Whenever we can, we like to plan our exhibits to align with university-wide thematic programming.  Last year’s Summer Reading Program selection, Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World,  inspired many games and gaming-themed events across campus, including the Libraries’ very successful International Games Day celebration last semester.  This year’s gaming theme provided a perfect opportunity to highlight a subset of our Edgar W. and Faith King Collection of Juvenile Literature: historical games and books about recreational games.  Putting together an exhibit on any topic is an opportunity for me to delve deeper into the collections, to find “new” treasures, and to think about new ways that the material can be used in their current exhibit context and in the future for research and/or instruction.

In doing research about the history of board and table games in the West to provide context and provide interesting label content for the physical exhibit, I discovered that our collection contains some wonderful examples of how the mass production of games changed over the course of the nineteenth century in England and the United States.  From the simple, but elegant, hand-colored educational board games published by specialized printing shops in England at the end of the eighteenth century to the mass-produced and attractively packaged games produced by giants of the gaming industry, like Milton Bradley, McLoughlin Bros., and Parker Bros., we have some great representative pieces.  It’s been great learning about the origins of modern board and card games and the “golden age” of game production.

Figuring out how to display the board and card games in the physical exhibit cases in an appealing way, while being conscious of preservation concerns, was also a  great takeaway from this exhibit for me and my colleague, our Preservation Librarian Ashley Jones.  Ashley wrote about this in last week’s blog and it’s an interesting look behind the scenes of the exhibit process.  We’re also trying new things to make a visit to our exhibit gallery a more interactive experience, with the addition of an iPad kiosk equipped with a gaming app and coming soon: two playable “recreations” of board games circa 1800.

A brief description of the exhibit: Due to advances in manufacturing and printing technologies and an expanding middle class with more leisure time, the mass production of board, table and card games exploded in the 19th century. This exhibit traces the origins of today’s gaming industry, highlighting the products of the golden age of commercial game production in the United Kingdom, the United States, and beyond from the 1790s to the 1920s. Highlights of the exhibit include several hand-colored board games from England circa 1800, early games and puzzles produced by leading American game manufacturers, Milton Bradley, the McLoughlin Brothers, and the Parker Brothers, and an early French version of the popular magnetic fish pond game.

A reception, free and open to the public, will be held on March 12 from 4:00 – 6:00 PM and will include a talk on games and gaming by Sarah Fay Krom, Visiting Assistant Professor in the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies, and a gallery talk by Special Collections Librarian and curator of the exhibit, Kimberly Tully.

Do stop by this semester and see some fascinating games from the past!

Kimberly Tully
Special Collections Librarian

 

 

Among the many activities of Special Collections is the exhibition of our materials. The librarians and staff of special collections work hard to curate several exhibits a year, choosing exhibit themes and carefully selecting materials from the collection to display in our exhibit space. When assisting the curator of an exhibit, it is my job to think and act from a preservation standpoint. Exhibiting materials can be quite damaging. Light exposure, undue stress on the materials or binding and fluctuating temperatures and humidity are just a few of the issues that arise when creating an exhibit of special collections materials.

Displaying Books and Bound Volumes

A good portion of the materials put on display in special collections are books and bound volumes. Properly displaying books can present a host of unique preservation issues. Oftentimes special collections books can be quite fragile, with loose or damaged bindings. Displaying a book should never be the cause of additional damage to a book or object. Occasionally I will recommend that a book not be put on display at all, if I think the stress from exhibit is too great a risk for the item. Otherwise, we use a variety of tools and supports to minimize the stress on the book as much as possible.

Quite frequently, the curator of the exhibit desires the book to be displayed open to a certain page, usually the title page or another page of great visual or informational interest. Opening a book 180 degrees can flatten the spine and cause considerable damage to the volume in question, therefore we utilize a variety of cradles, stands, and supports when displaying books. Another issue that arises when displaying books, especially volumes with stiff and inflexible bindings, is getting the book to stay open for display. You never want to force a book open, as this can cause severe damage to the spine and the binding. Instead, special collections uses a strip of clear mylar plastic, which is gently wrapped around the open section of the book, thereby allowing the book to stay open to the desired page. This technique of using mylar strips, in conjunction with properly fitted book supports creates a very gentle and safe way to display and open volume.

Displaying documents

Special Collections is home to much more than books and bound volumes. A large portion of our collections are made up of manuscript materials, flat documents, maps, and photographs. These types of flat materials often pose their own preservation issues. Occasionally, one can exhibit a flat document by simply laying it on a flat display surface, however, quite often the curator of the exhibit desires the item to be displayed standing upright or hanging. One way in which we are able to achieve this desired effect is to add an extra layer of support to the document through encapsulation. Once a document is encapsulated, it can be hung by simply using pins through the outer edge of the encapsulation, being very careful to make sure the pins do not come into contact with the actual document, and using enough pins to fully support the weight of the document. Another method of upright document display is to temporarily encapsulate the document with an acid free board inserted behind the document. This creates more than enough support for a document to then be placed in a stand or cradle.

As with bound volumes, a condition assessment is always done on the item first. If a document is in a delicate enough state that displaying the item for an extended period of time would cause considerable damage, whether from light exposure or stress from lack of proper support, we will choose not to display that particular item. However, with single leaf documents it is quite easy to produce a facsimile that can easily be displayed in place of the original by simply producing a high quality scan of the original and printing a surrogate copy. In fact, the use of digitally scanned and printed facsimiles often allows the curator to be a bit more creative in their exhibit design, as there is no worry about damaging the facsimile, and documents can be enlarged or cropped to fit the curator’s needs.

Displaying three-dimensional objects

In addition to books and documents, special collections is also home to many three-dimensional objects. Displaying these objects once again produces unique preservation challenges. As with the bound volumes and documents, the biggest concern is making sure the object is well supported. Often this requires the fabrication of unique cradles and supports designed specifically for individual items. When creating these supports, I usually try and make the support as unobtrusive as possible, choosing to match the color or material of the support to that of the exhibit cases so that the supports blend and fade into the background, leaving the object displayed front and center.

Creating an exhibit is more than simply laying out a few items. It takes a lot of work  for a curator to create an exhibit that is both intellectually stimulating and visually appealing. It is my job to help the curator fulfill their vision while preserving the physical condition of the materials.

Ashley Jones
Preservation Librarian

I’ve been working on the Rodolfo Usigli collection housed here in Special Collections for some time now. It’s an amazing collection containing a wealth of documents, memorabilia, correspondence and myriad other items. The majority of the items are directly related to Usigli, but some materials are items he collected and saved throughout his life, so, although this collection is an invaluable reference for all things Usigli, other investigating scholars will also find this collection useful for their research quests.

Who was Rodolfo Usigli? Born in Mexico City in 1905 the son of immigrant parents, he came to be considered the father of modern Mexican theater. From an early age Usigli had a keen interest in the theater; he collected published pictures of actors and made scrapbooks, acted in, directed, translated, critiqued and wrote plays. By the time he was 30, he had published two books dealing with Mexican theater and one three act play, written poems, essays and literary and dramatic criticism, published in periodicals and magazines, served as professor in the Summer School Faculty, been director of the Radiophonic Theatre of the Ministry of Education, in charge of the Press Bureau of the Presidency of Mexico and worked in the Radio Office of the Ministry of Education. He is especially noted for his play, “El Gesticulador” and the “Corona Trilogies”. Besides being a noted playwright and author, this multi-talented, multi-lingual man was also an educator, a diplomat, working first in the embassy in France and then serving as ambassador to Lebanon and then to Norway, a theater critic, a Yale fellowship recipient, a Cannes and Edinburgh festival participant, and a recipient of many awards, including the prestigious “Premio Nacional de Letras”.

There are ten boxes of correspondence which are, for the most part, arranged in alphabetical order. His correspondence with other prominent figures (André Breton, José Clemente Orozco, Octavio Paz, Diego Rivera and George Bernard Shaw) has been filed in a separate box.

Here is a copy of a letter George Bernard Shaw penned to Usigli which includes Shaw’s famous praise, “Mexico can starve you; but it cannot deny your genius.”

Here is a copy of pages from a 1919 scrapbook. Note that Usigli was 14 at the time and being a conservative “early recycler” used an old schoolbook instead of purchasing a new book.

Usigli’s works are housed in 12 boxes. These boxes contain drafts, notes, published material, playbills, newspaper clippings, etc. Here are copies of plaques awarded to Usigli for productions of “El Gesticulador”.

I’ve immensely enjoyed working with this collection, arranging the collection and getting it ready to be put online for easy and available access by all. King Library is very fortunate to have this extensive collection housed here in Special Collections and it will be used by many.

Ellie Castañeda
Library Assistant

Welcome everyone to 2014! 2013 was an exciting year for our digital collections here in the Walter Havighurst Special Collections. I was brought on board to help expand the digital services of Special Collections in February and it has been a thrill to look back on the work I have been privileged to be a part of in the year since.

Over the course of the year, we added two new major digital collections. First was the Myaamia Collection Online, developed to support the mission of the Myaamia Center here in Oxford by making historical manuscripts and other documents available publicly for personal and scholarly research. The collection began with the 1880 annuity rolls donated by Margaret Sue Strass to the Myaamia Heritage Musuem and Archive, which are currently housed here in Special Collections. We launched in June and, though the initial collection was small, it gained some traction in the press.

Since the initial launch, we have added another set of items to the Myaamia Collection Online, consisting of the original land grants in Indiana by U.S. Presidents Monroe and Tyler to the Miami Tribe, as well as a map of Lafontaine’s addition to Huntington, Indiana.

Another collection launched in 2013 that is no less exciting is our Bowden Postcard Collection Online. This digital collection draws from our massive collection of nearly half a million postcards which were generously donated by friends and Miami alumni Clyde Bowden and Charles Shields. While the task is seemingly endless, we are working hard to make more and more of the collection available online with new additions several times a week. The collection’s website offers an RSS feed to track these new additions and you can also follow the newest items via the collection’s Twitter feed @bowdenpostcards. Currenly, we have roughly 1,300 postcards available online to view, but we hope to reach 4,800 by the end of 2014. It may seem crazy, but that’s only 1% of our total collection!

Hopefully some of you were able to stop by and see our exhibit last fall, The Cradle of Coaches: A Legacy of Excellence, but for those who missed it – or for those who want to see more – the exhibit featured an online supplemental component which now continues as a record of the exhibit. On this website you can view articles about the famous coaches to have passed through Miami, listen to speeches given by the coaches, and even watch a highlight reel of John Pont’s time here as a player!

We have exciting plans for the coming year as we continue to develop our current digital collections and launch new ones, so be sure to stay tuned. Happy New Year!

Marcus Ladd
Special Collections Librarian

Now that the students have gone home for the holiday break, it’s very quiet here in the library. Oxford and campus are blanketed by a picturesque layer of snow and all is calm after the flurry of activity surrounding this semester’s classes, researchers, and programs. In fact, here in Special Collections, “not a creature [is] stirring – not even a mouse”…and that’s the way we like it since mice are bad for rare books and manuscripts!  Of course, I’m quoting that most famous of Christmas poems, Clement C. Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas”, also known as “The Night Before Christmas”. The seasonal poem first appeared uncredited in a New York state newspaper, The Troy Sentinel, in 1823.  Though the poem was reprinted several times in the following years, Clement C. Moore was not identified as the author until the 1837 publication of the poem in The New-York Book of Poetry published by George Dearborn (which we do have a copy of here in Special Collections).  Moore (1779-1863) was a professor of literature and divinity at the General Theological Seminary in New York City. His poem, originally written for his own children, has appeared in a variety of formats since it’s early appearances, including newspapers, periodicals, broadsides, and separate publications. Moore’s portrayal of St. Nick, his reindeer, and his arrival on Christmas Eve to deliver toys to children is credited with influencing our modern conventions surrounding Santa Claus and Christmas.

In honor of this yuletide classic, I thought I’d share a selection of images from different versions of the poem that are housed here in Special Collections in the King Collection of Juvenile Literature and our other rare book collections.  Click on the image to enlarge.

An early appearance in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in December 1857.

Christmas Poems and Pictures was published in New York in 1864 and features an illustration by Thomas Nast, the famous political caricaturist.

This tiny stocking stuffer edition from the “The Christmas Stocking Series” published by Chicago’s Reilly & Britton in 1905 features an introduction by The Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum.  

This edition from 1907 features a puzzle on each page so that the reading of the poem becomes an interactive experience.

 

This 1926 edition with simple vignette illustrations by Constance Whittemore is particularly sweet because a child loved the book so much they had to color in the illustrations with crayon!

This 1931 edition features the distinctive style of Arthur Rackham, one of the giants of the Golden Age of Illustration.

This 1949 moveable book edition features illustrations and “animations” by Julian Wehr.  The page shown allows the reader to make Santa’s belly shake like “a bowlfull of jelly”.

From it’s nineteenth century origins to classic versions by Tasha Tudor and other great illustrators, our collection of the different editions of this classic poem is varied and rich.  These are just a few of the many versions of Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas” that we have in Special Collections and we are adding to the collection whenever possible.  One of our last additions was Robert Sabuda’s gorgeous pop-up published in 2002.

From the staff of the Walter Havighurst Special Collections, “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”  See you next year!

Kimberly Tully

Special Collections Librarian

The snowfall and chilly temperatures these last two weeks inspired us to fill one of our exhibit cases with images of winter from our collections. We thought we would share this exhibit with you online since the semester is over and many may not have an opportunity to come in and see it in person.

The photographs were taken by our graduate assistant, Caylan Evans. I would like to thank him for all of his help with this blog post.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We hope you have a wonderful winter break.

Jim Bricker

Senior Library Technician
The Walter Havighurst Special Collections