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!
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!
The Cambridge University Library has just mounted Printing Colour in Tudor England, a display informed by the research of Munby Fellow of Bibliography Dr. Elizabeth Upper. The exhibition traces the history of color printing in England from its earliest example, the Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Heraldry (1486)—also referred to as the Book of St. Albans, after its place of printing—through the sixteenth century.
Dame Juliana Berners, supposed author, The Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Heraldry (St. Albans, England, 1486) / Incunabula 533.7, superv’d. / Hanes Foundation
The Book of St. Albans is certainly well known here at UNC, as the Rare Book Collection acquired a copy in 1974 as the University’s second millionth volume. The RBC copy was featured in the Meaningful Marks: Image and Text and the History of theBook exhibition at Wilson Library in 2011. And this past semester the artistically significant rarity made an appearance for Professor Tatiana String’s course “Art and Culture in Tudor and Stuart England.”
The Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Heraldry is the first printed English sporting book and the first English printed armorial, as well as the first English book to employ color printing—most interestingly, in the heraldry section. Heraldic symbols became widespread in Europe in the thirteenth century. They were certainly an effective means of visual communication in a preliterate society, particularly in warfare, serving as they did to announce loyalties. Color was of course integral to the power of armorial designs, as the woodcut illustrations in this volume demonstrate. That’s the Tudor coat of arms, bottom right, on the page above.
Millionth volumes are a grand tradition at UNC-Chapel Hill, thanks to the John W. and Anna H. Hanes Foundation. Our millionths are always very special single volumes or book collections that promote ongoing conversation, like the Book of St. Albans. We look forward to celebrating another millionth volume—the seventh—on March 20, 2014. Stay tuned to our blog for further details.
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.
Zulu beadwork letter
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.
