Getting to Know Some Old Things Very Well: The Rare Books Room Project
One of the greatest differences between Medieval culture and our own is the speed with which things happen. Time presumably passed just as quickly when measured in an astronomical sense, but people lived not according to clocks accurate to the tenth or hundredth of a second, much less according to computers and cell phones calibrated to the vibrations of a Cesium atomic clock. Sunrise and sunset, passing seasons, religious feast days, traditional pagan feasts, and the chaotic but widely dispersed catastrophes of fire, windstorm, flood and warfare were the main ways Medieval authors indicated passage of time. The modern Medieval scholar must slow down and develop patience to learn from the surviving witnesses what they have to reveal. To give you some hands-on experience handling very old objects and developing the patience to learn from them, Gail McCormick, the Library's Special Collections Librarian and I will teach you how to use rare printed and manuscript books as primary research materials. This is a great opportunity to slow down your scholarly "clock" and to become familiar with some rare objects few people have seen in several hundred years. More importantly, it gives you a chance to discover some genuinely new primary source evidence that you can use in English 240 as well as in your other courses.
First, you need to spend one hour in groups of two or three with the Special Collections Librarian on a day in the first three weeks of class. She will teach you how to handle archival materials (when and why to use the white gloves, how to handle fragile paper and parchment, how old bindings must be treated). She also will help you understand how books are constructed and how the text is kept on the page by showing you examples of old and modern book binding, pages printed on early hand presses, and pages written by human scribes rather than printed by machines. Before you meet with the librarian, take a look at this very brief but well-illustrated web page on the making of manuscript (hand-written) books from the Getty Museum. Read this web page and (if you have time) the related links to familiarize yourself with the basic history of how books were made, from manuscript to movable type printing. If you want to see images of early typefaces from the 15th century through the present, see the images from the Cary Collection at RIT. These early book pages will help prepare you for what you are about to encounter. Just select one image from each century and you will get a rapid sense of how book layout and typefaces can tell you when an early book was printed.
When you have completed your training session, I will give you two titles from a list of relevant old books (1495-1803) to study for one hour in the Rare Book collection on the library's ground floor. (You can take more time if you like, but it is not required.) Everyone will be assigned a different section of the 1598 Thomas Speght edition of Chaucer's works, one of the library's best Middle English holdings. The other book usually be a smaller, later work, though all are quite complex when compared to a paperback modern novel, and all are at least over two hundred years old. Each book can tell you many things, depending on what you already know and how patient/curious you are. With each book you will also receive a short list of questions the book can answer if you examine it carefully. We also hope you will discover your own questions as you study these old objects and give them the respectful attention deserved by anything that has survived for 200 to 400 years, or more. You can study your book during the fourth through sixth weeks, or during the seventh through twelfth weeks, When you are done, you will meet with me for a conference to discuss what you found. I am especially interested in your own questions about the books, bookmaking, publishing, and other aspects of the technologies by which literature of the past can be recovered.
To make the project more interesting and to give you a greater chance of discovering something exciting, we will take advantage of two facts about our own culture and its impending changes. First, because the Rare Book collection is well over one hundred years old, and because it has not always been in the care of a librarian whose sole duty was to be its curator, we do not know about at least some, or even many, of the books in the Rare Book collection. That is, not everything is in OLLI, the online catalogue, nor was it even in OLLI's predecessor, the paper "card catalogue." Second, because the impending construction of the Athenaeum will result in the library's moving to the new site, everything in the Rare Books collection must be properly identified. We must know what we are moving so that we can tell if anything is lost or misplaced, and we must be sure fragile objects are properly protected during the move (e.g., given book boxes, protective sleeves, etc.). We are organizing a multi-year "Rare Book Collection Census Project" (starting Fall 2006) which will create a database recording details about each of our rare books, including digital images and detailed descriptions, starting with those printed or written before 1700, and working our way to the most recent volumes. This information will be linked to OLLI and online sites we create to make specific types of information available to scholars (e.g., evidence of early female book-ownership--see below). However, before we start the project, we need to test how we are going to do it, including how we can best train the students doing internships, independent studies, and senior theses with materials from the project. For this reason, when you are done studying your book, we would like you to "read the shelves" for a few minutes until you have accounted for the cataloging, location, and condition of ten books. Librarians already have begun this process, but they have not made much progress so far (as of January 2006). For that reason, you can choose any unread shelf, including books by authors from later eras. This gives you the opportunity to discover early editions by authors or about subjects other than early English literature, including authors you are reading in other courses. You can go further in your shelf reading if you like, under Gail's supervision, but we are only asking you to check ten volumes.
Reading shelves does not mean you have to read all ten books. (In fact, efficient shelf-reading tends to require us not to "read the books" at all, though it can be tempting--that's for later once we know what we have!) Shelf reading involves determining whether the book is where it should be in order to be found by a researcher, and whether it has been properly catalogued or not. In planning for this project, Gail has found several volumes that were not catalogued, meaning that the librarians "did not know" they had them. If the book has a cataloging slip, then we need to determine whether it is shelved according to catalogue number and whether it is in the online catalogue (OLLI). Finally, the shelf-reader should determine its condition (loose pages or binding boards, fragile pages or binding boards, etc.), and, if we have no record of it in OLLI, locate the book in the "OCLC" (Online Computer Library Catalogue), also known as "WorldCat." On at least one occasion, Gail has found a volume that is not even in WorldCat, which means no participating library anywhere in the world knows they have a copy. We also would be grateful if you could briefly scan each book's pages for traces of book ownership (usually a bookplate inside the front cover, signatures on the inside cover or title page, etc.). We are particularly interested in trying to locate volumes belonging to some major collections donated to the college, including books from John Goucher's library, and those from "The James W. Bright Collection." If the book can be found in OCLC, we want to print the record for the catalogue, and we want to know how many other libraries have the volume. If very few have it, we may have a discovery worth a great deal, both in terms of what may be learned from it and what the book is worth on the rare book market. If the book is not in the OCLC, we might have a major find. Just rescuing a previously unknown rare book by getting it into OLLI is an extremely important contribution to the scholarly heritage of the college, and recording the condition and ownership marks in each volume will help us protect it during transportation to the Athenaeum.
Links to Related Web Pages on Bibliographic and Conservational Issues
Oak gall ink and the corrosion of old MSS
Brittle paper and the condition of printed books