Author Archives: Kirsten van der Veen

Around the Libraries in 180 Days (Give or Take): An Intern Recaps Her Libraries Experience

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It’s hard to believe that my time at the Libraries has come to an end! Since there was a post about me here when I began my internship back in January, I thought I’d give a summary of what I’ve done since then.

I worked with Doug Dunlop through January, all of February, and the first week or so of March. For this assignment, Doug and I traveled to almost every branch in the Libraries, searching for images and information that may prove useful in the development of the Smithsonian Books proposal he’s working on, tentatively titled The Time-Traveler's Guide to the 19th Century. We spent hours looking for late 18th through early 20th century images with a “steampunk” feel that could illustrate the fictitious text about a time traveler’s encounters with James Smithson. This proved more challenging than it sounds, considering that steampunk is a very recent invention that relies on anachronistic technologies. Although we came across many images that we found hard to believe existed, Jules Verne and the World's Fairs tended to appear the most in our selections.

 Cover of Jules Verne, the World's Greatest Prophet
 
View of the Exhibition of Ancient and Modern Mexico
 
 In March I transferred to the Libraries’ Research Annex in Maryland to organize boxes of paperwork related to special exhibits. I created a filing system that will help employees working on exhibitions to sort out what paperwork should be kept and what should be disposed of. These files ranged from the 1970s through the present. Papers could usually be sorted into one of about 10 categories, although there were thousands of sheets to sort relating to nearly every exhibit over the past 30 years.

In April, I moved out to the Dibner Library, the Libraries' rare book collection for the history of science and technology, and began enhancing catalog entries for the Heralds of Science collection. It’s been a treat to go through that collection, searching for details that might distinguish one copy of an edition from another. While there I’ve learned about gilt-tooled spines with brown leather labels, headpieces, tailpieces, initials, and marbled endpapers and edges, though I still haven’t learned enough Latin to read some of the titles. I wrote a blog entry during my time there in which I examined Johann Prüss’s Ortus Sanitatis.

  Prüss' Ortus Santatis

I only got about halfway through the collection before moving to the Book Conservation Lab at the beginning of May. There I worked on the general collections with Phu Pham, doing paper repair, mixing wheat paste, sizing and folding boxes, creating enclosures, and shipping books out after work was completed.

I worked in the Book Conservation Lab until mid-June, when I returned to Dibner to finish work on the Heralds catalog entries. Once I completed that project, I worked on various other projects such as editing desiderata lists and cleaning recent acquisitions for my last couple of weeks at the Smithsonian. My final assignment was to go through dealer catalogues with collection growth and management in mind.

It’s been a busy few months, but I’ve learned many skills here that will help me as I enter library school at the University of North Carolina next month and continue on my career path.

—Betsy Hagerty, Smithsonian Libraries intern

Two-Tailed Mermaids and Dog-Headed Men: Looking at a 15th Century Herbal

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Since starting my internship on January 10th, I have searched through hundreds of 18th-early 20th century books for period dress and steampunk-like technology, sorted thousands of papers with exhibit-related information, and worked on catalog entries for around 120 Heralds of Science.  While I have enjoyed all the work that I’ve done so far, one of my favorite tasks has been enhancing the catalog records for the Heralds of Science collection. This collection is composed of what Bern Dibner deemed the most important texts in science, and includes multiple incunabula in the library.

Bern Dibner’s copy of Johann Prüss’s Ortus Sanitatis, donated with most of the other Heralds as part of the gift that founded the Dibner Library, is at first glance unassuming despite its 1497 publication date. A sizable volume with a faded green leather cover much younger than itself, it appears almost plain next to many of the other Heralds with their elaborately gilt-tooled covers and ornate designs. Once opened, though, the care taken in the book’s binding and conservation immediately becomes visible. Gilt-tooled leather accents beautifully marbled endpapers that are marked with two different bookplates. These plates distinguish the book’s history of ownership, or provenance.

Pruss_bkplates 

James Franck Bright (1832-1920) was a British historian  and Master of the University College at Oxford. Jacobi (James) P.R. Lyell (1871-1948) was a solicitor, book collector, and bibliographer who focused on the Medieval period.  Who owned the text earlier than that seems to be a mystery, though they have left their marks!

Pruss_sketch 

Typical of many incunabula, hand-drawn initials and rubrication appear throughout the text; like most hand-created items, they bear signs of human error. In this book, the rubricator obviously tried to move along too quickly. His mistakes are visible in ink smudges, or on the occasional chapter title where part of the opposite page sticks to once-fresh paint.

The most interesting thing about the text, at least to me, is its variety of bizarre illustrative woodcuts. The first half of the text, “De Herbis,” contains many woodcuts of various plants. Three more sections follow, including the next section, “Tractatus de Animalibus,”  which focuses on animals both real and imagined. Prüss immediately catches the reader’s attention with a detailed, labeled woodcut of a human skeleton, then continues with hundreds of odd woodcuts, some of which depict animals that the artist had clearly never seen.

Pruss_montage 

Since I can’t read Latin (something that I’ve learned will likely have to change!), I have little concept of why these strange things are in a book that otherwise seems quite concerned with identifying herbs and their purpose. However, I’m glad they are; they provide a fascinating window into the mindset of people living around 500 years ago, especially when considered next to the ink stains, handwriting, and bookplates.

—Betsy Hagerty, Smithsonian Libraries intern

An Anniversary for the Telephone and the Bell Henry Library

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SIL14-B2-09a The invention of the telephone has a fraught and complicated history, but in spite of legal challenges and controversy, most can comfortably credit Alexander Graham Bell with its creation. On this day, October 9th, in 1876, Bell and Thomas A. Watson held the first two-way telephone conversation, one in Boston and the other in Cambridgeport, a town about two miles away. The conversation lasted some three hours, the dialogue transcribed in each location, both versions of which were published side-by-side in an effort to dispel any suspicion of trickery, and to demonstrate that “audible speech by telegraph” had been achieved.

Joseph Henry, the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and a leading scientist in the field of electricity and magnetism, encouraged Bell in his pursuits. After Henry’s death, Bell purchased his library from his widow; Bell’s descendants donated the two collections, to be kept together, to the Smithsonian. After long being housed in the offices of the Joseph Henry Papers Project, the collections are now at the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology. The Bell Henry Library offers a fascinating portrait of the intellectual life of two eminent scientists and life-long experimenters. Included in these collections are their own annotations, presentation copies of numerous works, and many catalogs of scientific apparatus and pamphlets, many of which are quite rare.

SIL14-H003-08a Having this collection in our care had an added benefit: in Bern Dibner’s Heralds of Science, his selection of the two hundred most significant publications in the history of science, he includes Bell’s Researches in telephony, published in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1876. While the Libraries held its own copy it was in another collection with the rest of the serial volumes. Now we not only have the Herald, we have Bell’s own copy of it.

While the Bell Henry Library has not yet been cataloged, we do have a list of all the works in both collections—titles, authors, place and date of publication if available, annotations and presentation copies noted—which should provide an adequate guide to scholars interested in studying these collections, the gentlemen themselves, or the history of speech pathology, telephony and electricity during that exciting time. We will soon be making these lists available online.—Kirsten van der Veen

A Second Look Uncovers a First Edition: a Manuscript Page from Darwin’s Origin of Species

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Within the span of about a month, the Dibner Library received two separate inquiries about our lone manuscript page from the draft of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. His popularity is unsurprising, especially during this anniversary year: 2009 is the year Darwin would have been 200, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his Origin of Species, events which are being actively commemorated here.

One inquiry was from a gentleman named Milton D. Forsyth, Jr., who has been tracking down all extant leaves of the first draft of the Origin within his reach; the other from David Kohn, Director and General Editor of the American Museum of Natural History’s Darwin Manuscripts Project (currently called the Darwin Digital Library of Evolution, a project linked to the Biodiversity Heritage Library). Both were seeking pages of the original draft, so I was disappointed to see the note on the back by Darwin’s daughter Henrietta Litchfield, describing the page as containing “the passage… from Chapter VII, p 264 of 5th edn, 1869…”

Mr. Forsyth’s inquiry came first, so I sent him copies of the draft and the disappointing note and asked him to be sure to alert me to any interesting discoveries, should he have any… and he did just that. Henrietta Litchfield’s note did allow some room for interpretation, and happily Mr. Forsyth did not take it as fact, and looked into the matter further. His knowledge of the existing draft pages and the editorial changes that occurred with later editions led him to determine that our leaf is indeed one of only 45 extant sheets from the original Origin manuscript, a fact happily confirmed by Dr. Kohn after reading Forsyth’s analysis. The true origin of our Origin page was apparently buried for a long time, since, as Mr. Forsyth notes, according to a published record of the sale, the manuscript page which sold at auction at Sotheby’s, London, in July 1958, was described as “p. 264 of the 5th ed. 1869.” It may be that Bern Dibner did not realize the gem he had.

Our single manuscript page will be a part of the Darwin Manuscripts Project’s planned edition of all locatable manuscript pages of the Origin of Species’ first edition. The Project was just given grant funding to digitize Darwin’s Library, including the extensive marginal notes in his own hand. Press releases detailing the scope of this project can be found here and here.—Kirsten van der Veen

Schrödinger Manuscript Collection

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He haunts physics textbooks. His cat is featured on T-shirts. He won a Nobel Prize.
Who is he? A newly digitized manuscript collection can help us find out!

Erwin Schrödinger(1887 - 1961)

Although Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887 – 1961) addressed topics from DNA to color theory, he is best known for his contributions to quantum mechanics, the study of matter and energy on an electron-size scale. Four letters, a galley proof, and an envelope in SIL’s Dibner Library provide insight into his daily life.

An English letter to autograph collector Howes Norris, Jr. describes Schrödinger’s conception of knowledge and the human mind, in addition to offering advice for students nervous about exams. Since the mind contains knowledge “virtually, not actually, in the same way as the flint contains the spark,” an examiner should “act on them [students] as the steel does on the flint to display their virtual knowledge.” Next time you start to sweat about finals, remember Schrödinger’s take on the situation!

In three letters to friend and fellow physicist Hans Thirring, Schrödinger discusses his work, his plans, his travels, and a student. Thirring (1888 – 1976) studied physics in Austria, in addition to advocating pacificism and participating in Parliament.

The galley proof (copy of a text headed for publication and corrected by an editor) was to become part of a book. Alternating texts and equations discuss the application of wave mechanics to specific heats, the amounts of energy needed to raise the temperature of an amount of various substances by one degree Celsius.

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Manuscripts like these catapult scientific giants like Schrödinger out of textbooks and into real life.

(Curious about the cat? Along with the equation that earned him a Nobel Prize, Schrödinger’s cat is one of the ideas for which the physicist is best known. You can find a description of the feline here and the merchandise it inspired here and here.)

- Nicole Yunger Halpern, Dibner Library intern