Smithsonian Libraries

Around the Libraries in 180 Days (Give or Take): An Intern Recaps Her Libraries Experience

It’s hard to believe that my time at the Libraries has come to an end! Since there was a post about me here when I began my internship back in January, I thought I’d give a summary of what I’ve done since then.

I worked with Doug Dunlop through January, all of February, and the first week or so of March. For this assignment, Doug and I traveled to almost every branch in the Libraries, searching for images and information that may prove useful in the development of the Smithsonian Books proposal he’s working on, tentatively titled The Time-Traveler's Guide to the 19th Century. We spent hours looking for late 18th through early 20th century images with a “steampunk” feel that could illustrate the fictitious text about a time traveler’s encounters with James Smithson. This proved more challenging than it sounds, considering that steampunk is a very recent invention that relies on anachronistic technologies. Although we came across many images that we found hard to believe existed, Jules Verne and the World's Fairs tended to appear the most in our selections.

 
 

 
 In March I transferred to the Libraries’ Research Annex in Maryland to organize boxes of paperwork related to special exhibits. I created a filing system that will help employees working on exhibitions to sort out what paperwork should be kept and what should be disposed of. These files ranged from the 1970s through the present. Papers could usually be sorted into one of about 10 categories, although there were thousands of sheets to sort relating to nearly every exhibit over the past 30 years.

In April, I moved out to the Dibner Library, the Libraries' rare book collection for the history of science and technology, and began enhancing catalog entries for the Heralds of Science collection. It’s been a treat to go through that collection, searching for details that might distinguish one copy of an edition from another. While there I’ve learned about gilt-tooled spines with brown leather labels, headpieces, tailpieces, initials, and marbled endpapers and edges, though I still haven’t learned enough Latin to read some of the titles. I wrote a blog entry during my time there in which I examined Johann Prüss’s Ortus Sanitatis.

 

I only got about halfway through the collection before moving to the Book Conservation Lab at the beginning of May. There I worked on the general collections with Phu Pham, doing paper repair, mixing wheat paste, sizing and folding boxes, creating enclosures, and shipping books out after work was completed.

I worked in the Book Conservation Lab until mid-June, when I returned to Dibner to finish work on the Heralds catalog entries. Once I completed that project, I worked on various other projects such as editing desiderata lists and cleaning recent acquisitions for my last couple of weeks at the Smithsonian. My final assignment was to go through dealer catalogues with collection growth and management in mind.

It’s been a busy few months, but I’ve learned many skills here that will help me as I enter library school at the University of North Carolina next month and continue on my career path.

—Betsy Hagerty, Smithsonian Libraries intern

Related articles

• The Practice of Book Conservation at the Libraries (smithsonianlibraries.si.edu)

Two-Tailed Mermaids and Dog-Headed Men: Looking at a 15th Century Herbal

Since starting my internship on January 10th, I have searched through hundreds of 18th-early 20th century books for period dress and steampunk-like technology, sorted thousands of papers with exhibit-related information, and worked on catalog entries for around 120 Heralds of Science.  While I have enjoyed all the work that I’ve done so far, one of my favorite tasks has been enhancing the catalog records for the Heralds of Science collection. This collection is composed of what Bern Dibner deemed the most important texts in science, and includes multiple incunabula in the library.

Bern Dibner’s copy of Johann Prüss’s Ortus Sanitatis, donated with most of the other Heralds as part of the gift that founded the Dibner Library, is at first glance unassuming despite its 1497 publication date. A sizable volume with a faded green leather cover much younger than itself, it appears almost plain next to many of the other Heralds with their elaborately gilt-tooled covers and ornate designs. Once opened, though, the care taken in the book’s binding and conservation immediately becomes visible. Gilt-tooled leather accents beautifully marbled endpapers that are marked with two different bookplates. These plates distinguish the book’s history of ownership, or provenance.

 

James Franck Bright (1832-1920) was a British historian  and Master of the University College at Oxford. Jacobi (James) P.R. Lyell (1871-1948) was a solicitor, book collector, and bibliographer who focused on the Medieval period.  Who owned the text earlier than that seems to be a mystery, though they have left their marks!

 

Typical of many incunabula, hand-drawn initials and rubrication appear throughout the text; like most hand-created items, they bear signs of human error. In this book, the rubricator obviously tried to move along too quickly. His mistakes are visible in ink smudges, or on the occasional chapter title where part of the opposite page sticks to once-fresh paint.

The most interesting thing about the text, at least to me, is its variety of bizarre illustrative woodcuts. The first half of the text, “De Herbis,” contains many woodcuts of various plants. Three more sections follow, including the next section, “Tractatus de Animalibus,”  which focuses on animals both real and imagined. Prüss immediately catches the reader’s attention with a detailed, labeled woodcut of a human skeleton, then continues with hundreds of odd woodcuts, some of which depict animals that the artist had clearly never seen.

 

Since I can’t read Latin (something that I’ve learned will likely have to change!), I have little concept of why these strange things are in a book that otherwise seems quite concerned with identifying herbs and their purpose. However, I’m glad they are; they provide a fascinating window into the mindset of people living around 500 years ago, especially when considered next to the ink stains, handwriting, and bookplates.

—Betsy Hagerty, Smithsonian Libraries intern

2011 Resident Scholar Applications

Johannes Hevelius, Machinae Coelestis Pars Prior [and Posterior] [Celestial machines, or astronomical instruments], 1673-79, Four male figures (including Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, and possibly Ptolemy and Aristotle) contemplate a celestial globe; allegorical figures surround them

The Libraries will award grants to Dibner Library Resident Scholars and Baird Society Resident Scholars in the 2011 academic year. These competitive short-term grants are offered for one to six months to historians, librarians and bibliographers, as well as predoctoral and postdoctoral students, with an approved research project. The scholars will complete their residencies at one or more of the Libraries’ twenty branches for various lengths of time throughout the year.

Dibner Library Resident Scholars will do research in the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology in the National Museum of American History. The Dibner Library specializes in the physical sciences and technology, and holds more than 25,000 rare books and 10,000 manuscripts covering a wide variety of subject areas and time periods, particularly in mathematics, astronomy, classical and Renaissance natural philosophy, theoretical physics, experimental physics, engineering and scientific apparatus and instruments. The collections range from early printed works of ancient Greek and medieval scholars through the Renaissance and Early Modern eras up through the 19th century. There are significant works by Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, Galileo, Descartes, Newton and many others. This award is supported by The Dibner Fund.

Baird Society Resident Scholars will do research in other Libraries’ special collections located in Washington, D.C., and New York City. Included are 19th- and early 20th-century World’s Fairs printed materials; manufacturers’ commercial trade catalogs, numbering more than 300,000 pieces and representing 30,000 companies from the 1840s to the present; natural-history rare books; the air-and-space history special collection for the study of ballooning, rocketry and aviation from the late-18th to the early-20th centuries; James Smithson’s library; and the European and American decorative arts, architecture and design special collection, which spans the 18th to the 20th centuries. This award is supported by the Smithsonian Libraries Spencer Baird Society.

The deadline for applications to the 2011 resident scholar programs is April 1st. Visit our website for application materials and further information or e-mail SILResidentScholars@si.edu.—Liz O'Brien

An Anniversary for the Telephone and the Bell Henry Library

The invention of the telephone has a fraught and complicated history, but in spite of legal challenges and controversy, most can comfortably credit Alexander Graham Bell with its creation. On this day, October 9th, in 1876, Bell and Thomas A. Watson held the first two-way telephone conversation, one in Boston and the other in Cambridgeport, a town about two miles away. The conversation lasted some three hours, the dialogue transcribed in each location, both versions of which were published side-by-side in an effort to dispel any suspicion of trickery, and to demonstrate that “audible speech by telegraph” had been achieved.

Joseph Henry, the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and a leading scientist in the field of electricity and magnetism, encouraged Bell in his pursuits. After Henry’s death, Bell purchased his library from his widow; Bell’s descendants donated the two collections, to be kept together, to the Smithsonian. After long being housed in the offices of the Joseph Henry Papers Project, the collections are now at the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology. The Bell Henry Library offers a fascinating portrait of the intellectual life of two eminent scientists and life-long experimenters. Included in these collections are their own annotations, presentation copies of numerous works, and many catalogs of scientific apparatus and pamphlets, many of which are quite rare.

Having this collection in our care had an added benefit: in Bern Dibner’s Heralds of Science, his selection of the two hundred most significant publications in the history of science, he includes Bell’s Researches in telephony, published in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1876. While the Libraries held its own copy it was in another collection with the rest of the serial volumes. Now we not only have the Herald, we have Bell’s own copy of it.

While the Bell Henry Library has not yet been cataloged, we do have a list of all the works in both collections—titles, authors, place and date of publication if available, annotations and presentation copies noted—which should provide an adequate guide to scholars interested in studying these collections, the gentlemen themselves, or the history of speech pathology, telephony and electricity during that exciting time. We will soon be making these lists available online.—Kirsten van der Veen