed in 1868 after British troops defeated the Ethiopian Emperor Tewodros and looted the churches and monasteries of Maqdala. The exact origins of the ZSR manuscript psalter are unknown; it was acquired as a gift in the 1940′s as part of the personal collection of Oscar T. Smith.

I recently began work on repairing an important book in our special collections, and thought I’d share the process of preservation.  The book is loaded down with a long French title, but is known as Diderot’s “Tree of Knowledge.”  The “Tree of Knowledge” was an attempt to represent the structure of knowledge graphically and was somewhat based on the work of Francis Bacon.  Special Collections book historian, Megan Mulder, could tell you much more about Diderot and the “Tree of Knowledge” than I can.  I can tell you that our volume was printed in 1780.  The paper in this book is wonderfully healthy after over 200 years.

The primary problem with our “Tree of Knowledge” (TOK) was the front board was detached and there were some minor paper tears.  The interior hinge must be repaired first.  Repairing the exterior hinge before the interior hinge will result in the repair you had made on the exterior popping off.  Physics.

I measured and tore a piece of toned Japanese paper for the inside hinge repair, glued it out and applied it to the inside hinge.  Any paper used in repairs are always torn to give a softer edge when it is applied to the paper.  A cut edge can eventually cut into the paper.  The interior hinge repair is allowed to dry open.

There were a few paper tears on the TOK, which is a large (38 1/2″ x 24″) folded and illustrated engraving of all the fields of knowledge just past the title page of the book.  It folds out into 9 panels and had a few small tears. 

I applied a natural colored Japanese paper (Sekishu) to three small tears on the reverse side of the large panel.

The exterior hinge of the book was completely torn, leaving a break in the leather.  I was able to lift the leather off the boards revealing the attachment of the text block to the board with leather cords which were inserted through the boards.  This work is beautifully done and very uniform.  I doubt it has been seen by anyone in many years.  Today, individuals who do this work are considered artisans….in 1780, binders were mere craftsman.  I love seeing the guts of a book.

I tore a sheet of toned Japanese paper which I applied to the board and overlapped it onto the spine. 

One of the leather labels had come off the spine. I glued the label back in place and filled several small openings in the spine with Japanese paper.  I then glued down the leather of the cover making a clean and not too noticeable repair.

This repair was pressed into place using a teflon bone folder and allowed to dry under a weight.

The final step is to apply a leather consolidant to the covers.  This helps keep the leather from dissolving into a powder and also improves the appearance.

The book is now ready to return to the Special Collection closed stacks to amaze our patrons.

Special Collections is happy to announce a new exhibit in the small case in the atrium. The exhibit highlights the Samuel and Sally Wait Collection and shows examples of their letters from Wait. It also includes Samuel’s walking stick and reading glasses. Take a look when you get a chance!

The Renaissance scholar Aldus Manutius (ca. 1451-1515) began his career in typical fashion, as a tutor to an aristocratic Roman family. We don’t know what prompted him in 1490 to move to Venice and try his hand at a business venture involving the exciting new technology that was spreading across Europe: printing with moveable type. But over the next 25 years Aldus became the most important scholar/printer of the Italian Renaissance.

The Aldine Press, as it became known, began by printing editions of Latin and Greek classics that were in demand by scholars. But Aldus also published works in the Italian vernacular, and in 1502 he undertook an edition of the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321).

Dante wrote his epic poem between 1308 and 1321. There are no surviving manuscripts in Dante’s own hand, but the work was widely copied  and over 400 manuscript copies from the 14th century are known to exist. Dante’s popularity continued unabated into the 15th century, and several Italian printers issued editions of the Divine Comedy between 1472 and 1500. Most of these early editions included the extensive commentary by Florentine scholar Cristoforo Landino. In many of them the commentary almost overwhelmed the text, and little attention was given to accurate editing of the poem itself.

Aldus’s edition, by contrast, dispensed with all commentary and presented the unadorned text of the poem in a small octavo format.

The text itself was a new version edited by Aldus’s friend and frequent collaborator, Pietro Bembo. Its origin was an early manuscript version of the Divine Comedy from the library of Bembo’s father (though it was not, as Bembo claimed, in Dante’s own hand).

Bembo was a Renaissance humanist and an accomplished scholar. Rather than writing a lengthy gloss on the poem, as Landino had done, he concentrated on making the text itself understandable for his 16th century Italian readers. After the publication of Aldus’s 1502 edition, Bembo’s version became the standard Dante text until well into the 19th century.

One of Aldus’s and Bembo’s major innovations was the liberal use of punctuation, a feature often missing from manuscripts and earlier printed texts.

The Aldine Press Dante was typical of many of Aldus’s imprints in that it was a small octavo volume, affordable and easily portable. Many 15th century editions of the classics were large folio volumes, impressive but unwieldy and extremely expensive, with text often buried under centuries of accumulated notes. Aldus realized that there was a market in the scholarly community for well-edited and reasonably priced texts. His Dante is one of many small volumes, printed in his trademark italic font. Aldus was an innovator in typeface design, and his italic type was based on the handwriting of two highly accomplished Italian scribes.

The 1502 Divine Comedy was the first book in which Aldus Manutius used his famous dolphin and anchor printer’s device. The emblem was taken from a Roman medal given to Aldus by Pietro Bembo. The swift dolphin and the immovable anchor are a visual representation of the motto “festina lente” or “make haste slowly.” This quote from Emperor Augustus was an appropriate motto for Aldus, whose painstaking scholarship and editing underpinned his prolific output as a printer.

However, not all copies of the 1502 Dante have the Aldine device. The engraved illustration was apparently not ready when the first copies of the Divine Comedy went to press, so the earliest issues (of which ZSR’s copy is one) do not have the device.

ZSR Library’s copy of the Aldine Press Divina Commedia contains bookplates from three former owners. One of these was famous in his own right: the Victorian artist and critic John Ruskin (1823-1900).

Ruskin was one of the most influential writers on art and society in 19th century England,  and he was a great admirer of Dante. In his Stones of Venice Ruskin wrote

I think that the central man of all the world, as representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral, and intellectual faculties, all at their highest, is Dante.

Ruskin made his first visit to Italy in 1845, spending time in Venice and Florence.  It is  possible that he acquired the Aldine Press volume during this trip. It is also possible that Ruskin was responsible for having the volume rebound in blue velvet, with yellow silk endpapers and gauffred edges.

In any case, it is clear that this copy of the Aldine Press Dante has been a treasured possession of many owners over the past 500 years. ZSR Library purchased the book from bookseller William Salloch in 1986. All of the images above are from volumes in the ZSR Rare Books Collection.

Although the Charles Lee Smith papers have had a finding aid online, it has not been complete. Well, it is now! We have added 3 additional boxes and an over-sized folder to the former collection. Many of you may know of Charles Lee Smith from the Charles Lee Smith Library (the books that are housed in the “Rare Book Reading Room”) but we also have some of his correspondence, scrapbooks, printed materials, and clippings.

Take a look at the finding aid!

You may remember another post about Henlee Barnette’s Correspondence series being complete. Well, we have now updated the finding aid to include his second wife, Helen Barnette’s (née Poarch), papers. Henlee Barnette’s first wife died, leaving him with two young sons. He later married Helen and they added a girl and boy to the family.

Helen Barnette is well represented in the previously processed correspondence of her husband, but her series of materials illustrates her achievements in education. She was a well educated and well respected member of the Baptist community. Her series will be an asset to researchers.

Special Collections and Archives is excited to announce the completion of the inventory and finding aid for RG11.1, Audio Recordings: Reel to Reels. This collection consists of over 500 recordings that sometimes take up to five reels per title. This is a massive collection.

Now that we have a comprehensive list and description of what is actually in this Record Group (RG) we can move forward with ways to access the content. We have sent out a small group of reels to be digitized, but it is only a drop in the bucket.

Focusing mainly on the 1960s through 1980s the Audio Recordings provide a glimpse of what was happening on campus during these times of tremendous change. This is a great asset to the University record and we look forward to completing finding aids for all of the audio recording formats in our holdings.

None of this could be possible without the hard work of our student employee Charles, who transcribed paper finding aids and arranged each of the reels. Thanks to Charles!

This post was written by Sarah Appleby, Graduate Student in English and student employee in Special Collections and Archives. Thanks, Sarah!

The material in this collection comes from collaboration between influential writer, Gertrude Stein, and the professional endeavors of three young men at a fledgling press. Conference Press was founded in the 1930s by UCLA students Hal Levy, Gilbert A. Harrison, and William Bayard Okie, who formed the press after meeting writer William Saroyan. In their own words, from a 1940 prospectus:

Once upon a time there were three young college boys who liked the way William Saroyan wrote. So one day they left the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles and drove across town to a Hollywood studio where Saroyan was “writing for pictures.”

Saroyan was very cordial and for a half an hour the four young men (Saroyan was but a couple of years older than his admirers) talked about William Saroyan,writing in general, and the prospects for the U.C.L.A football team. Soon the talk switched to publishing, and before anyone was quite sure what had happened thethree college boys had formed a publishing house and Saroyan had agreed to give them enough stories to make a book.

The Conference Press was born. And Saroyan, bored with Hollywood, was going to have another book published.

A few hectic weeks followed. Saroyan, as the first of four Conference Press vice-presidents (there was no president), helped read galley proofs in the print shop, ate ice cream pie at the nearby drugstore, and sang baritone in the quartet of embryonic publishers they drove home in the early mornings. The three college boy publishers, starting from scratch with absolutely no knowledge of the publishing business, soon found themselves learning by the fast and sometimes bitter method of first-hand, first-time experience.

That first meeting in Saroyan’s office was on November 12. On December 12 the book was in the bookstores, ready to be sold.

That first book was really just a collegiate lark. Now we are out of college,working on our second book, and planning the ones to follow. (CP)

Gilbert Harrison corresponded with Gertrude Stein beginning in 1933—he would continue to do so until her death in 1946—and met her in Pasadena during her 1934-35 tour of America. In 1937, Harrison visited Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris. This relationship resulted in the 1940 Conference Press publication of Stein’s work, What are Masterpieces? The young men proudly announce their “new and important” book:

This book is important because it brings into print for the first time the famous Oxford-Cambridge lectures of Miss Stein—Composition as Explanation, An American and France, and What are Masterpieces.

These lectures present, clearly and positively, her aesthetic theories and the basic philosophy underlying her experimental work.

The lectures are supplemented by several illustrative examples of Miss Stein’s creative work—the poem Precosilla, the pen-portraits, Edith Sitwell and Jean Cocteau, a play, A Saint in Seven, from her early period, and a play, Identity, from her most recent period.

Here, at last, is a book which shows that her work has been consistent and logical, that her contribution to American literary thought is strikingly profound. (CP)

That publication is the cornerstone of the collection. The Conference Press collection tells the story of a book and how it was envisioned, edited, constructed, advertised, sold, and received. Featured among the items in the publishers’ archive are the original typescript prepared in part by Alice B. Toklas, galley proofs corrected in Stein’s hand, and preliminary layouts and sketches for the book by designer Ward Richie, himself a prominent figure in Southern California fine printing.

A two-page, handwritten letter from Gertrude Stein praises the publication: “Really and truly it is a quite perfect book.” (Stein’s handwriting is, however, exceedingly difficult to read at times, so proceed with caution). Also found within collection are several pages of purchase orders and correspondence to the gentlemen of Conference Press. The young press published What are Masterpieces? not long after their first book, William Saroyan’s Three Times Three (the “stories” Saroyan gave them to publish while they were still students), and the two works were offered for purchase simultaneously to distributors and interested parties. One could pre-order a copy of Stein’s book for $2; $2.50 once it hit the shelves.

Additionally, the collection houses some miscellaneous Stein ephemera, such as manuscript notes written on the title pages of detective stories, bibliography notes by Robert Bartlett Haas with additions and corrections in Stein’s hand, and theatre programs from productions of Yes is for a Very Young Man, 4 Saints in 3 Acts, and The Mother of Us All (the programs of which are, on their own, interesting and worthwhile artifacts that feature period-specific advertising and marketing).

There are also several copies of articles written by Stein for diverse publications such as The Psychological Review, Cosmopolitan, Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Times, as well as general clippings, reviews, and a few photographs. Throughout, the collection helps provide fascinating insight into both Gertrude Stein’s writing process and product, and a publisher’s endeavors, from inception to publication and reception.

Take a look at the finding aid for the collection!

This is one of our amazing student assistants, Charles. This is Charles’ second year working in Special Collections and we are lucky to have him on our team. Charles is working on a very large project to process the reel to reel collection and publish an Archivists’ Toolkit finding aid. RG11.1 Audio Recordings, Tapes [Reel to Reels] is housed in approximately 40 linear feet of boxes, containing over 500 recordings (some up to 5 tapes per recording). The inventory and finding aid is a first step towards eventual digitization. You would be surprised by some of the speakers that have spoken on this campus: Malcolm Mudderidge, Peter Jennings, Timothy Leary and Dr. Sidney Cohen, Betty Ford, and Elie Weisel to name a few. We thank Charles for all of his hard work and look forward to the finished finding aid.

This article is cross posted on the Library Gazette.

In celebration of National Archives Month and North Carolina’s Archives Week (October 22-28), ZSR’s Special Collections and Archives is reaching out to invite departments and student groups across campus to deposit their paper and electronic documents in the University Archives. We particularly encourage submissions from groups underrepresented in the Archives, such as WFU’s ethnic minority, LGBTQ, and international communities. We want to identify, locate, secure, and make accessible these important and at-risk historical records.

The Documenting Diversity initiative seeks to raise awareness of the importance of preserving the historical records, especially of under-represented groups. We will provide consultations and guidelines for the transfer of non-current records to the Archives.

Documenting Diversity kicks off with an Archives open house event in the Special Collections Reading Room from 4-5 pm on October 25^th. Members of the WFU community will have the opportunity to see the University Archives, drop off materials, view some collections already housed in the archives, and discuss the future of a more inclusive and well-rounded University record. Light refreshments will be served.  Participating departments and organizations include

• The Office of Multicultural Affairs
• The Office of Diversity and Inclusion
• The LGBTQ Center
• The Department of Women’s and Gender Studies
• Student Government

We encourage all interested individuals and groups to attend the Archives open house and to contribute appropriate materials to the University Archives. Visit the PDC website to register for the event.  Please send questions to Rebecca Petersen petersrb@wfu.edu.