Displaying the Body

The history of Western anatomy extends from ancient times to the modern analyses of bodily function; however, the scientific study of anatomy, particularly of the human body, is a recent historical phenomenon dating only so far back as the 2nd century.  During this time, the physician Galen compiled most of the writings from other ancient authorities and used empirical observation to develop theories of organ function.  He supplemented authoritative knowledge from classical sources by performing vivisections, mostly on animals, and applying those observations to human anatomy.  His work as a gladiatorial physician afforded him additional opportunities to study various wounds without the need to preserve and examine corpses, and these observations helped him expand his theories on organ function, the humors, and disease.  His tracts became the authoritative foundation for physicians for the next 1300 years.

Contrary to a popular misconception, the dismemberment of corpses wasn’t officially restricted during the Middle Ages and Renaissance; nevertheless, human dissection was rare in part because of local persecution and in part because physicians acquired their anatomical training from book-learning rather than practical observation.  But by the 14th century, some European universities began holding anatomical lectures.  Within 300 years, dissections became increasingly more common, and the modern field of anatomy as we know it today came into being.

With the advent of the printing press, print materials like books and pamphlets provided the means of recording and sharing the observations found in systemic dissections at major European universities.  Anatomists like Andreas Vesalius began to question relying solely on authoritative sources to draw anatomical and medical conclusions.  Vesalius openly denied Galen’s anatomical teachings and advanced the opinion that a new account of human anatomy was necessary.  By the end of the 1540s, his De humani corporis fabrica revolutionized anatomical study; however this work, though attractive, was not anatomically correct, and it required refinement from future anatomists.

A copperplate featuring a skinned nude. Individual muscles are assigned numbers and given labels on the adjacent page.
Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica is often credited as the foundation of modern anatomy. However, other contemporary texts are far more accurate in their prose accounts of the human body. Vesalius had the advantage of attractive, detailed copperplate illustrations, and his work quickly overshadowed these more studied accounts. In time, he would face his critics, such as Juan Valverde de Amusco. QS 4 V575 1543 superv’d.

Bartolomeo Eustachi, unlike Vesalius, was a noted supporter of Galen.  In addition to his rediscovery and accurate description of the tube that now bears his name in the internal ear, Eustachi was the first anatomist to accurately study the teeth and to describe the first and second dentition. He also discovered the adrenal glands.  However, it took many years for him to complete his intricate set of anatomical engravings.  By the time he finished them in 1552, Vesalius was already published. Eustachi would never see his own book printed in his lifetime.

A plate showing the base of the brain connected to the spinal column and its associated nerves.
Eustachi dissected with laborious care. He based his engravings on many autopsies, not just one or two. The plates function as general composites to portray the average human body in the most accurate way possible. This plate shows the base of the brain connected to the spinal column and its associated nerves. QS 4 E91 1722.

Eustachi’s student, Juan Valverde de Amusco, had an equally fraught relationship with Vesalius.  Valverde’s best-known work, Historia de la composicion del cuerpo humano, was published in Rome in 1556, 13 years after Vesalius. Like Vesalius, Valverde criticized Galen, but he disagreed with several of Vesalius’s conclusions. Moreover, he blamed Vesalius and other Italian anatomists for failing to mitigate Spanish anatomists’ ignorance. In his Historia, Valverde asserts that the goal of the book is to aid Spanish surgeons whose minimal knowledge of Latin kept them unaware of the major anatomical reforms coming out of Italy in the mid-sixteenth century.

All but four of the 42 plates in Valverde’s book actually come directly from Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica.  This infuriated Vesalius, who bitterly accused Valverde of plagiarizing him and performing few if any dissections himself.  The inclusion of the plates also led many non-Spainards to believe Valverde had merely translated Vesalius’s work into Spanish.  However, Valverde refuted these claims.  In the introduction to his subsequent Italian translation, Valverde wrote:

Succeſſe dapoi, che molti non intendando la lingua Spagnuola, & vedendo le mie Figure non molto diuerſe da quelle, cominciarono á dire ch’io hauea tradotta l’historia del Veſſalio.

Many of those who did not understand the Spanish language, and who saw that my illustrations were not very different from his began to claim that I had just translated the work of Vesalius (translation by Bjørn Okholm Skaarup in Anatomy and Anatomists in Early Modern Spain).

A copperplate showing the exposed musculature of a skinned anatomy specimen. The figure holds a knife in his left hand and his own skin in his right.
One of Valverde’s original plates, the skinned figure is posed in a way to show its detailed musculature. Here the figure holds a knife in his left hand and his own skin in his right. Each muscle is meticulously cataloged in the adjacent prose. QS 4 V215a 1606.

Valverde longed to prove the inaccuracy of the accusations against him, including Vesalius’s, thereby validating his work as original.  Though it conversed with and pulled material from other books, Valverde corrected or complicated that material, always treating it as the building block to his own larger argument.  Throughout his own book, he corrects Vesalius’s images in nearly every account, improving on or adding details that he claims Vesalius grossly overlooked, most especially in the eyes, which he and other anatomists argue Vesalius universally mislabeled.

Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica, Bartolomeo Euctachi’s Tabulae anatomicae, and Juan Valverde de Amusco’s Anotomia del corpo umano will be on display in the Fearrington Reading Room at Wilson Special Collections Library as part of RBC’s Anatomy Day Open House.  Please join us from 12:00pm – 2:00pm on Tuesday, November 12, to view historical representations of human anatomy in selected materials from our collections. 

Recognizing Evil: The Devil and His Horns

“Angels are bright still,” Shakespeare writes, “though the brightest fell.”  This moment in Macbeth, when Malcolm debates with himself whether he should trust Macduff, maps Malcolm’s internal, political concerns onto a very real religious concern for Protestants in England: the outward appearance of evil.  Malcolm believes that even though evil constantly attempts to look good, good must always appear to be good, too.  Therein lies the problem:  how does one distinguish between what appears to be good, and what actually is?  How does one know whether they are working for something godly or for the Devil?

The western tradition still considers the figure of Satan as the multifarious and malevolent author of evil. In his seminal, multi-volume portrait of what the idea of “the Devil” evokes, Jeffrey Burton Russell suggests that the Devil isn’t a finite figure; instead, he argues,

The Devil is the personification of the principle of evil. Some religions have viewed him as a being independent of the good Lord, others as being created by him. Either way, the Devil is not a mere demon, a petty and limited spirit, but the sentient personification of the force of evil itself, willing and directing evil (Devil 23).

Nevertheless, across religious and secular traditions, the Devil remains a symbol of rebellion, heresy, accusation, and turpitude. Cultural representations of the Devil in literature and its accompanying visuals continue to define, condense, and even localize the measureless potential for evil.  The text and images in these books never stop attempting to confine the unconfinable.

Who or what, then, is the Devil? And how would we actually recognize him if he showed up?

The cover of Arthur Lyons's Satan Wants You, the title in all caps and white text with a red subtitle in the same font that reads "The Cult of Devil Worship". On the cover, a black and white photo of Anton LaVey dressed in Satanic ritual robes and posing as Uncle Sam in front of a nude model lying on an altar.
The traditional iconography of Satan is re-presented here on the cover of crime fiction writer Arthur Lyons’s exploration of Satanism. The book traces the history and rise of Satanic belief from sixth-century Persia to the doctrine of LaVeyan Satanism in the 20th century. BF1548 .L96 1971.

The Apocalypse long loomed over the religious life of Western Europe.  From the rise of the early Church to the Protestant Reformation, Christian life anticipated the Second Coming, and it involved daily interactions with the divine, and the demonic, as a result.  The general population understood the spirit world to be intimately tied to their own, and ecclesiastical authorities attempted to exert control over how their congregations perceived and interacted with that world.  Canon scripture does not describe Satan, so early and medieval Christian artists had to develop an iconography that captured the Devil’s evolving role as tempter, tyrant, and rebel angel. They had to visually embody evil.  Within centuries, the Devil acquired his characteristic hooves and horns, icons drawn from the Greco-Roman Pan and Jewish seirim that Western Christian artists grafted onto the demonic.  And ecclesiastical authorities made sure that that iconography accompanied the texts moving out of scriptoria.

A woodcut of demons dragging and prodding naked souls of men and women into a large, leonine Hellmouth.
Example of a medieval Hellmouth. The woodcut is part of a large decorative border surrounding contemplative prayers in a French Book of Hours (16th-century). It depicts demons dragging and prodding the naked souls of men and women into the jaws of a leonine monster. The adjacent woodcuts depict the breaking of the fourth seal in Revelation 6. ND3363.K4 C3 superv’d.

The early modern period further intensified the early and medieval Church’s demonological iconography.  The visual tradition remained in print, even during the far more iconoclastic Protestant Reformation.  Protestants emphasized the written word over Catholic visualization and ceremony, but they proved themselves the masters of the accompanying image, too.  Using well-established visual rhetoric, Protestants developed an effective way to deliver their anticlerical, reforming message.  Even before Martin Luther distributed his Theses on Halloween 1517, critics of the Papacy lampooned it with demonic imagery.  This provided Protestants a range of visual sources to capitalize on and modify.  In their hands, the Catholic image of the Devil would become the Catholic hierarchy of offices itself.  But in prose, the Protestants argued that the Devil was terrifyingly mutable and, therefore, far more difficult to recognize.

A woodcut of a devil dressed in papal vestments and carrying a pitchfork. Two horns curl out from under a mitre blazing with hellfire. The devil is shirtless, and his chest is a demonic face. The woodcut is labeled "Ego sum Papa".
Pope Alexander VI is lampooned as a demon who declares, “Ego sum Papa” (I am the Pope). The woodcut originates from a Parisian handbill of the late 15th century and is reprinted here in M.M. Sheĭnman’s Вера в дьявола в истории религии [Faith in the Devil in the History of Religion]. BT981 .S53.
Protestants believed that the Devil could easily trick Catholics without having to change his appearance.  But for Protestants, who viewed themselves as true believers, the Devil could not so easily deceive them.  While visual aids in books and pamphlets could represent the internalized evil of the Devil, Protestants understood the Devil’s exterior was always trying to appear innocuous.  Visual aids simply weren’t enough to understand evil anymore.

Arthur Lyons’s Satan Wants You, the Thielman Kerver Heures a lussaige de Rome, and M.M. Sheĭnman’s Вера в дьявола в истории религии will be on display in the Fearrington Reading Room at Wilson Special Collections Library as part of RBC’s Hallowzine event.  Please join us on Thursday, October 31, from 3:00-4:30 pm for more spooky books, zine-making fun, and a book-themed costume contest with a generous prize for best costume!

‘The Blood is the Life’: Dracula and 19th-Century Transfusions

In Bram Stoker’s genre-defining novel Dracula, after a series of sleepwalking episodes leaves Lucy Westenra mysteriously exsanguinated, her friend and jilted suitor, John Sewell, consults his former medical teacher, Abraham Van Helsing, to find a cure for Lucy’s anemia. “She wants blood, and blood she must have or die” (123-24)–these words, muttered by Van Helsing as he tries to save his dying patient, catapult readers out of gothic vampire fiction and into 19th-century medical reality.

First edition of Dracula, bound in yellow buckram with red title and border
Front cover of the first edition (1897) PR6037.T617 D7 1897, superv’d

Transfusions in Stoker’s time weren’t completely uncommon. James Blundell, an English obstetrician, performed many of the first successful human-to-human transfusions in the early 19th century, but he often found that many of his patients “suffered fever, backache, headache and passed dark urine”–all signs of blood incompatibility. First published in 1897, Dracula predates physician Karl Landsteiner’s discovery of blood type cross-matching by several years, and, like the contemporary science the novel immortalizes in its pages, it never mentions whether the four transfusions Lucy receives are compatible ones.  Instead, Stoker tells his readers that it is male vitality that continues to rouse her: “You are a man and it is a man we want” (123).

Stoker owes a great deal to Blundell’s language, whose report in an 1829 issue of the Lancet established the idea of transfusion as “life-giving”: “…the patient expresses herself very strongly on the benefits  resulting  from the injection of the blood; her observations are equivalent to this—that she felt as if life were infused into her body.”

Contemporary cover of Jennings' Transfusions. Plum-colored cloth featuring the title in gold-lettering
Cover of Jennings’ Transfusion (1883) WB 356 J54t 1883

British physician Charles Egerton Jennings also wrote on transfusion’s “life-giving” properties.  In his book Transfusion, a short work on the process’s history and “modes of application,” Jennings advocates for the continued use of and experimentation with transfusions.  He saw their application as a vital component to contemporary medical treatment, especially obstetrics, and believed they were necessary to save at-risk parturient women. Complications during childbirth were common well into 19th-century Britain, and severe hemorrhages, while less frequent than in the past, were not unusual.  Jennings’s short treatise offers hopeful solutions to the country doctor, providing him with new tactics and a patent for new transfusion siphons that are ideally safer and easier to transport.

 

Jennings' figure of a siphon for a combined method of transfusion, including a small vessel to carry saline fluids, and a bifurcated tube that can be used for direct transfusion.
Jennings’ “syphon for intra-venous injection and a modified form of canula”. The siphon features a vessel that holds a saline solution that he believed could act as a blood supplement, as well as a bifurcated tube that can transport the solution as well as blood from a donor.

Today, we read Dracula and find the idea of transfusion probable, even banal. However, in 1897, when the novel was published, transfusion was an experimental process rife with dangerous complications. Air could easily find its way in transfusion equipment and cause fatal embolisms, blood could coagulate and clot siphons, and the equipment itself was often difficult to transport and rarely available for emergency transfusions in country homes outside the universities and hospitals of major cities, like London.  That Van Helsing risks the operation reinforces his position as an eccentric and experimental physician, and highlights the novel’s attention to the conflict between modern science and the folkloric horrors its theories cannot account for.

A first edition printing of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and an early printing of Charles Egerton Jennings’s Transfusion will be on display in the Fearrington Reading Room at Wilson Special Collections Library as part of RBC’s Hallowzine event.  Please join us on Thursday, October 31, from 3:00-4:30 pm for more spooky books, zine-making fun, and a book-themed costume contest with a generous prize for best costume!

A Brief History of Zines

To prepare for the Wilson Special Collection Library’s upcoming Hallowzine! event, I wanted to learn more about the history of zines to gain a better understanding of the historical and social contexts they evolved from. When I started my research, it seemed that without fail any website or article I found about zines would always begin by trying to answer one question: “What is a zine?” The answer is broad, and the content, style, and audience of zines vary widely, but there are several shared characteristics that make a zine:

  1. Zines are self-published or published by a small, independent publisher. Self-publishing allows marginalized voices to express themselves beyond the constraints of mainstream media, and also lets authors take control of the process of publishing. Zines also present an alternative to the hierarchical and commodified world of mainstream media.
  2. Zines are non-commercial, and are printed in small numbers, circulating only through specific networks. They are underground publications that tend to have niche audiences.
  3. Zines provide a vehicle for ideas, expression, and art. They build connections between people and within groups, and provide modes of communication in addition to information dissemination.
  4. There are exceptions to every rule, and though many have shared characteristics, there is no formal definition of a zine.
La Bollicienta
La Bollicienta, one Spanish artist’s take on the story of Cinderella.
PN6777.A77 B65 2008

Zines were first created in the science fiction fandoms of the 1930s, taking their name from fanzine, which is short for “fan magazine.” Long before the advent of the Internet, zines allowed fans to create networks, share ideas and analyses, and collaborate on writing and artwork.

The counterculture movements associated with the Beat generation of the 1950s and 1960s saw a growth of the underground press, which played an important role in connecting the people across the US. Although the underground press often involved significantly more people and resources in the production of materials, it provided a function that became a key part of zine culture in the 1980s and beyond: giving people a voice outside the scope of the mainstream media.

Art and literary magazines of the 1960s and 1970s were based on a similar need to circumvent the commercial art world, and were printed cheaply and spread through small, niche networks. Many of them combined art, politics, culture, and activism into a single eclectic publication, redefining what a magazine could be, and influencing the rise of activist artists’ magazines that shaped the punk and feminist scenes later on.

Presence, a collaborative poetry magazine with various contributors from the Beat generation. F869.P737

The punk music scene of the 1980s expanded upon the self-published format by creating a wide of array of constantly evolving zines dedicated to the musical genre that were both fanzines and political tracts. Punk zines were more than just magazines–they represented the aesthetic and ideals of an entire subculture, a condensed version of this cultural revolt against authoritarianism.

Similarly subversive, the riot grrrl movement grew out of the punk subculture and developed a zine culture of its own, focusing on feminism, sex, and chaos. The Sallie Bingham collection at Duke University’s Rubenstein Library has a large selection of zines by women and girls created during this period. The collection’s website also provides a short description of the role of zines within the riot grrrl movement:

“In the 1990s, with the combination of the riot grrrl movement’s reaction against sexism in punk culture, the rise of third wave feminism and girl culture, and an increased interest in the do-it-yourself lifestyle, the women’s and grrrls’ zine culture began to thrive. Feminist practice emphasizes the sharing of personal experience as a community-building tool, and zines proved to be the perfect medium for reaching out to young women across the country in order to form the ‘revolution, girl style.'”

Examples of zines can be found at the Sloane Art Library as well as in the Rare Book Collection. Within the Rare Book Collection, zines comprise part of the Beats Collection, the Mexican Comic Collection, and the Latino Comic Collection. All three collections provide diverse examples of the genre.

The Mexican Comic Collection, a collection of comic books and other graphic material produced in Mexico by Mexican writers and artists, contains examples of self-published artist zines and fanzines from the contemporary comic and graphic novel scene.

La Punta
La Punta, a collaborative fanzine created by several different artists.
PN6790.M482 M4

The Latino Comic Collection, a collection of comics and graphic material produced by contemporary US-born Latino artists and writers, also contains several examples of zines. Many of them are small, hand-drawn booklets, but others are more professionally produced.

Pizza Puffs zine
Pizza Puffs, a zine made to share one of the artist’s favorite recipes.
PN6726.L38

Pizza Puffs, a zine made to share one of the artist’s favorite recipes.
PN6726.L38

If you’re interested in learning more about zines, check out the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s Sallie Bingham Collection at Duke University, which contains a robust collection of zines by women and girls. They also provide a resource page that is an excellent starting point for learning more about zines and their history.

And if you’re interested in making zines, please join us on October 31st from 1:00 pm – 4:00pm for Hallowzine!, a zine-making event at Wilson Library where you can learn more about zines and apply your DIY skills to making one of your own. A variety of zines from the Sloane Art Library’s collection will also be on display in Wilson Library during the event, so please stop by!

The Incubator Awards: Research Grants for Creative Artists

This year, the Wilson Special Collections Library is partnering with the Sloane Art Library to support the art community of UNC with the Incubator Awards: Research Grants for Creative Artists. The Incubator Awards are designed to encourage students to draw on UNC’s Special Collections for creative research, and will provide financial and research support to project proposals that incorporate UNC’s historical and rare library materials into their artistic practice. In November, selected proposals will be awarded for the Spring 2018 semester. Awards provide between $1000 and $3000 in financial support for projects. Applications will be evaluated based on the feasibility and strength of the proposed projects. Graduate and undergraduate students from all creative disciplines are welcome to participate.

Incubator Awards Poster: Research Grants for Creative Artists

To learn more about the Incubator Awards, join us for the Incubator Awards Open House on Tuesday, October 10th.  At the event, applicants will have an opportunity to discuss their interests and potential project with the library staff, and browse a diverse sample of special collections materials. This will be a drop-in, informal event for those interested in our collections to help formulate ideas for projects.

Artists using special collections material often have a different relationship to research than traditional academic researchers. Special collections research provides creative artists an opportunity to enhance and inform their work, but may take a more open-ended, exploratory path. This topic is explored in an entertaining zine from the Providence Public Library in Providence, RI, created by a local artist in collaboration with library staff called “Lizard Ramone in Hot Pursuit: A Guide to Archives for Writers and Makers.” The comic tale is designed to “demystify archival research” and be a “bridge helping artists and archivists to find each other.” Our hope is to create another such bridge between creators and librarians through the Incubator Awards.

Excerpt from Lizard Ramone in Hot Pursuit
An excerpt from Lizard Ramone in Hot Pursuit about using archives for creative research

If you’ve never used our Special Collections before, and even if you have, this is a great opportunity to dive into our unique and vast repository of books, music, films, maps, and other materials in your creative work. The Incubator Awards aim to foster engagement with UNC’s rich cultural and historical resources and encourage students to pursue new directions, topics, or methods in their work and creative process.

A Tearful Goodbye to Sandi Honnold

On March 15, 2017, Wilson Library said goodbye to Sandi Honnold after 38 years of service to the Libraries. Sandi began her career in 1979 and over the years has worn many hats. Since 2009, she has been part of the Special Collections Technical Services department, working behind the scenes to provide accurate resource description and access for rare books.

L to R: Nancy Kaiser, LeTroy Gardner, Sandi Honnold, Eileen Dewitya, and Elizabeth Ott

Sandi’s retirement comes at the end of a long and wonderful career. Colleagues past and present stopped by Wilson to say goodbye, giving speeches attesting to Sandi’s warm and friendly personality, as well as her deep institutional knowledge. Sandi brought an ethic of hard work and care to the RBC, and we are sad to say goodbye!

Jan Paris gave a tearful speech about Sandi’s years at Wilson Library

The following speech was delivered by Eileen Dewitya, Head of the Bibliographic Technical Services section for Special Collections:

Over the span of her career, Sandi developed into a talented rare book librarian as she learned each of the specific areas involved in rare book librarianship and became a resource to her colleagues. She was responsible for ordering/acquiring rare materials, accessioning once the items arrived at Wilson, cataloging up to national standards, working on exhibitions, participating in programming events, meeting with donors, and managing student employees (many of whom became librarians themselves). She always kept us moving forward with her attention to detail, incredible memory, infinite patience, and caring ways.

Sandi has been my partner in crime the past 7.5 years, offering constructive feedback, ideas, historical context, unconditional support, and a sense of humor. I always trusted in her ability to hire exceptional students, and I knew she’d jump in to take on more work when staffing needs shifted and left us short.  

Sandi has been a most thoughtful team player, not only for the Rare Book Collection and Technical Services, but also for the greater Wilson Library. She was always one of the first to volunteer for reference shifts when her colleagues needed assistance due to illness or scheduling conflicts. 

The national cataloging standard has changed over time, and Sandi has weathered pre-AACR2, AACR2, and RDA. We have laughed and commiserated along the way, but you have done it gracefully and successfully. When I looked at your official application form, your comment under Typing ability was, “a bit slow but accurate.” You always joked about your technical skills, but you were always willing to put the time in and learn something new.

Sandi, you have been the library’s constant for 38 years, and mine since July 6, 2009. You’ve done so much work and been a great friend along the way. Thank you for everything. We all wish you much happiness in the future!

Recent Acquisitions feature: a textile text!

Our Recent Acquisitions Evening is tonight! We hope you’ll be there to examine some of our remarkable recent acquisitions, including the Library’s eight-millionth volume!

Livre de Prières

Livre de Prières, published in 1886, is a book of hours–a book of devotional literature used by laypeople to guide their prayers throughout the day.

Books of hours have been an important genre of book since the medieval period and are the most common type of surviving illuminated manuscript. The style of illustration used in Livre de Prières is a pastiche of many kinds of illumination and manuscript decoration from different eras and geographical locations across Europe.

Livre de Prières is the first and only illustrated book woven on a Jacquard loom. The Jacquard loom was invented in 1804; it employs a punch card system of programming to produce complex woven patterns of textiles. This punch card system inspired 19th-century inventor Charles Babbage, who examined the loom while working on his Analytical Engine. Employing an estimated 200,000 to 500,000 punched cards to complete its complex design, Livre de Prières is considered to be a precursor to computer programming.

Because the UNC Library’s eight million plus volumes now include electronic books, Livre de Prières was selected to mark the ever-evolving technological innovations in the Library’s collections.


See this incredible volume and more in just a few hours at the Rare Book Collection’s Recent Acquisitions Evening, a not-under-glass display of some of the Collection’s notable acquisitions. We hope you’ll join us for the unique opportunity to see these incredible items up close.

Recent Acquisitions feature: African postcolonial literature collection

Our Recent Acquisitions Evening is tomorrow. For the past couple weeks we’ve been featuring recently acquired individual items. This feature shines a light on a notable collection of works we’ve recently acquired.

African postcolonial literature collection

This collection of African post-colonial literature includes works published from the 1950s through the 1980s, primarily titles published in English and French, all by African authors. Most were published in the United States, London, and Paris, with some titles published in countries across Africa including Ghana, Cameroon, and Nigeria.

The three decades beginning in the 1950s found African literature flourishing in a post-colonial moment. African writers took to the pen, telling or retelling stories of African life, often in the languages of the colonial powers who had occupied their nations. Their work had a significant impact on the novel in the West and represented a global turn in literature.

Many of these works have long been read in academic departments at UNC and can be found elsewhere in the library’s collections–but not as preservation copies. The Rare Book Collection has acquired this collection to preserve the artifactual history of these important works, documenting how these works were marketed for a mass audience.


This collection and many other items will be on display at the Rare Book Collection’s Recent Acquisitions Evening, a not-under-glass display of some of the Collection’s notable acquisitions. We hope you’ll join us on March 22 for the unique opportunity to see these remarkable items up close.

Recent Acquisitions feature: Phantasmion

Our Recent Acquisitions Evening is tomorrow. Here’s one more fascinating item that will be on display — this one offers an intimate glimpse into the life of a 19th-century woman writer of increasing relevance.

Phantasmion

Sara Coleridge was a talented writer and translator whose work is often overshadowed by the biographical fact of her parentage: Her father was literary giant Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Many critics consider her Phantasmion, first published in 1837, to be an early precursor to the modern fantasy novel. Coleridge’s life has been little studied, though there has been increasing scholarly interest in her since the 2007 publication of many of her poems, the majority of them newly-discovered.

Phantasmion

This extensively annotated volume of Phantasmion holds special significance because its vast marginalia was written by Coleridge as a long letter to Aubrey de Vere, an Irish poet who Coleridge formed a close friendship with after the death of her husband. In it, she offers a look into her inner life, including remembrances of growing up in England’s Lake District, the anxieties of growing up with a famous writer for a father, and her experiences as an opium addict. More than just a presentation copy, this book represents a unique record of female authorship, written in Coleridge’s characteristically eloquent style.


See this remarkable volume and more at the Rare Book Collection’s Recent Acquisitions Evening, a not-under-glass display of some of the Collection’s notable acquisitions. We hope you’ll join us on March 22 for the unique opportunity to see these incredible items up close.

Recent Acquisitions feature: William Webb’s journal

Our Recent Acquisitions Evening is in just two days. As we eagerly await the event, we continue our blog feature of recently acquired items that will be on display on Wednesday evening.

William Webb journal

William Webb’s A Record of My Journey from London Bridge to Berlin Thence to Persia via the Baltic Volga & Caspian Sea is the only known copy of Webb’s travelogue documenting his travels through Persia in 1870.

William Webb traveled to Tehran from London to begin a new job as a signaler for the Indo-European Telegraph Company. The title of the book references a stop in Berlin, where Webb was trained to use cutting-edge high-speed telegraph equipment.

Webb’s diary records an arduous two-month-long journey from Berlin to Tehran, during which Webb faced hardships including being thrown from his horse and having two teeth pulled.

William Webb journal
This illustration, done by a Persian artist, depicts Webb (on the right). The person on the left is identified in a caption as Mirza M. Hussein, “who gained the highest no. of marks at the college for the English language under examination of Capt. Pearson.”

The book’s text, in a beautiful script, was done using lithographic printing at the Royal College of Tehran, also known as Dar al-fonun, the first modern university in Persia. Lithographic printing was the primary method of publishing in Tehran at that time because lithographic printing was better suited to Arabic scripts than movable type.

No record of an earlier lithographed English-language book printed in Persia has been found.


This and many other unusual items will be on display at the Rare Book Collection’s Recent Acquisitions Evening, a not-under-glass display of some of the Collection’s notable acquisitions. We hope you’ll join us on March 22 for the unique opportunity to see these remarkable items up close.