Hello, my name is Candace Pine – current intern here in the Steward and Sustain department – and I have something fun to share with you today. Recently, I discovered the English Toy Theatre collection that is housed here in Special Collections, and I fell in love with it. And, being the theater aficionado that I am (side note: buying those Broadway season tickets for the Aronoff Center was one of the best decisions I ever made!), I couldn’t help but want to show off the Pollock’s Toy Theatre as soon as I found it. So I decided to create a little exhibit for it in our reading room. Unfortunately, the wooden theater set that we have is too large to fit in the display case, but I was able to incorporate photos I took of the theatre (with set dressings from the play Treasure Island) into the display I created. So I’m still very happy with how things turned out. And if you want to check out my display in-person please feel free to stop by the reading room!  

Pollock’s Toy Theatre with set dressing from Treasure Island 

Close up of set dressing from Treasure Island

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English Toy Theatre: Bring Your Favorite Stories to Life!

During the 1800s, Benjamin Pollock sold the Toy Theater as a craft hobby for children. Each toy theater play came with printed sheets that featured characters and settings for that particular play, which children would cut out and use to stage the plays in little wooden theaters. Each toy theater play set even came with a short script for the children to use to act out the story.

The idea for the Toy Theater likely was a result of the popularity of theatrical prints that were sold in London near Theater Row in the 1800s. The Toy Theater no doubt opened up a new market for London printmakers to sell their theatrical prints too – children. This can be seen by the fact that the plays featured in Pollock’s Toy Theater often reflected the types of plays that were popular on stage at the time.

Interest in Toy Theater eventually waned, with Pollock being one of the last Toy Theater merchants. After his passing, his inventory of printed sheets and printing plates was purchased by Marguerite Fawdry. She used the materials to found the Pollock’s Toy Museum in the 1950s, and the museum still exists in London to this day.    

Pollock’s Toy Theatre display 

Close up of character cut outs for Aladdin or The Wonderful Lamp

Hello, it’s Candace Pine here again – intern in the Steward and Sustain department. I’m very excited to share with you that I have put together a small exhibit, which is currently residing in one of the display cases in our reading room. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of putting this exhibit together from start to finish, and I hope that soon I may be able to turn it into a digital exhibit as well. However, in the meantime, please feel free to stop by and check out the display in person!

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Tourism the Old-Fashioned Way: Travel Guides to England and Scotland

Planning a trip to a new place, either to a new country, or within one’s own country, used to be a very different experience from what we are used to today. In a time way before the internet, how did people find out about places they had never been to? They consulted books. Many travel guidebooks were published during the 1800s, and they contained information about places of interest that people might want to visit, plus included drawings or photographs of certain locations that were featured in the guidebooks. Sometimes guidebooks were even framed as a story of someone’s travels through a certain region. And those kinds of resources were often all that people had to go on when making plans for a trip.

Map of London, The Shell Guide to Britain, Shell-Mex and B.P. Limited, 1964

Oban, Nelson’s Hand-Books for Tourists: Oban, Staffa, and Iona, T. Nelson, 1859 (left); Interior of Roslyn Chapel, Scotland Illustrated, William Beattie, 1838 (upper right); Postcards

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Today, old travel guidebooks may not be of much use to actual travellers, but they are not worthless. They contain a great deal of interesting historical information, and some wonderful artwork. The items featured in this exhibit highlight England and Scotland in particular, and showcase why those countries have attracted so many visitors over the years.

Hello, it’s Candace Pine again, intern here in the Steward and Sustain department, and lover of old and beautiful books. I’m continuing to enjoy my time working here, and I wanted to share another fun experience with you.

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Recently, the department was hosting a small reception. The University Archivist put together a great display about Freedom Summer in the reading room, but one table in the corner was left open so that some of the most popular (and some of the most expensive) items from special collections could be displayed to visitors. It’s always nice to be able to showcase some of the treasures that are housed here, so our Library Associate, Justin, pulled some materials and then gave me the freedom to display them however I liked. I’ve been wanting to but together a little exhibit for a while now, so I was very excited about this, even though it was only going to be a very temporary display. At least it was a chance to get my feet wet, right? So I looked over the materials that Justin had brought out and, needless to say, I wanted to include pretty much everything. But setting books out on display takes up a fair amount of room. So a one-table display quickly became a two-tables display. And that actually gave us a little bit of extra room, so Justin and I went back and got some more things. I grabbed a couple of artist’s books, and he picked out some postcards from our extensive postcard collection, as well as a signed football and a Cradle of Coaches playbook. Then I laid everything out in a way that would allow people to easily be able to view at least one item, no matter where they were standing around the tables, and then the display was ready to go.

Shown below are some photos of the materials that I arranged on display. They include items such as: a leaf from a Gutenberg Bible, a Shakespeare first folio, a book of hours, a book with marbled endpages, a Bible with two different fore-edge paintings, letters written by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, postcards, artist’s books, and more. I hope you enjoy getting to see them. And if you want to see anything in-person, please feel free to stop by!  

Hello, my name is Candace Pine, and you may remember from my last blog post that I am interning here in the Steward and Sustain department while I’m pursuing my MLIS degree at Kent State University. I wanted to continue sharing the things I’m learning about and experiencing during my internship, so you can look forward to hearing more from me in the future!

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For the past few weeks I’ve been working on item-level indexing for a collection of materials related to the Miami University – University of Reading Exchange Program. For those of you who don’t know, for a time the Philosophy department here at Miami worked out a faculty exchange program with the Philosophy department at University of Reading, which is located in England. And for those of you who also don’t know, item-level indexing means that you go through every single item in a collection and write a brief description of it that basically could be used to explain what the item is to a person who can’t actually see the item. Well, actually I did that. I wrote 31 pages worth of item-level description; you just get to read about it. Lucky you! But in all seriousness, this has been an interesting experience. I was able to practice my indexing skills, and I got to learn about the Miami University – University of Reading Exchange Program.

The reason why I wrote pages and pages of descriptions for this collection is because it is mostly made up of correspondence, so there was a lot of material to go through. The exchange program started in the 1980s, so various representatives from both universities had to write a lot of letters back and forth to each other to make arrangements (financial, living, teaching, etc.) for the instructors who participated in the exchange. So I read at least parts of all of those letters. And that made me really appreciate the art of letter writing, which is something that I feel is quickly fading away in our society today. As I read through all sorts of letters I came to see how different they are from the way we communicate today through email. The letters often had a more formal tone (even after the correspondents wrote to each other for months, or even years), and the writers would take care to add extra little details like commenting on something interesting that was going on with them, or taking the time to ask after the well-being of the recipient and their family. Writing a letter and sending it either to or from England took time, and so the writers wanted to make sure that their letters were worth it. Nowadays, business communications such as these seem to be much shorter and to the point. Now that we can communicate with each other in an instantaneous manner, we don’t feel the need to write anything elaborate anymore. I see this happen all the time in the course of my job. I can’t even begin to count the number of emails I’ve received that are only one or two sentences long and written very casually (yes, I see grammar, capitalization, and punctuation go right out the window). However, there’s nothing wrong with trying to be more efficient in our communications. As time passed and I saw the correspondents from Miami and Reading move from writing letters to writing emails, I instantly noticed how much shorter and to the point their messages were. And like I said, there’s nothing wrong with that. But it did make me feel a bit nostalgic for the days when people would take the time to write letters to each other (for business or other reasons). And as I thought about it, it also made me realize that I hardly ever physically write anything anymore – most of my communications happen via email and texting now. So I wonder what those letter writers from Miami and Reading think about how much technology has changed the way we communicate with each other. And it makes me wonder how much things will continue to change in the future. Another 20 or 30 years from now we may communicate in totally new ways, and future archivists will look at our emails and text messages and think of them as being outdated forms of communication. It’s a strange thought, but I’m sure it will happen!

 
Letter from Michael Goldman to Edmund Burke, March 18, 1988

Email from William McKenna to Michael Proudfoot (Yes, I think of Lord of the Rings every time I type his name), February 9, 1998

Hello, my name is Candace Pine and I am currently interning here at the Walter Havighurst Special Collections and University Archives. I’m a graduate student working on my Master of Library and Information Science degree through Kent State University, and the concentration I am focusing on for my degree is archives and special collections. So when it came time for me to participate in an internship (a requirement for my degree) I thought there could be no place better for me to go than the Steward and Sustain Department housed in King Library. And so far this internship has been a great learning opportunity.

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One of the perks I’ve experienced while interning in Special Collections is getting to help with putting materials away after they were used for a class presentation. And I know – that doesn’t exactly sound like fun, let alone a perk, but if you love to look at interesting old books like I do, it’s actually a great way to spend a half an hour of your time. I walked into our classroom to see that all of the tables were covered in books that needed to be boxed up in their own individually-sized boxes before they could be put away. But there was a catch – the boxes had not been kept in the same order as the books were laid out on the tables, which meant we were going to have to just pick up a box and then search for its corresponding book. And while that may not be the most effective way to go about putting things away, I was happy for the challenge. We were going to have our own little scavenger hunt, where every prize was a beautiful book. So we set out, boxes in hand, trying to match them to books by first looking for something that seemed like the right size and width, and then checking to make sure that the label on the box matched the book. However, we easily became distracted. The Head of the department, Bill Modrow, quickly started pointing out all sorts of interesting things to me, from a painstakingly made facsimile complete with beautifully illuminated pages, to some of the cuneiform tablets the archive owns, and (my personal favorite) a small book with a fore-edge painting. I learned about fore-edge paintings while taking a class on rare books, and it was exciting to see one in-person. I’ll never understand how someone could have the patience and precision to paint an entire painting of the edges of the pages of a book, but it’s truly amazing to see.

We continued with our scavenger hunt in this way, pairing books and boxes, but stopping occasionally to take a closer look at items we thought were especially interesting. And, while I couldn’t actually read any of the books, which were mostly written in French and German, I couldn’t help but be a bit mesmerized by them. I’ve always been impressed by the kinds of art that often went into old books – things like illuminated pages, marbled endpapers and/or covers, and (of course) fore-edge paintings – and there was plenty of lovely artwork to admire in the books as I put them away. But the thing that struck me the most was the feeling of holding books in my hands that were sometimes hundreds of years old. It’s hard to imagine where those books have been and who else has held them during their long lives, but it’s certainly fun to try. So, sign me up to help out the next time a set of old books needs to be put away. I’m always happy to get lost in a room full of books for a while.

Edgar’s “loyal disciples,” unknown, Otto Miessner, H. V. Stearns, and Leo Miller, undated.

“How much better – in order to obtain a good “sensible” effect – would it be to have the [musical] dynamics regulated by the emotions.”

– Edgar Stillman-Kelley (1857-1944)

You might be surprised to learn that remote Oxford, Ohio produced America’s first creative artist-in-residence at a college or university. Edgar Stillman-Kelley, a Wisconsin native, wrote music and taught at Western College from 1910 to 1934. He and his wife Jessie (Gregg) Kelley maintained their home base in Oxford until Edgar’s death in 1944. The couple traveled from California to New York to Germany to promote the value of sacred and secular classical music through teaching and performing.

Jessie and Edgar enjoy a lively discussion at a university function, 1944.

Please stop by Havighurst Special Collections and Archives (King Library, 3rd floor) to see a special exhibit featuring handwritten sheet music, a German notecard, and even a sterling silver baton! You can read more about Edgar and Jessie’s legacy of creativity and education, and the contents of the Edgar Stillman-Kelley Collection, at the Western College Memorial Archives.

Edgar’s notebook from his student days at the Stuttgart Conservatory in Germany, 1877-1882.

Margaret Breidenbaugh is a second-year MA History student at Miami University and a graduate assistant at the Walter Havighurst Special Collections & University Archives. Her research interests include women’s travel writing, 19th-century German society and culture, and American attitudes toward the 20th-century world wars. Margaret aspires to a career in preservation and collections management. She enjoys translating German letters (including the one featured in this exhibit) and had a blast staging her first exhibit! Margaret is a classically trained theremin player.