Tricks Of The Trade Revealed In Harvard Exhibit

By Nancy Mattoon

A Die-Cut Trade Card For
Colburn's Philadelphia Mustard, ca. 1875.
(All Images Courtesy of Baker Business Library.)

Harvard University Business School's Baker Library has digitized part of an immense collection of advertising ephemera, making images of 1,000 Victorian trade cards available online. The cards represent a "full range of products and businesses advertised through this medium from the 1870s through the 1890s." An online exhibit has also been created to spotlight this New and Wonderful Invention, one of the earliest forms of printed advertising used for nationwide commercial campaigns.

Trade Card For
Centemeri Kid Gloves, 1888.

Lavishly illustrated and lushly colored, with eye-catching images on the front and promotional text on the back, trade cards were produced by the hundreds of thousands and inserted into packages at the factory, handed out by retailers with every sale, or mailed to prospective customers. The images used often had little to do with the actual products, but the point was to attract the eye, and bring the manufacturer's name to the forefront. The industrialization and urbanization of post-Civil War America caused the rapid rise of new consumer markets. Manufacturers began to compete for customers through aggressive advertising, and the first attempts to create "brands" had begun.

Trade Card For Henry Martin's Furs, Ca. 1875.

Technological advances in printing, and the development of chromolithography in the mid-nineteenth century, led to the extensive use of color in commercial advertising. This allowed for greater use of illustrations, and the popularity of color advertising cards spread rapidly. By the early 1880s the chromolithographed trade card was being distributed widely by businesses ranging from small shops to large manufacturers. The 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia provided the first large-scale opportunity for commercial lithographers to display their products, as well as for a wide variety of businesses to hand out advertising cards flogging their goods and services.

Trade Card For Preston's
Infallible Yeast Powder, ca. 1880.

According to the Baker Library exhibit, "The great majority of trade cards printed in the late nineteenth century advertised household items, promoting everything from patent medicines, cosmetic products, and packaged foods to wringers, sewing machines and lawn mowers." Trade cards often provided an introduction to the idea of using manufactured products as replacements for items that were previously homemade. New marketing techniques, such as testimonials and premium offers were employed to promote the growing number of commercial products. Special novelty cards and cards issued in series were produced to encourage card collecting, which of course created brand loyalty and more product consumption. Soon, trademarks appeared on cards to maximize brand-name recognition and foster continued use of a particular product.

Trade Card For Brook's Spool Cotton, ca. 1880.

Trade cards featured all of the persuasive tools of the advertising game: alluring women, adorable children, cuddly animals, patriotic symbols, ethnic stereotypes, lush gardens, magical creatures, and exotic foreign destinations were all well represented. Industrialization was celebrated in scenes of urban growth, and the latest innovations in manufacturing and technology were shown as ushering in a new era of comfort and convenience. Home life never looked so good.

Trade Card For
Willamantic Thread, ca. 1885.

The public responded enthusiastically to this early use of colorful, eye-catching images, and collecting trade cards became a craze in the 1880s. Cards were swapped with friends, and collected and pasted into albums. As one of the most popular forms of advertising in the 19th century, trade cards reveal not just consumer habits, but also moral values and artistic trends. This makes them of interest to scholars of business, graphic design and printing, and social and cultural history. The popularity of the trade card peaked around 1890 and then faded by the end of the century, as mass-market magazine advertising became the preferred means of creating nationwide marketing campaigns.

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The Art of War, Lakota Style

By Nancy Mattoon

A Sioux Warrior Captures Cavalry Mules.
Image from The Half Moon Ledger.
(All Images Courtesy of Harvard Houghton Library and
Peabody Museum Of Archeology and Ethnology.)

Sometime around 1865, prospector J.S. Moore purchased a small accounting ledger in which to keep track of his money. He was attempting to make his fortune near the Bozeman Trail, which connected the gold rush territory of Montana to the Oregon Trail. Unfortunately, the area was smack dab in the middle of the lands in dispute during Red Cloud's War (1866-1868), a series of battles fought by a combined force of Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux against white men threatening bison herds near the Powder River. Moore became collateral damage in that fight. The prospector was killed, and his ledger fell into the hands of Lakota Sioux warriors.

At the time of Red Cloud's War, the Plains Indians had just become familiar with the white man's tools for writing and drawing--graphite, colored pencils, ink, and, of course, paper. In Native American hands, Moore's accounting ledger began a second life as the pictorial battle record of a band of Lakota warriors. At least five unidentified Sioux braves created drawings depicting their feats of derring-do on its pages. In total, 77 drawings of their exploits were added to the ledger, before the violence between the Native Americans and the white men once again caused the small book, about the size of a mass market paperback, to change hands.

A Lakota Warrior Under Fire,
Bearing A Shield Decorated With Celestial Symbols.

As legend has it, in the aftermath of the Battle of Little Big Horn (1876), an Army private stumbled upon a funerary lodge in a deserted Lakota village. One of the dead lying in state there was said to be a great Sioux warrior, Half Moon. (In fact there is some doubt as to whether Half Moon ever existed; his name has never been found in any Sioux tribal records.) Next to his corpse, it was said, was a mail bag, atop which was the ledger. The soldier took the book as a souvenir, and it became known thereafter as The Half Moon Ledger. Sometime later, the soldier apparently learned the book was valuable, and placed it up for sale.

The next recorded owner of the ledger was a Chicago newspaperman, James "Phocion" Howard. Howard was a shrewd businessman, who knew how to make a quick buck. Rather than reselling the book as he originally purchased it, he added such trappings as a leather binding tooled in gold, and a title page proclaiming it to be: The Pictorial Autobiography of Half Moon, an Uncpapa Sioux Chief. Who was killed in the Battle of the Rosebud, June 18, 1876, And who with Four other Chiefs was found lying in State on the Custer Battlefield June 28.

A Triumphant Brave Herds Horses
Captured From The U.S. Cavalry.

Howard also penned an illustrated introduction for the book, purporting to explain the meaning of the warrior's drawings. It contained a fearsome portrait of an angry chief identified as the famous warrior, "Half Moon." (According to Castle McLaughlin, associate curator of North American ethnography at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, the text added by the newspaperman is notable mainly for revealing "how poorly Howard knew his subject.")

Howard's "improvements" were meant to make the ledger more attractive to buyers. Apparently, it worked, as this now curious amalgamation of two cultures was purchased for an unknown sum by a New York City rare book dealer. In the ensuing years, the volume made its way to Boston. Finally, in 1930, it was donated to Harvard University's Houghton Library by the sister of an alumnus, Harriet J. Bradbury. As is sometimes the case with volumes in large academic libraries, the ledger remained overlooked and essentially unexamined for nearly 80 years.

A Lakota Brave Rides A Blue Roan,
Wearing A Coat Taken From A Cavalry Soldier.

Early in the 21st century, Harvard librarians came to realize that The Half Moon Ledger was something special. Ledger drawings by Native Americans are not uncommon, but to find a large number of them in their original context is extremely rare. The volume also proved of great interest to the University's Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, which houses one of the largest collections of indigenous artifacts in the Western Hemisphere. In concert with the Houghton librarians, curators at the Peabody and members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe began to study the ledger's historical significance in depth.

Peabody curator Castle McLaughlin already had a particular interest in one aspect of the ledger. She was the co-founder of the Nokota Horse Conservancy, a non-profit group dedicated to preserving blue roan horses, descendants of the breed revered and immortalized in the Sioux warrior's drawings. Researching the breed for three years at the behest of the National Park Service, McLaughlin connected today's surviving animals directly to their ancestors ridden by the Lakota Sioux Chiefs.

A Chief In His Battle Finery Astride A Blue Roan.

Through her work with the horse conservancy, McLaughlin also formed a friendship with Lakota tribe member Butch Thunder Hawk, a respected contemporary artist, and tribal arts instructor at the United Tribes Technical College in North Dakota. Together McLaughlin and Thunder Hawk--along with Peabody exhibits director Sam Tager-- created an ongoing exhibit now on display at the museum, which is centered around The Half Moon Ledger.

The multimedia exhibit is entitled "Wiyohpiyata": Lakota Images of the Contested West. The word "Wiyohpiyata" literally means "the direction West" in the Lakota language, but it "is both a celestial orientation and a concentration of natural and supernatural forces," according to curator McLaughlin. As the exhibit's brochure states, "In traditional Lakota belief, Wiyohpiyata... is one of four sacred directions that are associated with a color and animal spirits. Wiyohpiyata (black/blue) is home to the spirit of thunder and lightning, Wakinyan, the Winged-One or Thunder Bird. It controls the winds, the storms, and warfare. All things from the West are mysterious or holy."

A Sioux Courageously "Counting Coup,"
Or Touching The Enemy With His Bow.

Among many artifacts, contemporary art works, and audio and video installations on display for the exhibition, are a complete facsimile of The Half Moon Ledger, reproductions of selected pages, and the ledger itself. Due to extreme fragility and risk of damage from light exposure, the ledger is carefully opened to a single page, which is secured with a thin strip of archival-quality plastic. The page is turned every three months by Houghton Library Lake Conservator Mary Oey. Pages are only allowed to be on display--under glass--after they are monitored for color fading by a spectra photometer.

The Half Moon Ledger will remain on exhibit at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology through early August of 2011, at which time it will be returned to the Houghton Library. But in keeping with its early history of passing from hand to hand, there's a chance that the volume will leave the Harvard library for good. The book’s reputed discovery at a grave site may make it subject to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. If Sioux and Harvard researchers conclude that the legend of its discovery in a funerary lodge is true, The Half Moon Ledger must be returned to the Lakota tribe.
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How a Jew Championed the Classics for Western Civilization

2011 marks the centennial anniversary of the Loeb Classical Library

by Linda Hedrick

James Loeb (1867-1933)

James Loeb wanted to share his love of the classics by making the works of ancient authors available to anyone interested in them, regardless of whether or not they had knowledge of Greek or Latin. 

One hundred years ago he arranged to publish these great works in collaboration with some of the most outstanding classicists of the time.  The books were published  in Greek or Latin with the facing pages in English translations.  They were small in size so that they could fit in a gentleman’s coat pocket.

According to Harvard University Press, he stated his reasons were:  “To make the beauty and learning, the philosophy and wit of the great writers of ancient Greece and Rome once more accessible by means of translations that are in themselves real pieces of literature, a thing to be read for the pure joy of it, and not dull transcripts of ideas that suggest in every line the existence of a finer original form from which the average reader is shut out, and to place side by side with these translations the best critical texts of the original works, is the task I have set myself."

Official Logo with Athena, goddess of Wisdom
enthroned with shield (with Loeb logo on it).
Nike, goddess of victory, stands in her hand holding out a wreath.
Derived from a Greek coin from Lampsakos, circa 297-282 BCE

As time has gone on, with greater understanding of the texts and changes in translation styles, older editions have been revised or replaced entirely.  New titles have been added and existing ones reprinted so the entire Loeb Classical Library is always available.  The series represents the canon of classical heritage spanning fourteen centuries of everything from epics and poetry to mathematics and geography. In 2001, HUP (Harvard University Press) began a similar project for Renaissance works in Latin.  The I Tatti Renaissance Library editions have blue covers.

In many of the older editions words that might have been deemed objectionable were replaced with euphemisms or were omitted.  According to the Harvard University Press website, the early edition of Catullus contained a sentence translated:  “Tis you I fear, you and your passions, so fatal to the young, both good and bad alike.”  The new, more accurately translated edition reads:  “Tis you I fear, you and your penis, so ready to molest good boys and bad alike.”  Sometimes offending words were printed, but in a language other than English, rendering it incomprehensible to anyone ignorant of that language.  It should surprise no one that the ancients were prurient and salacious.

An example of an updated edition.  In the earlier edition the final line was:
"I fear there is much you don't remember,  sir."
The real meaning was in a footnote.

Another change in the newer editions is the language style.  The older editions were written into the English of the King James Bible, which made the passages stilted and awkward.  Since their inception the texts have often been denounced by serious classicists and professors for their prosaic prose, and considered akin to “Cliff Notes” for the classics.  Yet the series has prevailed, and is currently experiencing a resurgence in popularity, in no small way due to the updates  Proceeds from the Loeb Classical Library continue to subsidize graduate student fellowships at Harvard.

Green is for Greek, red is for Latin.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia

There are a couple of ironies at work here.  The first is that some of the texts, including the ones by the Church fathers whose works were often informed by the “pagan” writers, only exist thanks to Muslim scholars who valued them enough to collect and copy them.  These Muslim custodians of our Western heritage warrant our gratitude and respect.

Another irony concerns Loeb, himself.  Loeb began his college education at Harvard in 1884, studying Greek and Latin.  A German-American Jew, he was advised that his ancestry would derail any efforts toward a career in academia.  It must have been difficult for him to accept that his heritage stood in the way of the studies he loved and wished to pursue.  It is a testament to his devotion to learning and the classics that he remained staunch in his resolve to pursue his interests, albeit in a different yet remarkable way.

After graduation from Harvard, Loeb worked in New York at his father’s banking firm.  Because of his depression, a lifelong predicament, he moved to the country.  He subsequently moved to Germany, and through an association with Sigmund Freud, became acquainted with Emil Kraepelin of Munich.  This affiliation led to the founding of the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie, aka The Gerrman Research Institute for Psychiatry.  Loeb also supported other medical institutions in Germany and the United States.

James Loeb at work

While at Harvard Loeb was also involved in music.  His interest in music later led to his financial backing of the foundation of the American Institute of Musical Art in New York.  Later this became the renowned Julliard School, the first endowed music school in the country.  In the early 1900s he also helped the struggling Philharmonic Society of New York.

He continued his support of Harvard.  He donated funds for the music department building and Paine Hall, Harvard’s concert auditorium.  He left a large endowment to the classics department.  In addition, he was trustee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and donated his art collection from the classical period to the Staatliche Antikensammlungen in Munich.

Loeb was a remarkable man.  His generosity and endorsement of the academic studies he was barred from participating in  attests to his character, and underscores the type of man the ancients would applaud. 

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Except as noted, images courtesy of Harvard University Press

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The Case Of The Murderous Mushroom: When Rare Books Get It Wrong

By Nancy Mattoon

A Bouquet of Poisonous Mushrooms.
Number 3 is Amanita phalloides.
From: McIlvaine, Charles.
One Thousand American Fungi.
Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill Company, c.1900.
(All Images Courtesy of: Farlow Library, Archives, and Herbarium of Cryptogamic Botany.)

Amanita phalloides, his name means "phallus-shaped fungus." Sounds pretty sexy until he gets intimate enough with you to reveal his nickname: "The Death Cap." And once you've had a taste of this fellow there's no turning back, every part of this mushroom is poisonous, and a death cap weighing less than two ounces contains more than enough toxins to kill an adult human.

Detail From: Murrill, William A.
Edible and Poisonsous Mushrooms.
New York: W.A. Murrill, 1916.
Figure 32 - Venenarius phalloides (Amanita phalloides).

According to mycologist David W. Fischer, "No mushroom is worthier of fear than the terribly poisonous Death Cap (Amanita phalloides). This single, widespread species of mushroom is solely responsible for the majority of fatal and otherwise serious mushroom poisoning cases, worldwide as well as in North America. Indeed, one might argue that the Death Cap's notorious, relatively frequent victimization of Homo sapiens is far and away the best explanation (or rationalization) for the widespread fear of edible wild mushrooms."

Bridgham, Joseph
Unpublished watercolor, circa. 1890,
Incorrectly identified as Amanita phalloides pale form,
but probably Amanita mappa, which contains almost no toxins.

Alleged victims of the deadly Amanita phalloides, or one of its almost equally lethal kissing-cousins, include Roman Emperor Claudius, Pope Clement VII, Tsaritsa Natalia Naryshkina, and Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI. And more recently, Nicholas Evans, author of The Horse Whisperer and his wife, Charlotte, were ill for months and underwent kidney dialysis after partaking of poisonous mushrooms they plucked on a forest walk in Great Britain. To this day, there is no known antidote for the toxins found in the death cap, which attack and shut down the liver and kidneys.

Detail From: M. C. Cooke,
Handbook Of British Fungi,
With Full Descriptions Of All The Species.
London, New York: Macmillan and co., 1871.
Plate 2 - Amanita phalloides.
Note at bottom of plate written by William Gibson Farlow,
indicating the identification is incorrect.

Such dire consequences would lead most folks to think that scientists over the centuries would have been particularly meticulous when describing and depicting these delicate dispensers of death. But according to an online exhibit from Harvard University, "For such a deadly mushroom it is truly frightening how often it has been misidentified and misrepresented in mycological literature." The exhibit uses rare books and materials from the Farlow Library, Archives, and Herbarium of Cryptogamic Botany to illustrate the varied--and quite frequently inaccurate-- representations of Amanita phalloides, dating from 1727 to the present, in literature, illustration, specimen, and even in song.

Taylor, Thomas
Student's Hand-Book Of Mushrooms
Of America Edible And Poisonous.
Washington: A. R. Taylor, 1897-98.

Plate XV, figure 8 - (Amanita) phalloides Fries.

Included in the Harvard show are several contemporary reports of mushroom poisoning, such as this one from Volume 96, Number 3 (1996) of The American Journal of Gastroenterology:

On a summer day in 1995, a 51-year-old grandmother in Alabama sent her husband to collect mushrooms for a family Sunday brunch. On his return to the kitchen, she breaded and fried the morsels, then proudly served her brunch specialty to her children and grandchildren. The chef and her husband had recently moved from Illinois to the South, and they were happy to find that the mushrooms that they loved to collect up North were plentiful in Alabama as well.

Within twelve hours, the cook and three of the brunch guests were sickened with abdominal pain, diarrhea, and vomiting. The three adults eventually recovered, but the youngest patient, her 3-year-old granddaughter, did not survive—a victim of fulminate liver failure. Unknowingly, the Alabama grandmother had mistakenly served her precious loved ones a heaping platter of deep fried deathcap mushrooms, Amanita phalloides, perhaps the most deadly of the 2000 species of mushrooms found on our planet.

Bulliard, Pierre.
Flora Parisiensis : Ou, Descriptions Et Figures
Des Plantes Qui Croissent Aux Environs De Paris.
Paris : P.F. Didot, 1776-1783.
Plate 625 - Fungus phalloides Vaill.

Also part of the exhibit are some poetic takes on our fickle friend, the death cap:

Don't eat amanitas--you'll quiver,
You'll fall to your knees and you'll shiver.
Poison mushrooms, that's why,
And you'll probably die.
If you don't then you'll need a new liver.

by Meg Beagle
Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form

A salad with diced amanita
Will kill with the sped of a cheetah.
Though it's mushrooms you've bought,
Added toadstools are thought
By a killer to make things much sweeter.

by Isaac Asimov
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
May 1984

Asimov's limerick takes more than the usual amount of poetic license. One of the truly unfortunate aspects of Amanita phalloides poisoning is that the acute initial symptoms--violent vomiting and diarrhea, accompanied by severe stomach cramps--disappear after about 24 hours. (They start about 6 hours after ingestion.) This leads victims to believe that the "food poisoning" is over, and they are on the road to recovery. Especially in the case of misdiagnosis, even doctors will assume the danger has passed, and the patient will be discharged. In reality, the liver and kidneys will continue to be attacked, leading to jaundice and renal shutdown, which causes coma, organ failure, and/or death.

Lenz, Harald Othmar.
Die Nützlichen Und Schädlichen Schwämme,
Nebst Einem Anhange Über Die Islandische Flechte.
Aufl.: Gotha, Becker, 1840.
Taf 1, 1 - Agaricus phalloides.

There are tens of thousands of species mushrooms and toadstools worldwide. The terms go back hundreds of years, and are essentially interchangeable, having never been properly defined. Between 1400 and 1600 A.D., the terms tadstoles, frogstooles, frogge stoles, tadstooles, tode stoles, toodys hatte, paddockstool, puddockstool, paddocstol, toadstoole, and paddockstooles were used synonymously with mushrom, mushrum, muscheron, mousheroms, mussheron, or musserouns. It was generally thought that to be called a toadstool a fungus had to be inedible and perhaps poisonous, while the moniker mushroom meant it was tasty and harmless. In fact, the killer Amanita phalloides is actually quite delectable.

The best advice about picking and eating wild mushrooms might come from the punchline of the favorite gag of mycologists. When these experts are asked whether of not a particular mushroom is edible, their answer is likely to be, "You can eat any mushroom once!"

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John Ward And The "Infinite Variability Of Performance"

John Milton Ward "prefers to have a copy of every extant score of a work when possible, and never believes that a second copy of a published work is a duplicate until it has been compared measure for measure by measure. His conviction that publishers frequently made internal changes in scores has been validated repeatedly."

Ward, the internationally acclaimed musicologist, retired as the William Powell Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University in 1985. In the twenty-five years since then he has amassed and curated, on behalf of the Harvard Libraries, what is now recognized as one of if not the most important and vast collections of original music and dance material in the world.

John Ward and His Magnificent Collection, which has just been published in an attractively produced limited edition, is a celebratory collection of appreciative essays about, and an interview with, this very special man who, now ninety-three, continues to be robustly passionate about the collection of music and related material.

Bibliophiles strive to collect every copy of a work of literature to track textural changes. John Ward insisted on the same careful attention to variation in musical scores. The difference is that, while an author may make a few minor or major changes to their text over time, a piece of music is different every time it is performed; it can be repeated note for note but can never replicate the performer's or conductor's mental state. Music changes through time, adaptation to cultural milieu, through the interpreter. Sometimes changes to a score occur simply to make it accessible to audiences. While he would surely never allow it, the operas of Wagner are routinely truncated so that an audience can enjoy them from beginning to end within their lifetimes.

 

John Ward at home, October 2009. Credit: Gordon Hollis.

 

This phenomenon is crystallized in Ward's dictum of "the infinite variability of performance." What it meant to him on a practical level was an insistence on collecting every score and piece of material associated with it for Harvard as keys to understanding music from the past. Ward was and remains one of the foremost historians of music and the history of a musical score is, to him, amongst other things, the history of the culture from which it was born.

Hence, the performer's or conductor's scribbled notes on a score offer crucial documentation to  a musical work's evolution.

The book, a warm and delightful festschrift, opens with editor Gordon Hollis' interview with Ward and then divides into three sections that encapsulate Ward's life, contributions, and accomplishments with appreciative essays by leading scholars and members of the rare book trade who have worked with Ward over the years to assist in his quest for scores and related anything that can shed light on a musical work.

1. Interview with John Ward by Gordon Hollis.

 

2. John Ward as Educator, Collector and Curator



 

Sir Curtis Price, Origins of the King’s Theatre Collection
.

 

Joseph G. Price, An Innocent Bystander.

 

.
John and Jude Lubrano, La Chasse et Le Professeur.


 

Carl B. Schmidt, A Personal Recollection - John Milton Ward as Educator
Christel Wallbaum, Letter to John Ward.



 

3. The Collections



 

Andrea Cawelti, Introduction to the John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward Collections at Harvard University
.

 

Virginia Danielson, A Passage to India. John Ward and the Whole World of Music
.

 

Lisa Cox, A French Journey.

 



4. The Ward Collections at Work



 

Philip Gossett, Il barbiere di Siviglia and the John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward Collection
 at the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

 


Morris S. Levy, From Vienna to Naples to Cambridge. The Ward Collection, Robert von Gallenberg, and Furio Camillo
.

 

Hugh MacDonald, Bizet’s La Jolie Fille de Perth in Print and in Performance
.

 

Lowell Lindgren, Handel’s Significance within The King’s Theatre Collection of John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward
.

 

Richard MacNutt, The First Editions in Vocal Score of Weber’s Der Freischütz and Euryanthe
.

 

D. W. Krummel, Lutebooks on the Loose.

While this volume is a must-have for musicologists and collectors of music, its story of a particular collector in a particular field of collection should be of keen interest to book collectors no matter what their individual area of collection. Ward's philosophy of collecting can apply to all, and the fact of his philosophy highlights the importance to collectors of anything to form their own to guide and provide an overarching context to their efforts.

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John Ward and His Magnificent Collection. Edited by Gordon Hollis. Beverly Hills, CA: Golden Legend, 2010. Hardbound in cloth. 168 pp. Black and white photo-illustrations. Limited to 200 copies. $75. Exclusively distributed by Golden Legend.

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Houghton Library Exhibit Illuminates The Book Within The Book

Guillaume d'Estouteville (ca. 1412-1483), Epistola ad heremitas Sancti Augustini, Central Italy, after 1475. This volume is comprised of a series of letters written by various Popes to Augustinian Hermits. Depicted here is the presentation of the book to a member of the Holy Order by Pope Sixtus IV. The compiler, who later became Dean of the College of Cardinals in Rome, is seen standing beside the papal throne.
(All images courtesy of the Houghton Library.)

Lovers of the quiet, solitary refuge of books seem to find themselves outnumbered today. In a world where the moving, electronic image has become the most common form of mass communication, readers may wish they could have lived in an earlier time. A time in which the bound, printed word still reigned supreme as the major source of knowledge and culture. A new exhibit at Harvard University's Houghton Library looks back at such a time, The Middle Ages. It shows that in the medieval world, at least for the upper classes, books were essential to nearly every important part of everyday life.

Polistorio (Polyhistoria), Northern Italy, late fourteenth century. This volume, written in 1383, is a world chronicle that focuses on the city of Rome. The image seen here shows a copyist at work, using one text to create another. The depiction here is idealized, as actual calligraphy was done on loose sheets, which were only later bound together.

The show, Books in Books: Reflections on Reading and Writing in the Middle Ages, is made up of 10 of the library's most important medieval manuscripts. Spanning more than three hundred years, from the early 12th to the early 15th centuries, each of these texts show books being written, created, presented, exchanged, read, or studied. These artifacts show that for those living in Europe's Dark Ages, books illuminated ancient history, literary traditions, and religious doctrines. They also dictated social customs, manners, morals, and the appropriate role of art, music, dance, sports, and games in courtly society. And, in the case of the Bible, the book was even taken as the literal word of God.

Book of Hours, Use of Sarum, England, ca. 1420. this prayer book combines Flemish and English modes of illumination. The image shows St. Jerome, patron saint of libraries and librarians, holding a quill and a pen knife in his hands as he works on a long unfurled scroll.

The images of books within books in these manuscripts serve a wide variety of purposes. Portraits of writers at work identify them as the authorities behind the text. Dedication portraits pay tribute to the patrons who commissioned the works, and often depict the finished book's presentation. Sometimes the images help to convey how a book is to be received: readers may be shown engaging in a discussion over the text, or a solitary reader may be seen inviting the viewer to quietly look over his shoulder, or they may show a reader benefiting from the wisdom gained upon finishing and applying the work's content to improve his daily life.

Konrad von Ammenhausen (ca. 1300), Schachzabelbuch, a translation into German of Jacobus de Cessolis (flourished 1288-1322), De ludo scachorum. Austria (Vienna?), before 1408. The full title of the original Latin work, of which this manuscript presents a translation into German, reads, in translation: "Book of the Customs of Men and Duties of the Nobles and the People as Seen through the Game of Chess." The work uses the game of chess as an allegory of the social hierarchy. It contains tinted drawings of bishops, knights, peasants, money changers, physicians, innkeepers and gamblers, among others. Here two elderly gentlemen may be engaging in a discussion over the volume.

The artistry of the calligraphy and illumination of each manuscript in this exhibition points out how immensely the physical creation of books has changed over the centuries. The painstaking hand work of each volume could not be more different from the mass produced, printed paperbacks of today. But the fact that the book survived through so many technical innovations is comforting in light of the advent of e-books, Kindles, and iPads. In one form or another, the written word lives on.

Treatise on Tournaments, France, between 1452 and 1475. This compendium on the form and organization of knightly contests brings together several works. The work may have been written by the great bibliophile, Jacques d'Armagnac (ca. 1433-1477), the Duke of Nemours, whose great library was confiscated by Louis XI after his execution for treason. The image here depicts a knight presenting the book to his lord. Other illustrations include fictive coats of arms for the 150 Knights of the Round Table, and watercolors featuring suits of armor.

The Harvard University Books in Books show will be on display through June 25, 2010 in the Amy Lowell Room of Houghton Library. It was a joint project of the library and Professor Jeffrey F. Hamburger, the Kuno Francke Professor of German Art & Culture, and the Chair of Harvard's Medieval Studies Committee. As part of the project, the manuscripts were digitized, and are available in an online version of the exhibition. This use of modern technology brings rare books and manuscripts to a far wider audience than they have ever previously enjoyed. It reminds us that even though the book may no longer be the center of our culture, some of the items that seem to be replacing it are ironically making it more accessible.
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Archives's Exhibit Exposes Espionage

Original European Union Poster For: Prague Through The Lens Of the Secret Police.

Imagine that every move in your ordinary, everyday life, was secretly photographed. Your seemingly innocuous activities, strolling through a park, munching on an apple, waiting for the subway, were considered so dangerous they were captured forever by the secret police. Sounds far fetched, doesn't it? But a traveling exhibit from the newly created Security Services Archive in the Czech Republic capital of Prague reveals that from 1968 to 1989 this was exactly what citizens in that city endured.

The exhibit, Prague Through The Lens Of The Secret Police, is on view at the Harvard University Center for Government and International Studies through December 21, 2009. It consists mainly of banner sized enlargements of the black and white photos snapped for over twenty years by citizen spies employed by the Cold War communist government.

The methods employed to obtain the photographs might seem almost comic if they weren't so oppressive. According to an article in The Harvard Gazette, the homegrown spies who worked as secret police agents concealed their cameras in "tobacco pouches, purses, briefcases, transistor radios, lighters, and on engine blocks (for mobile surveillance)." Film, and later, video cameras were hidden in parked cars, and even in baby carriages pushed by spies posing as proud parents.

A Series Of Surveillance Photos.
(The officers’ most commonly used exposure time was 1/125 of a second and often even 1/60 of a second.)

The resulting photos document a drab, gray, depressing Prague devoid of the most basic freedoms. A city strangled by a totalitarian regime, under which citizens were denied the freedom to think, speak, read, or assemble freely. Contrasting these photos with the city's now vibrant cultural and artistic scene, leads to the conclusion that the spies inadvertently documented the soul-crushing effect of their employer's tyranny.

The exhibit marks a new era in studies of the Cold War. Virtually all former Eastern Bloc countries are in the process of organizing and digitizing what were once highly classified documents hidden in secret, secure government files. The Prague Institute For The Study Of Totalitarian Regimes, which administers the Security Services Archive, is, by government mandate, free and open to all scholars, researchers, and curious citizens.

One attendee at the opening of the exhibit at Harvard knew first hand of the of all-seeing eye, and all-hearing ear, of the Czech Cold War government. Haviland Smith, the United States CIA station chief in Prague in 1958, recalled that when he and his wife were alone, settling into a Prague hotel room, Mrs. Smith complained to her husband that there was only one towel in the bathroom. "Within two minutes," said Smith, "there was a knock at the door, and a maid stood there with an armful of towels." Smith called such relentless, ubiquitous surveillance “an expression of the regime’s desire to stay in power -- nothing more, nothing less.”

Author Milan Kundera (right) Was One Surveillance Target.

At the opening reception for the exhibit, Jiri Ellinger, first secretary and head of the political section at the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Washington, D.C., spoke to a crowd of about 150. He remarked that those documented in the photos were considered enemies of the state for a variety of reasons. One subject of surveillance, code named "Doctor A", was actually Zdenek Pinc, a professor of ancient philosophy at Prague's Charles University. "He was dangerous to the regime because he wanted to study and think freely." To a government bent on controlling the minds and souls of its citizens, even study of ideas expressed for thousands of years can seem perversely revolutionary.

Even Nuns Were Viewed As Dangerous By The Czech Secret Police.

The photographs in the exhibit have been collected in a 2009 coffee table book published by The Prague Institute For The Study Of Totalitarian Regimes. For information on obtaining the book, Prague Through The Lens Of The Secret Police, in English, send an inquiry to the archive at: info@kosmas.cz.

Posted by Nancy Mattoon