June 26, 2014 by btylr | Comments Off on The Accordion Player
The month of June was designated National Accordion Awareness Month in 1989, which makes 2014 its 25th anniversary. Highlighted below is a pen and wash sketch drawn by Horace Day (1909–1984) during World War II, part of the Brown University Library’s Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection. The Brown Digital Repository currently features over 130 of Day’s artworks.
“Accordion Player” by Horace Day
June 12, 2014 by rness | Comments Off on Images of the Great War
Over 25,000 prints, drawings, and watercolors from the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection have been digitized and added to the Brown Digital Repository, a portion of which feature World War I subject matter. Events surrounding the centennial of World War I (1914-1919) mean that some of this artwork will be displayed in public exhibitions. In April, an exhibit titled “Images of the Great War: The European Offensives – 1914-1916, World War I Prints and Drawings from the Anne S.K. Brown University Library” opened at the President Woodrow Wilson House in Washington D.C. The exhibit presents multiple perspectives on the war, and was co-curated by Peter Harrington, curator of the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, and Stephanie Daugherty, curator at the President Woodrow Wilson House. Peter Harrington feels that the significance of the thirty-five prints and drawings on exhibit is that “they offer an interesting contrast between those produced for the home front, often for commercial purposes, and the images created by the soldiers themselves.” Among the prints created for commercial purposes is this colored plate after the Dutch propaganda cartoonist Louis Raemaekers, depicting three French infantrymen guarded by a German soldier. The image was published in London for the British Weekly “Land and Water” and can be viewed in The “Land & Water” edition of Raemaekers’ cartoons.
Read more about the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection prints highlighted in the exhibit (on view through August, 2014) here and on the Brown University Library News blog.
French Prisoners of War, c. 1914-1915. Louis Raemaekers.
June 9, 2014 by lelgin | Comments Off on To the Moon and Back
Many of the books and objects that my colleagues and I photograph are hundreds of years old, so it’s not unusual for us to encounter materials that have a bit of dust on them. This past April, though, I encountered an entirely new kind: moon dust.
I had found myself in the extraordinarily lucky position of being asked to photograph the ceremony in which retired U.S. Air Force Colonel and NASA Astronaut David Scott gave the flight data files from the Apollo 15 mission to the Brown University Library. These flight records are the only complete collection in the world that has been to the surface of the moon, and it was a remarkable experience to learn about them, and to photograph the ceremony and a selection of the objects. We were all given careful instructions not to disturb the dust on the objects – it being lunar dust and all.
For more photos and information on this incredible collection, please take a look at the Library blog post here.