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The Black Tradition in RBC

We couldn’t let Black History Month pass without blogging about the Rare Book Collection’s outstanding resources for the study of the Black tradition. Here we highlight a recent acquisition and an extraordinary survival. This ephemeral broadside for the Sabbath School of the State Street M.E. Church is an African-American imprint, dateline Mobile, Alabama, March 17, 1865. There is only one other printing issued in the Confederate States of America known to be of African-American authorship.

This single sheet gives the rules, regulations, and by-laws for a school that appears to have became the first one for African-Americans in the state of Alabama. Sabbath schools were different from the Sunday schools of our era, offering non-religious instruction on the Sabbath, that day being the only one of the week that the laboring classes might have free. The creation of a school for African Americans was a bold move, and this document was produced on the very day that Union forces began their campaign to take the port city.

The State Street Methodist Church was founded in 1829 as a mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church, later the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. It came to have a congregation of 500 full members by 1855, when an imposing Italianate structure had been erected as its home. The landmark building still exists in Mobile.

In Urban Emancipation: Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile, 1860-1890 (Baton Rouge, 2002), Michael W. Fitzgerald notes that “less than one month after the city fell, the ‘State Street M.E. Colored Church’ opened a school with the assistance of a northern aid society. Ten days later over five hundred students were in attendance, gathered from churches throughout the city.” The broadside now in the RBC would seem to relate to that school’s origins and history. It also elicits all kinds of queries: from the circumstances of access to a printing press to the identities and lives of the “Committee and Framers,” a few of whom can be found in the 1870 census for Mobile, with their “Color” listed variously as Mulatto or Black.

Other schools for African Americans rapidly opened in Mobile in the wake of State Street’s. Tragically, at least two were destroyed by arson. A true rarity, the RBC’s broadside provides material evidence of the Black quest for education in the United States and opens up new avenues for thought and research on Reconstruction and Black history in the American South.

Warm Hearts In Cold Regions

It’s headed for 10 degrees. And we’re ready! Floating icebergs, walruses sporting, seals on the ice, narwhals, and the haunt of the sea-birds. We’ve got our books–and our sweaters–to keep us warm.

Siberia in Chapel Hill: A Blad for the Blog

It’s forecast to feel like Siberia here in the Southern part of heaven. So we’re dressing for it in our Northern sweaters. And turning to our Travel Book Collection for tales of frosty lands.

J.W. Buel, Russian Nihilism and Exile Life in Siberia (Hartford, Conn., 1883) / Travel DK26 B93 1883 — J.W. Buel, *Russian Nihilism and Exile Life in Siberia* (Hartford, Conn., 1883) / Travel DK26 B93 1883

This volume has to have one of the most evocative of 19th-century decorated bindings—with its images of an angel, chaos, a shackled prisoner, and icicled letters. However, looking for the story inside, one is disappointed. The book is a salesman’s sample, a dummy book, or “blad,” and has only a hundred of the title’s 545 pages. Blads were used by traveling salesmen as samples of books that could be purchased by subscription. On the inside front cover, specimen spines of alternative binding styles were customarily mounted, as shown below.

The back of this book features a notice on “Conditions of Subscription,” which lists the price in a cloth binding at $2.50 and a leather one at $3.00. It stipulates that the book is for sale by subscription only “and will never be for sale in book stores or on railroad trains, and persons desiring to purchase must do so from the canvassing agent.”

The terms further state that “Persons signing their names in this Prospectus as subscribers, will be expected to receive and pay for the book when delivered by the Agent, only on condition that the complete book is as here represented.” Of the twenty-two individuals subsequently signing, seventeen requested that the book be bound in leather, a decision that mystifies us, enamored as we are of the pictorial binding.

To view this book’s cloth covering—and the decoratively patterned coverings of the RBC’s stewards—come out of the Chapel Hill cold and get warm inside Wilson Library’s North Carolina Collection / Rare Book Collection Reading Room.

Cheers! To the New Year!

The Toast Master's Companion (Derby, n.d.) PR3991 A1 T57 1830 — *The Toast Master’s Companion* (Derby, n.d.) / PR3991 A1 T57 1830

Tonight’s the night for making toasts, and so we turn to a rare chapbook in the RBC for some ideas. Alas, many phrases from The Toast Master’s Companion don’t work, written as they were for Great Britain in the early 19th century. The overwhelming number are gathered under headings like “Loyal and Patriotic,” “Military,” “Naval,” and “Masonic,” and are often inflected with the concerns of their time and place. However, other categories, such as “Love” and “Friendship,” offer ageless sentiments for raising a glass: “May the unions of persons always be founded on that of our hearts,” or “May the hinges of friendship never grow rusty.” (We like that one.)

Another heading, “Bottle,” collects toasts that directly address the power of wine and spirits to promote conviviality, as well as the need for moderation. Which is apt and also interesting in that our copy of this chapbook is labeled in pencil over the frontispiece as a George Cruikshank “disassociation copy.” The ink inscription at bottom has been taken to be his disavowal of a role as illustrator. (We admit we haven’t done any recent authentication of the handwriting.) In later life, the famous British caricaturist became an ardent member of the Temperance movement, reacting against the excesses of alcohol consumption in British society.

So as the beer distributors say, “Celebrate responsibly.” Or to steal a toast from this little book: “May the moments of mirth be regulated by the dial of reason.” Happy New Year!

A Working Christmas

In 1802, the great American printer Isaiah Thomas retired from business to write his landmark book The History of Printing in America (1810). At that time, he handed over his firm to his son of the same name. The latter made a serious start at business, as this advertisement indicates, announcing his services on Christmas day (note the date at the bottom of the oval). The single leaf is bound with another Thomas imprint held by the RBC, the first Greek New Testament printed in the U.S., in 1800.

Working on Christmas was common in the early years of our nation. And so we honor our industrious forebears by posting this ephemeral printing dated exactly two hundred and eleven years ago today.

Just know, however, that UNC and the RBC are closed on Christmas. We wrote this in advance and programmed it for posting. Happy holidays!

Nelson Mandela (1918-2013): The Zulu Beadwork Letter, South Africa, and North Carolina

The world mourns the loss of Nelson Mandela, who passed away on December 5 at the age of 95. We pay special tribute to him here by examining a unique object in the Rare Book Collection: a beadwork Zulu love letter from South Africa.

In 1937, Daniel M. Malcolm, Chief Inspector of Native Education in Natal, South Africa, brought the letter to UNC-Chapel Hill as a visual aid for a lecture he gave at that year’s “Conference on Education of American Negroes and African Natives.” Malcolm explained that the letter was written by a girl to her beloved. The white beads indicate the purity of her heart, and the red beads show that her heart is broken and bleeding for her beloved. The four black squares represent four questions about their relationship that he must answer. Malcolm gave the love letter to UNC and its Hanes Foundation for the Study of the Origin and Development of the Book. It subsequently became part of the RBC’s “Curiosities Cabinet,” which houses many other non-codex objects of significance for the history of the book, such as cuneiform tablets and papyrus fragments.

Dr. Malcolm’s visit to Carolina was before the implementation of apartheid segregation in South Africa in 1948, although black South Africans had been severely restricted by the 1913 Natives Land Act, which reserved the majority of the country’s land for whites. In fact, Nelson Mandela had studied at South Africa’s prestigious University of Witwatersrand in the 1940s, after attending Fort Hare University, the South African Native College. Witwatersrand, along with the University of Cape Town, followed a policy of academic non-segregation, which began because of inadequate training facilities for black natives to study medicine. The University of Witwatersrand remained an “open” university until 1959, when the government passed the Extension of University Education Act, also known as the Separate Universities Act. Witwatersrand, although “open” until then, was not a particularly hospitable environment for blacks, as the research of B.K. Murray indicates. Mandela failed to gain his law degree, going on to become Witwatersrand’s “most famous non-graduate.”

The first African-American students at Carolina arrived in 1951, four law students and one medical student, because there were no equal facilities for them in the state, according to a federal court ruling. In 1954, the Supreme Court abolished segregated public schools, and Carolina admitted its first undergraduate black men the next year. Fifty years ago, in 1963, Karen Parker became UNC-Chapel Hill’s first African-American female undergraduate. And the following year, the Civil Rights Act ended public segregation in Chapel Hill and the United States. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela was tried for sabotage in 1963 and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964. International pressure led to his release in 1990, and in 1994 he became the first black president of a democratic South Africa.

The Zulu beadwork letter is a tangible artifact of the parallel and divergent histories of segregation and education in South Africa and North Carolina. In the 2004 motion picture Zulu Love Letter, an adolescent girl makes a letter for her mother, who is haunted by the horrors of her past under apartheid. Its images of solitude, loss, hope, and love are intended to encourage the mother not to give up the fight. In the wake of Nelson Mandela’s death, we turn to our own Zulu love letter and remember a great man, a man who did not give up the fight.

On the Road: Armenian Exercises

A month ago, this blogger found herself in the spectacular landscape of Armenia, deep in the Trans-Caucasus, skirting the borders of Georgia, Turkey, Iran, and Azerbaijan.

Armenia is well known for being the first country to establish Christianity as its official religion, having certainly done so before 314 AD. Unsurprisingly, the nation has a rich architectural heritage of ancient Christian churches and monasteries, such as Spitakavor (left). It also has a remarkable scribal tradition, which produced tens of thousands of manuscript books.

In 405 AD, a unique alphabet was invented for the Armenian language, which constitutes its own distinctive branch of the Indo-European language family. The alphabet consisted of thirty-six letters, and it is still in use today, with the addition of three more letters for a total of thirty-nine. The monk Mesrop Mashtots is credited with the invention, which was promptly employed to write Armenian translations of the holy scriptures.

Located at the end of Mesrop Mashtots Avenue in Yerevan, the capital city of Armenia, is the Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts and the Matenadaran, or “manuscripts repository.” This public building houses over 17,300 manuscripts, 450,000 archival documents, and 3,000 printed books. Most of the manuscripts are in Armenian, although there are also examples written in Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Old Slavonic, and other languages.

An impressive selection of that large collection is on display. Many are beautifully illuminated and illustrated, including a number of medicinal manuscripts. The one below, a veterinary text, was particularly arresting, even though–or perhaps, because–I could not read a single word of it.

Horse medicine manuscript, Matenadaran, Yerevan, Armenia

When seeing books while traveling, I always think about the Rare Book Collection. Regrettably, we have no ancient Armenian manuscripts. But Armenian-language texts do lurk in RBC, among its fine Byron Collection, one of our British Romantic author collections (along with Keats and Wordsworth).

Page from Byron, ??? — *Beauties of English poets = Tsaghkakʻagh kʻyrtʻoghatsʻ Angilyatsʻwotsʻ* (S. Lazzaro, Venice, 1852). / Byron PR1179 .A7 B43 1852 / William A. Whitaker Fund

While resident in Venice, Lord Byron sought out the company of the Mekhitarist fathers on the island of San Lazzaro. The Mekhitarists were a Roman Catholic order founded in the early 18th century by an Armenian monk who had left the Armenian Apostolic Church. Byron was fascinated by Armenian culture and boated across the Venetian lagoon to learn the language at the monastery.

Note the reproduction at left of Byron’s English and Armenian signatures in a bilingual book, Beauties of English Poets = Tsaghkakʻagh kʻyrtʻoghatsʻ Angilyatsʻwotsʻ, published by the press on the island after the author’s death. This volume features mainly Byron’s own poetry, but also his translations of Alexander Pope, John Milton, and Thomas Gray. See below the latter’s “Elegy in a Country Church-Yard.”

Beauties / Byron PR1179 A7 B43 1852 — *Beauties of English Poets*, p.150-151 / Byron PR1179 A7 B43 1852

The San Lazzaro connection led to Byron becoming one of the most widely read English poets among Armenians. The island monastery published other Byron writings in the 19th century, including Armenian Exercises, which contains his English translations of Armenian historical and biblical writings, as well as anonymous Armenian translations of Byron’s letters and poetry, accompanied by their original English texts. The RBC holds the 1870 edition of this work.

Armenian travels, Armenian exercises. On the road, all roads lead home–even the Silk Road–to the Rare Book Collection.

Moonrise at the Selim Pass Caravanserai along the Silk Road, Armenia

Henrietta, the Woman Behind Bowdlerism

Almost a year ago, University Librarian Sarah Michalak, read from the 1818 second edition of The Family Shakespeare at the event “Banned and in the Rare Book Collection.” The Family Shakespeare exemplifies the nineteenth-century editorial phenomenon of expurgating literature on moral grounds. This came to be known eponymously as “bowdlerism,” after the Bowdler family, who proudly claimed three generations of Shakespeare expurgators.

Title page of the 1807 edition / PR2752 .B7 1807 / Whitaker Fund

Sometime after the event, the RBC acquired the first edition of The Family Shakespeare, which was issued with no named editor by a small provincial printing house in Bath, England in 1807. The first edition has been attributed historically to Dr. Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825). But in his book, Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America, Noel Perrin convincingly argues that the 1807 edition was actually edited by Thomas’s sister, Henrietta Bowdler (1750-1830), whose name was omitted from the title page. By the time the first edition of The Family Shakespeare appeared, Henrietta was already a published author and a well-known bluestocking. Perrin estimates that Henrietta excised about ten percent of Shakespeare’s words, taking special care to eliminate any hint of religious irreverence.

We can see Henrietta Bowdler’s editorial influence at work in her expurgation of Macbeth. In Act II, Scene 3, Henrietta cut the Porter’s entire opening speech and comedic exchange with Macduff, relegating the Porter to a non-speaking part in Shakespeare’s drama. The photograph below shows the beginning of Scene 2 in The Family Shakespeare, as morally conscientious readers might have encountered it.

Later editions of The Family Shakespeare were edited by Thomas Bowdler, who modified and in some cases reinstated many of Henrietta’s cuts. Perhaps feeling that his sister went too far in her moral zealotry, Thomas Bowdler reinstated the drunken Porter’s speech in his 1818 edition, but in a dramatically truncated form that rendered it almost unintelligible. His unintentionally comedic expurgation was brought to life by Sarah Michalak’s reading at the Banned Books Event.

UNC is one of the first libraries to acknowledge Henrietta Bowdler’s contributions in the library catalog record. How information is organized and presented to the public is far from value neutral. When catalogers suggest changes to the authority records, they draw on documentary evidence and scholarly research to support their claims. The Rare Book Collection is grateful for the hard work and advanced research skills of our technical services staff, and we are excited that our library records reflect the contributions of previously overlooked and marginalized authors and editors, like Henrietta Bowdler.

In Memoriam: Seamus Heaney (April 13, 1939−August 30, 2013)

Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney passed away this morning in Dublin after an extended illness. The RBC and UNC mourn the loss of this great poet, who delivered the University commencement address at Chapel Hill on May 12, 1996.

While the man Heaney has left this world, his remarkable literary achievement lives on at the Rare Book Collection, where the Henry C. Pearson Collection of Seamus Heaney resides. North Carolina native Pearson (UNC B.A., 1935) sought to form as complete a collection of Heaney’s printed works as possible. This rich trove today includes more than 1,200 cataloged items, reflecting the poet’s extraordinary productivity.

There is much deep wisdom to be found in Heaney’s writings. But let us end with just one example, from his Chapel Hill address. Here, Heaney uses his memory of an altered fact in a childhood story—an imagined spade substituting for the real, humble, wooden spoon—to emphasize the necessity of personal truth in living a life.

Typescript of Heaney's commencement address — From the typescript of Heaney’s commencement address

“I want to avoid preaching at you but I do want to convince you that the true and durable path into and through experience involves being true to the actual givens of your own lives. True to your own solitude, your own secret knowledge. Because oddly enough, it is that intimate, deeply personal knowledge that links us most vitally to reality and keeps us most reliably connected to one another. Calling a spade a spade may be a bit reductive at times but calling a wooden spoon a wooden spoon is the beginning of wisdom, and you will be sure to keep going in life on a far steadier psychic keel and with far more radiant individuality if you navigate by that principle.”

It was a great honor for UNC to hear Seamus Heaney in person in 1996, as it is a great honor for Wilson Library to preserve his words in our special collections in perpetuity.

Julia Margaret Cameron in NYC and UNC

A small but choice exhibition of 35 photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) has recently opened at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to fine reviews.

Julia Margaret Cameron, Illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and Other Poems (London, 1875) — Julia Margaret Cameron, *Illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and Other Poems* (London, 1875) / Folio-2 PR5558 .A2 C3 1875 / William A. Whitaker Fund

Which reminds us that here at RBC, one of our most magnificent photographic books is the Cameron masterpiece Illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and Other Poems (London, 1875). The splendid volume contains a dozen large albumen prints, created by the British photographer.

The great Victorian poet Tennyson invited Cameron, his friend and neighbor on the Isle of Wight, to illustrate his poems on the Arthurian legends for a popular edition. After considerable work, costuming and staging models, she produced twelve images. However, the “Cabinet” edition used only two, reproduced as small wood-engraved frontispieces.

At Tennyson’s prompting, Cameron set to work on a deluxe edition that would juxtapose the full-size albumen prints with text excerpts, handwritten by her and reproduced lithographically, along with Tennyson’s signature at the end of each. The result was the book Illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and Other Poems.

In the decade preceding it, photography had been championed as a creative medium to rival painting by the likes of Henry Peach Robinson. In the magical image shown above, Cameron demonstrates photography’s representational and artistic power, posing her husband as Merlin—his natural beard lengthened by an extension—and one Agnes Mangles as Vivien, to recreate a scene from Tennyson’s text.

It is assumed that Cameron’s work pleased Tennyson, who had been dissatisfied with other illustrations of his poetry. His brother Charles Tennyson Turner wrote a sonnet “To Mrs. Cameron,” which appears at the beginning of the book. Its first lines extoll the contemporary medium’s storytelling strength:

Lo! Modern Beauty lends her lips and eyes

To tell an Ancient Story! Thou has brought

Into thy picture, all our fancy sought

In that old time, with skilful art and wise.