Links & Reviews

Sorry, I got behind there for a few weeks. Time to play some serious catchup.

- The Pforzheimer Collection at NYPL has made a remarkable acquisition: a copy of Shelley's first book of verse, Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (1810). A total of four copies are known, and the newly-acquired NYPL copy is in original boards, with untrimmed pages. The title page is inscribed "Thos Medwin / a present from / one of the authors", there are manuscript corrections to printer's errors in the text, possibly in Shelley's hand, and pencilled notes ascribing authorship to various poems as well.

- Harvard Law School has released the results of testing done on a binding long-believed to have been made of human skin. The binding proved to be [drum roll please ...] sheepskin. That didn't stop another flurry of stories about anthropodermic binding, though.

- In The Paris Review, Graciela Mochkofsky on the theft and return of a stolen Borges first edition ... with a twist. Lots of background on some major theft cases from the last few years, as well.

- Hear Anne Blair deliver the inaugural John Rylands Research Institute Lecture, "Script, Type, and Byte - Manuscripts after Gutenberg (reflections on technological continuities)" (link at bottom to download the audio).

- In Time, Katy Steinmetz interviews lexicographer and slang historian Jonathon Green.

- Jennifer Howard reports on the first birthday of the DPLA for the Chronicle.

- The Getty Museum announced that it is returning a 12th-century Byzantine illuminated New Testament to the Holy Monastery of Dionysou in Greece, from which the manuscript was stolen before 1960.

- In the Washington Independent Review of Books, a profile of the Library Company of Philadelphia's retiring director John C. Van Horne.

- At The Collation, printer's waste as endleaves, with many good images and context from Sarah Werner.

- Tests on a papyrus fragment containing the words "Jesus said to them 'My wife...'" indicate that it can be dated to the fourth-eighth centuries, but skeptics continue to doubt its authenticity or significance.

- The OED has launched another public appeal, this time for a book quoted in Alice Morse Earle's 1902 book Sun Dials and Roses of Yesterday as "Mathematick Rules by I.N. Gentn, 1646."

- Simon Worrall has a piece in the BBC Magazine on the appeal of the Voynich Manuscript.

- Nick Basbanes is selling his collection of inscribed first editions.

- New from the FB&C "Bright Young Librarians" series, an interview with Sarah Burke Cahalan, a friend and library school class mate of mine!

- The Indiana Historical Society's copy of Audubon's Birds of America sold for a total of $3,525,000 at Sotheby's New York on 1 April. The copy of Quadrupeds made $245,000. IHS president and CEO John Herbst called it a "great day." The buyers have been identified only as a husband and wife "with the means to do the restoration needed for that set ...".

- Rebecca Rego Barry has an excellent rundown of the New York Book Fair, which was, as usual, a grand experience. It was fantastic to see so many friends and so many amazing books.

- Via Nick Basbanes on Twitter, Michael Rosenwald's 6 April WaPo article on the way online reading may change other forms of reading.

- Over at The Junto, an interview with Michael Jarvis, author of the Junto March Madness 2014 champion title In the Eye of All Trade (a book that has proven extremely useful to me in my own research, so I was delighted at its win!).

- From the Special Collections Processing at Penn blog, a look at H. Buxton Forman's bookplate, which bears an oddly apt caption.

- At Notabilia, a presentation copy from Abraham Ortelius to Francesco Soranzo, a Venetian nobleman who served as ambassador to Spain and a strong friend to Ortelius.

- The 8 April sale of Treasures from the Caren Archive: How History Unfolds on Paper realized $1.3 million. Eric Caren is still looking for a buyer for a collection of 200,000 additional items.

 - Goran Proot explores a 1629 book purportedly published in Antwerp, discussing the various layout elements which suggest that the book likely originated in Italy instead.

- A new blog to follow: Manutius in Manchester.

- There's an excellent interview with E.O. Wilson in the WSJ. Read all the way to the end.

- On 20 May, Sotheby's London will try again to sell the manuscript of Rachmaninoff's second symphony, this time with an estimate of £1-1.5 million. In 2004 a planned sale was called off after the relatives of the composer claimed ownership. The manuscript was later sold to the Tabor Foundation and deposited at the British Library.

- The 2014 update to the Directory of Institutions in the United States and Canada with Pre-1600 Manuscript Holdings has been posted.

Reviews

- Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's Plato at the Googleplex; review by Anthony Gottlieb in the NYTimes.

- Svante Paabo's Neanderthal Man; review by Carl Zimmer in the NYTimes.

- Justin Cartwright's Lion Heart; review by Katherine A. Powers in the WaPo.

- Helena Attlee's The Land Where Lemons Grow; review by Helena Attlee in the TLS.

- David G. Hackett's That Religion in Which All Men Agree; review by Seth Perry in The Junto.

- Justin Roberts' Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic; review by David Richardson at H-Albion.

- AMC's show "Turn"; review by Carolyn Eastman in Perspectives on History.

Links & Reviews

- The Indiana Historical Society will sell its copy of Audubon's Birds of America in April at Sotheby's. Their copy of Audubon's Quadrupeds will also be sold. Waldemar Fries' census reports that this copy of Birds was originally purchased by the York Subscription Library, possibly directly from Audubon himself. By January 1896 it had been purchased by William W. Borden for his wife, Emma, and it later was in the collections of the Borden Institute, a private school in Indiana. The Indiana Historical Society purchased it in 1933 for $4,000. Plate II in this copy contains the incorrect caption "Black Billed Cuckoo - Coccyzus Erythrophthalmus." Indiana Historical Society president John Herbst said that the copies "both had a lot of use before the society purchased them," and said that the Society would use the proceeds to fund purchases of Indiana-related materials.

- The New York Court of Appeals has reversed a lower-court ruling that would have forced auction houses to disclose the identity of consignors.

- In The Economist, an account of Cobden-Sanderson's destruction of the Doves Press type, and about designer Robert Green's attempts to digitally reconstruct it (the results of which you can now download).

- I've added a new blog to the sidebar: David J. Gary's American History Librarian. I expect this will be one most of you will want to follow too.

- "Shelfie"-madness hit Twitter this week, and it was great fun. More from Jacket Copy, or check out the Twitter hashtag.

- Cambridge University plans to raise £1.1 million to purchase the Codex Zacynthius, a ~6th-century palimpsest containing the Gospel of Luke. The manuscript has been on deposit at Cambridge since 1984.

- Eric Kwakkel asks, and then tries to answer, the age-old question "What is the oldest book in the world?"

- Over at the Oak Knoll blog, Bob Fleck writes about the Kelmscott/Goudy press, which sold this month to RIT.

- The BBC Magazine covers the Girolamini thefts; the article doesn't contain much new information, but there are several new photos of the looted library and damaged books.

- Also from the BBC Magazine, a look at the ongoing effort to recover and read the burned scrolls of Herculaneum.

- From Notabilia, a copy of Ben Franklin's Experiments and observations on electricity, inscribed to his sister Jane Mecom.

- At the Incunabula Project blog, Liam Sims covers a truly curious and fascinating list found in an early Belgian incunable in the Cambridge collections.

- Lew Jaffe posted an image of a particularly interesting bookplate this week, that of silversmith James Pérot, who lived for a time in Bermuda.

- Keren Levy highlighted one of my very favorite books, Watership Down, over at the Guardian this week.

Reviews

- Simon Winchester's The Men Who United the States; review by Sarah Wheeler in the Telegraph.

- James MacGregor Burns' Fire and Light; review by Eric Herschtal at The Junto.

- Bob Brier's Egyptomania; review by Janet Maslin in the NYTimes.

- Beau Riffenbaugh's Pinkerton's Great Detective; review by Ben Macintyre in the NYTimes.

- The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; review by George Packer in the NYTimes.

- Jo Baker's Longbourn; review by Diane Johnson in the NYTimes.

Bermuda Trip Update

Greetings from Bermuda! Today was going to be my day for exploring some parts of the island I haven't gotten to before, but since it's a bit stormy to do that, I'm hunkered down with a pile of books and lots of pictures from this week to get through. Tomorrow looks like it'll be much nicer for a hike.

I'm incredibly pleased to report that this has been an extremely fruitful trip thus far. I've already examined more material in the first five days at the Bermuda Archives than I expected to see for the whole trip, so everything I look at next week will be icing on the cake. My major focus has been on the volumes of wills and inventories through 1810, but I've also had a chance to look through a number of personal letterbooks, records of the Bermuda vice-admiralty court, government correspondence files, &c. The archivists have been wonderfully helpful, as always, and they've been pulling out all sorts of interesting little goodies for me to look at, including a "Bermuda incunabulum," one of the first pieces of job printing published in Bermuda (even better, it was the rules for one of the island's early literary societies).

I also was delighted to be able to look over the bookshelves at Verdmont, one of the Bermuda National Trust's house museums. There weren't all that many books, but a few of them had very interesting early Bermuda provenance, so I was happy to know of them. The most pleasingly appropriate was a copy of the 1777 third edition of James Lind's An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates, signed on the title page by Bermuda physician Richard Bell.

On Monday I'll be viewing the early records of the Bermuda National Library, and on Tuesday will visit the Bermuda Historical Society, which reportedly has some early Bermuda volumes. There are still a few more things on my "view if possible" list at the Archives too, and I'm now hoping I might actually be able to look at all of them (which would be really exciting).

I've put up a few of the non-research pictures from this week here, and once I've gotten the research images more fully processed I'll certainly pass along a few of those as well. I've been finding some fascinating things, but I need a bit of time to digest it all, so will hold off from sharing too much right at the moment.

And now, with the winds picking up outside (there are "gale warnings" up for this afternoon and evening), I think I'll go settle down with The Far Side of the World for a while.

Off to Bermuda!

Thanks to a generous fellowship award from the Bibliographical Society of America and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, I'm headed to Bermuda tomorrow for a couple weeks of reseach in the archives there as part of my Bermuda Project (that is, a study of the history of books in Bermuda from settlement through 1800).

I'll be staying at Greenbank (pictured at left), just across the harbor from Hamilton, where the archives are located. Not only is it a great place to stay, but it also provides me at least a good excuse to be outside some of the time, since it means a ferry ride across the harbor to get back and forth from the archives each day (nothing like going to a nice warm place in the winter but spending most of the time in a climate-controlled basement archive, right?).

This trip I'll be focused again on the early Bermuda probate records, but I hope to make enough progress with those that I can move on to other archival collections as well; there are some tantalizing letterbooks and other materials there to be examined. Time permitting I'll chime in here with interesting finds.

I'm incredibly grateful to the BSA and ASECS for their support of the project, and I look forward to sharing more with you all over the course of the next couple weeks.

Books coming with me for the trip: Naomi Novik's Black Power War, Melvyn Bragg's The Adventure of English (in flipback format, for the plane rides), Patrick O'Brian's The Far Side of the World, Wesley Stace's Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer, Richard Conniff's The Species Seekers, Ned Landsman's From Colonials to Provincials, E.O. Wilson's The Social Conquest of Earth, and Elizabeth Little's Trip of the Tongue. Probably far too many, but better too many than too few, right?

Book Review: "The Journal of Richard Norwood"

Richard Norwood's definitely not a household name, but he was an important figure in the history of early Bermuda, and his several works on mathematics and navigation were widely reprinted into the eighteenth century. He traveled widely in his early years, visiting Brussels, Naples and Rome all before his 25th birthday. By the end of 1613 he was in Bermuda, having gone there to engage in a pearl diving scheme (using a primitive diving bell of his own devising). That came to nothing, but Norwood was engaged to survey Bermuda and divide its land into parcels.

After twenty years in England, Norwood returned to Bermuda in 1637 as schoolmaster, and he lived out the remainder of his days on the island. In 1639 he composed an autobiographical journal of his life to that time, edited and published as The Journal of Richard Norwood (Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1945). Much of the journal is spiritual in nature, recounting Norwood's struggles with religious belief and doctrine throughout his early life, but he also provides much information about his time in Bermuda and how his surveys were carried out there. He also (and most importantly for my purposes) offers some clues as to the types of things he and others in Bermuda at the time were reading and studying.

Norwood's writing style is forthright, and his honesty when describing his internal spiritual battles makes his journal somewhat more endearing than many examples of this sort of work. I laughed out loud at one passage, when he describes taking a walk after a particularly powerful religious visitation: "... my heart was so abundantly replenished with heavenly joys in consideration and sure apprehension of the love and mercy of God towards me and of the continuance thereof forever, that I did not so much walk but rather went leaping all the way, though I did as it were something check and restrain myself from that action of leaping" (p. 84).

The journal is accompanied by contextual essays on Norwood's life and writings, as well as a bibliography of his works and a transcription of his estate inventory.

Washington Killed in Duel!

One of the most interesting (and distracting!) things I've found as I work my way through the early years of the Bermuda Gazette is the way rumors are reported. My favorite so far is this one, from the 18 January 1794 issue:

"There is a report here [i.e. in Bermuda], but from what authority we do not learn, that Citizen Genet lately sent a challenge to General Washington, which being treated with contempt by the latter, Genet took an opportunity to meet him, and shot him on the spot. -- We should not wonder at such an event's taking place, when we consider the enthusiastic rage that at present governs all the actions of Frenchmen. When life is so little valued, what lengths will not men go to?"

I've not found a "correction" for this (or for any other of the rumors that are reported but turn out to be unfounded) ... the printer simply carries on, and both Washington and Genet are mentioned later in the course of events.

"The Art of Printing"

Today's perambulations through some more Bermuda Gazette issues resulted in an interesting find that I thought I'd share: a poem from the 28 January 1792 issue. It's not attributed in the paper, but was written by Constantia Grierson (~1705-1732/3), quite an interesting character.

The Art of Printing

HAIL mistic art! which men like angels taught,
To speak to eyes, and paint unbody'd thought!
Though deaf and dumb; blest skill, reliev'd by thee,
We make one sense perform the task of three.
We see, hear, we touch the head and heart,
And take, or give what each but yields in part.
With the hard laws of distance we dispense,
And without sound, apart commune in sense:
View, though confin'd, may rule this earthly ball,
And travel o'er the wide expanded All.
Dead letters thus with living notions fraught,
Prove to the soul the telescopes of thought;
To mortal life a deathless witness give,
And bid all deeds and titles last, and live.
In scanty life enternity we taste;
View the first ages, and inform the last.
Arts, hist'ry, laws, we purchase with a look,
And keep, like fate, all nature in a book.

Links & Reviews

- In today's Globe, Jill Lepore talks about her new book In the Whites of Their Eyes, and about the Tea Party's use of what she terms "antihistory" in their political rhetoric. There's also an interview with Lepore by Lin Fisher on the Religion in America blog.

- Bouncing off a link in last week's L&R, Mike Widener has compiled a great guide to "research opportunities" based on the Joseph White murder case.

- The NYPL's Schomburg Center has acquired a large collection of Maya Angelou's personal papers (some 343 boxes' worth).

- Powell's Books will be selling some 7,000 books from the personal library of author Anne Rice.

- If you read one of the many "wow, Jane Austen had an editor?!" articles, make it Jen Howard's in the Chronicle. And be sure to check out the underlying project, the new Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition.

- Raymond Scott, serving an 8-year prison term for handling the stolen Durham First Folio, has reportedly landed a job in the prison library.

- No word yet on what was removed from former NARA department head Leslie Waffen's home this week under the conditions of a sealed search warrant.

- Some thoughts on "Sherlock" by Miriam at The Little Professor (I've now watched the first episode twice, and look forward to the second tonight).

- Some really interesting discoveries by Ben at Res Obscura, including a fascinatingly detailed index.

- Michael Kenney notes a few recent books on Boston's literary and political history.

- The ABAA blog uncovers a very rare early Mormon text for sale on eBay.

- Of great use to me and hopefully to many others as well, the Bermuda National Library has mounted a digital collection of the island's early newspapers.

- Paul Collins finds a very unfortunate millinery mishap.

- You think this year's political campaign is nasty? Someone's made some "attack ads" from the 1800 election.

Reviews

- Several recent books on ghosts and ghost stories, including Peter Ackroyd's The English Ghost; review by Jonathan Barnes in the TLS.

- Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra; review by Buzzy Jackson in the Boston Globe.

- Lewis Hyde's Common as Air; review by Michael Hitzik in the LATimes.

- Geoffrey Wolff's The Hard Way Round; review by Nathaniel Philbrick in the NYTimes.

- Pauline Maier's Ratification; review by Rick Brookhiser in the NYTimes.

- Susan Fletcher's Corrag; review by Ron Charles in the WaPo.

- Peter Ackroyd's The Death of King Arthur; review by David Robson in the Telegraph.

Bermuda Recon Report

Last week I took advantage of the Columbus Day holiday and a couple spare vacation days for a quick trip to Bermuda for some (not nearly enough) time in the Bermuda Archives in pursuit of some more data for the Great Bermuda Project (GBP). That included a perusal of the inventories in three volumes of colonial probate records (I skipped around a little, and ended up covering the years 1640-1703 and 1744-1791). That resulted in notes on 179 personal libraries, the vast majority of which were very small (less than five books) but a few medium-sized and a handful of what I'd consider large collections.

As is the way of things, I found a really fascinating personal letterbook just at the end of my last afternoon in the archives, which I look forward digging into more on my next trip.

One morning my wonderful girlfriend spent some time down the street at the National Library running through microfilm of the 1784 issues of the Bermuda Gazette for an intensive examination of those early Bermuda newspapers. They include significant advertisements for books being sold in the island, auction notices, and literary essays (including one very fascinating piece on the possible dangers of a press in the island that seems to be a set piece written by the printer himself, but is still very interesting). The National Library is preparing to mount a new digital database of the early issues next month, which (needless to say) will be a tremendous help.

Among the various anecdotes and curiosities in the early issues of the paper is this little gem; not entirely german to book history, but it made me chuckle: "A Vicar long ill, who had treasur'd up wealth, / Told his Curate each Sunday to pray for his health. / Which oft having done, a parishioner said, / That the Curate ought rather to wish he were dead. / "For my truth," says the Curate, "let credit be given, / I ne'er pray'd for his death - but I have for the Living." (27 March 1784).

Since returning from this little recon mission I've been busily writing up a few fellowship applications in order to (hopefully) obtain some funding for future trips to the island. There's a wealth of information there, and hopefully I'll be able to make the case that it's worthy of significant further study. In the meantime, I've got lots more notes and images to go through, and I'm sure I'll have further items to share in the near future.

The State of Things

There look to be a whole slew of interesting auctions coming up in late October-early November, so I'll be working up a preview post for those this weekend (making this a preview-preview, I guess).

In the meantime, some updates:

I'm continuing to add to the Signers of the Declaration of Independence wiki as new source material is found; this week I've updated the North Carolina delegates based on copies of their wills, and I've gotten some good leads on ways to get the probate files for the six delegates who died in Philadelphia (and whose probate files seem to be stuck in some sort of bureaucratic morass). Hopefully those leads will pan out and I'll have some new information on those shortly. About eighty titles from the library of one of those delegates, Francis Hopkinson, are at the University of Pennsylvania library, and I've been in touch with librarians there about additional materials on his book collection that might be extant.

On Monday I went down to Providence to look at the estate inventory of Stephen Hopkins in the City Archives. That was quite the experience, but when all was said and done the inventory contains a short list of books, which I'll be adding to LT shortly (hopefully today or over the weekend).

While I was in Providence I took the opportunity and visited the John Carter Brown Library, where I got to hold in my hands Richard Mather's copy of the Bay Psalm Book (online here) and a (thus-far unidentified) partial book containing shorthand annotations (and lots of them) by Roger Williams. They've also got an Internet Archive scanning station set up there, and are scanning a range of their printed books and manuscripts (including collections of imprints related to Haiti, Argentina, and Peru). I really like how their scans look, with full color and the actual page edges showing (example).

And of course I couldn't leave the city without visiting a bookstore, so I went to Cellar Stories and browsed around there (for not nearly as long as I would have liked). I'll have to go again and plan to spend half a day in their stacks, I think.

All those things, combined with making plans for the upcoming research trip to Bermuda and being hip-deep in the wonderfulness that is the second volume of the History of the Book in America are why things have been fairly quiet around here. Stay tuned for auction previews and hopefully more Signers news shortly.

Early Suffolk County Libraries

I went on a mission this morning to the New England Historic Genealogical Society, to prowl through their probate records for a while. I had several files I wanted to check:

- Andrew LeMercier, minister of the Huguenot church in Boston (d. 1764). He apparently gave some of his books and manuscripts to Richard Cranch, and given the number of French sermons and theological texts in Cranch's library, I wanted to see if there was an inventory of books in LeMercier's estate (or a mention in his will of the materials going to Cranch). Alas, there was neither (it's possible that the books were divested before his death, as none are mentioned in the estate inventory).

- Samuel Adams, (d. 1803). I was hoping to round out the Massachusetts Signers of the Declaration of Independence by finding an inventory of Sam Adams' books (I've documented the other four: John Adams, John Hancock, Robert Treat Paine, and Elbridge Gerry), but his inventory, alas, includes simply "1 lot books", valued at $30 (the same as "2 cows" and "1 Bed bedstead & curtains"). Clearly quite a few books, then, but just what they were isn't clear. There are a few scattered books with Adams' signature around, but definitely not a critical mass of them. In his will, Adams also gives to his wife "such Books as she was the owner of previous to my intermarriage with her."

- Simon Bradstreet (d. 1697). Husband of the poet Anne Bradstreet, who lost his major library in a 1666 fire. I hoped perhaps his will or inventory would mention the additional library he built up after that time, but no dice.

Once I'd tracked these down I started a longer term project, which will be to go through the early probate records systematically and look for references to books or libraries in wills and inventories. Today I got through the first hundred pages of the first volume of Suffolk County's probate records (about the 1650s), and found no inventories but a few references. I've noted them here. Hopefully I'll be able to get back there once a week or so for a while, and continue to pluck out book references (this is sort of a practice run for the Bermuda project, since I'll be doing the same thing down there at the first opportunity).

Report from the Field: RBS Days 10-15

[Note: For previous installments, go here and work backward.]

Wow, I didn't realize I'd missed an entire week of updates on RBS, but that just goes to show you what a busy time it's been! Busy, and incredibly fulfilling. I'll do a full recap of the week in this post, so please pardon its length.

On Monday morning the students, staff and faculty met for breakfast, and then separated into their class groups for the first sessions. I led the papermaking class across to their classroom in Jefferson Hall and made sure John and Tim had everything they needed, then worked on other projects around the RBS suite in the morning. After lunch I got my orientation to special collections handling so that I could work with those materials, and helped out with a show-and-tell session of atlases for Alice Hudson's Introduction to Printed Maps class.

During the afternoon we got things ready for the Monday evening lecture, by UVa professor David Vander Meulen (also a student this week in the papermaking class). He spoke on "Bibliographical Analysis in the 'Digital Age'," an entirely appropriate topic for the week. He discussed various opportunities that computers as tools offer to traditional bibliographic of printed books, but also noted that "a shadow is growing," as libraries seek to decrease print holdings and the major digitization outfits are not concerned with capturing the elements or metadata bibliographers need in order to conduct effective analysis. It was a good talk, and I know it got people thinking carefully about these issues, as they turned up in conversations throughout the week.

On Tuesday morning I helped John and Tim with their special collections session, which was a great treat - John had pulled some excellent examples of interesting papers and books about the history of papermaking to show to the students, and told some great stories about Dard Hunter and other well-known papermakers of the past. During the afternoon we worked on putting some things away from the Monday classes, and then had the weekly movie night (instructional film first, then a feature). I watched a Dutch movie on hand bookbinding first (in another room we showed one on paper-marbling), then everyone converged for a viewing of "Desk Set," which is always fun to watch.

Wednesday was quite a long day: it started early with some setup for the history of bookbinding and papermaking classes, after which I had a couple periods of free time, which I used for some stacks research on the Bermuda project. At lunchtime Michael Suarez and I had a nice chat about life plans and projects and all those various things, and then I took some reference materials over to the papermaking class for their very fascinating watermark identification exercise (each student was given a couple paper samples and asked to determine the location and approximate time period of manufacture). They certainly seemed to enjoy the hunt!

In the afternoon on Wednesday I cleaned up the printing press and its associated parts after the maps class did their printing demonstration, and then assisted with setup for the evening talk by Dr James Goode, "Three Centuries of the American Bookplate." This was an illustrated discussion of American bookplate design, featuring examples from Goode's own collection (part of which is currently on display at UVa). I joined Goode, some faculty members and other RBS staff for dinner after the talk, where we continued our discussions of bookplates, collecting, and other topics of interest.

Thursday morning I spent working with the RBS course archives, and then going to special collections to snap some pictures of the bookbinding class at their show-and-tell session, which featured a whole series of absolutely lovely and historic bindings from the university's collections. I spent the afternoon reshelving books in the basement stacks, which was great fun for me since I got to enjoy the bindings as I put them away. Once we finished up with classes a few of us went over to Heartwood Books and raided their books on books section thoroughly - when you're in town, a visit to this shop is highly recommeded.

Friday was a reasonably quiet day: in the morning I worked more on the course archives project, then we met as a staff at lunchtime to talk about how the week had gone (very well, we all agreed!). In the afternoon a couple of us worked some more on reshelving, then got things set up for the final reception before heading over to our classrooms to hand out the course evaluations and see the students off to the party, which makes a very nice capstone to the week. Once all was cleaned up in the RBS rooms the staff spent a lovely evening enjoying food, games and a little downtime.

Yesterday morning I met up with Endrina Tay from Monticello for breakfast, and we talked Libraries of Early America business for a while (and I enjoyed some very nice ham biscuits). Then the RBS staff spent the afternoon clearing out this week's classrooms and putting the materials away, which went extremely smoothly; there are only a few things left to finish reshelving this week. Once we'd gotten to a stopping point we brainstormed ideas for a while, which was very productive and led to some really interesting conversations. In the evening I went with Richard Noble, James Ascher and Donna Sy to the South Street Brewery for supper, where I finally got my pulled pork sandwich for this trip and we discussed weighty matters of great significance (well, occasionally anyway).

And today I fly home - it's hard to believe how fast the last two weeks have flown by! As I told the rest of the staff on Friday I can't remember another experience that has made me at once so exhausted and so energized. Rare Book School is a very special place, where people from all points on the bibliophilic continuum can meet and learn from each other, where an amazing teaching collection is used to great effect, where a truly awe-inspiring staff manages to pull off the tricky proposition of five concurrent classes in five different locations, all requiring materials and support. It's impressed me, it's inspired me, it's invigorated me - and I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm not alone in that.

Let me just make a quick plug (in case these posts haven't persuaded you already): COME to Rare Book School. And from me, a huge thank-you to the wonderful staff, who welcomed me so warmly and were so incredibly patient as I learned the ropes, and to the William Reese Company, the sponsor of my fellowship this summer. It's been one of the most enlightening and enjoyable experiences of my life, and I leave Charlottesville already looking forward to my next visit.

My Next Project

Last March, as I reported here, I spent a few days in Bermuda for the Society of Early Americanists' conference down there. In my notes posted when I got back, I wrote "I'm already thinking about research projects that might enable me to get back there sooner rather than later," and those ideas have been percolating ever since. I'm happy to report that they've finally come to a boil, and I've embarked on what will probably be a fairly long-term project, to explore the history of books and book culture in Bermuda from the earliest English settlements through end of the eighteenth century or so (say roughly 1609-1800). I'm writing about it here to make it official for myself, and to explain why I've been tossing out tidbits about early Bermuda records on Twitter and acquiring so many books related to Bermuda's history recently (just in case you were wondering).

There's not a whole lot in the literature on the topic (most of the reason I decided to explore it) - while both mainland America and the Caribbean islands have been explored (at least to some extent), Bermuda's been largely ignored ... a fault which I hope I can take at least some modest efforts to correct. Mike Jarvis' new book on Bermuda's role in the Atlantic world should spur further studies of how the island fit into the economic and cultural atmosphere of the time, and his framework and exhaustive efforts will be immensely helpful in all those attempts.

Over the last several months I've begun amassing a pretty hefty pile of books and articles on early Bermuda and its people to begin the project, and I've finally been able to start making my way through them (and making lists of those that I need to hunt up elsewhere). Not surprisingly, there is much more in the primary records (particularly those for the early period) than has been put to previous use - just this morning, for example, I found was appears to be the first record instance of book theft in Bermuda, in 1640. There are many questions I look forward to exploring, and many, many, many stones left to turn - and at the end, who knows what will emerge. Whatever it is, I'm sure there will be many twists, turns, and surprises along the way (and don't be surprised if I can't help but share with you all now and again).

This project will require at least a couple trips to Bermuda to use the collections at their archives (including, among other archival sources, the wills and inventories, which contain records of many early private libraries). I'll be spending some time writing up grant applications so that I might be able to undertake those researches, and anticipate some serious time spent immersed in detailed reads of record books (mmm!), both here and there.

Of course I'll still be attempting to keep up as lively a posting schedule as I generally have around here, and will be continuing to plug away at the Libraries of Early America (though I have not yet decided who's library to work on next - any suggestions from The List?) - you all just may be hearing a little more about Bermuda in the coming months than you have to date; I hope you don't mind.Oh, and if you need pictures by way of enticement, don't worry, I've got lots!