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Month: April 2016

American Art and Portrait Gallery Library Celebrates their Volunteers and the Allentown Art Museum Vertical File Donation

Paul and Janet, two volunteers at the AAPG Library who helped with the Allentown Vertical File Donation.
Paul and Janet, two volunteers at the AAPG Library who helped with the Allentown Vertical File Donation.

April is volunteer appreciation month and the American Art and Portrait Gallery (AAPG) Library would like to take the opportunity to highlight both the completion of a project as well as the volunteers that made it happen. The Allentown Art Museum donated their collection of artist vertical files to the AAPG Library in early November 2014 that consisted of ephemeral materials related to nearly 4,600 artists. The AAPG library was especially interested in the collection’s native Pennsylvanian artists who were missing from our Art and Artists File (AAF) collection.

When New England was New

This post was first featured on the Biodiversity Heritage Library blog.

 

Map of eastern North America. Detail of engraved map by Nicolaes Jansz Visscher, made about 1655, not long after Josselyn’s first journey to the New World. Note the prominent, plump turkey. Courtesy of Graphic Arts Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Gift of Mrs. Francis P. Garvan.

 

It is a small book, palm-size, with pages of less-than-fine paper, the well-worn letters of the type sometimes carelessly inked. The sparse woodcut illustrations are child-like in their simplicity and straight-forwardness. Yet John Josselyn’s New-Englands rarities discovered, printed in London in 1672, drew me in as I went about cataloging the work. Intrigued by the title and the early date of publication, I found myself reading an account of the landscape of my past, from Boston, “down east” (that is, up the coast as represented in the illustration above) to my place of birth, and points all around. That great bibliography, The Hunt Botanical Catalogue, notes that this book is “particularly interesting to people who are fond of Maine.” Indeed. The text provides a sense of place from the 17th century.

The Fix – Manuscript Conservation

The conservation of manuscript pages can be very tricky. In the case of the McAuley Diary, from our Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, there were many issues. The manuscript consisted of multiple sized unbound sections housed together in a leather cover that was far too small for its contents. The pages were nearly all crumpled and torn and many pages had areas of loss. In this condition the text was not legible and attempts to turn pages could result in further damage from tearing. We proceed cautiously with hand written documents as many inks become unstable over time and are very sensitive to water.

 

Adopt “Travels into North America”

Pehr Kalm (1716-1779), a Swedish-Finnish explorer and botanist, was a student of the great naturalist Carl Linnaeus. In fact, Kalm was one of the many “apostles” of Linnaeus sent out to explore the world, and one of the few who didn’t die in the process. To begin the research that later culminated in Travels into North America, Kalm arrived on the continent in 1748.  Based in Philadelphia, he worked and traveled with Benjamin Franklin and John Bartram, among others. In his explorations of Pennsylvania and New Jersey and two journeys north through New York to Montreal and Quebec, Kalm formed impressive specimen collections, which Linnaeus subsequently used in naming 90 species of plants, 60 of them new to science, in his Species plantarum (1753). Among those new species, Linnaeus named the mountain laurel genus Kalmia for his disciple.

The Challenge of Shelving Books

April 10-16 is National Library Week! In honor of the event, we invite you to explore some of the tools of the trade, circa 1894.

Running out of space for your books? More books than space to shelve them? In the late nineteenth century, the Yost Circular Case Co. had just the thing for you. A revolving circular bookcase which allowed for the storage of more books in less space! This circa 1894 trade catalog entitled Illustrated Descriptive Catalogue of the Yost Consolidated Revolving Circular Book Cases describes the Yost Consolidated Revolving Circular Bookcase. This bookcase could be used in homes, offices, or public libraries.