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.
Reproduced below is the broadside “Ode to the Mammoth Cheese…”, an 1802 nine-stanza poem presented to Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) by Thomas Kennedy (1776–1832). The broadside was captured by Digital Production Services in 2008 at the request of a library patron. The poem states that “Cheese is the attendant of a New-Year’s day,” and is dated January 1, 1802.
“Ode to the Mammoth Cheese…” (1802)
The blooming of the magnolia trees on campus is not far off (believe it or not!). With my thoughts on these long awaited blossoms, I type “magnolia” into the Brown Digital Repository and discover a beautiful 18th century hand colored intaglio print. The variety of magnolia represented in the print is known as Magnolia altissima lauro-cerassi folio, flore ingenti candido, Catesb. (commonly called the Laurel-Leaved Tulip Tree or Carolina Laurel) and is named for 18th century naturalist, Mark Catesby. Catesby spent three years documenting the flora and fauna of South Carolina, Florida and the Bahamas in the 1720’s. The tree featured in the print produced its flowers in the garden of Sr. Charles Wager at Parsons Green near Fulham, in August of 1737. The print was delineated and engraved by George Dennis Ehret (1708-1770), and is part of Joannis Martyn‘s Historia plantarum rariorum [1. The volume is part of the Albert E. Lownes Collection of Significant Books in the History of Science, a collection particularly strong for illustrated materials on natural history.]
According to the Campus Guide to Trees and Shrubs, Brown University is home to three varieties of magnolia trees; Magnolia acuminata or Cucumber Tree, Magnolia soulangiana or Saucer Magnolia, and Magnolia stellata or Star Magnolia. As the days warm, and I walk around campus during the coming month, I will be noting which of the fourteen stages the buds and blossoms are in.
1. The bud of the Flower as it first Appears.
2. The involucrum which encloses the Bud.
3. The Emplalement or Flower-cup.
4. The Flower-cup opening and discovering the Flower.
5. The cup falling of(sic) from the Flower.
6. The Flower-cup as it Appears before it is expanded.
7. The outside of the Apex or summit Represented.
8. The inside of the summit Represented.
9. The Ovary or Rudiment of the Fruit.
10. A Ripe Fruit with the seed falling from their cells and hanging by small threads.
11. A Seed as it Appears in it’s Cell.
12. A Seed falling out of it’s Cell.
13. The Footstalk with the marks where the Petals or Flower leaves were inserted.
14. A Flower fully expanded which is 11 inches in Diameter and has 10 Petals.
While a great deal of the photography that I do here at Brown involves planned projects (often from our Signature Collections), we also get requests from patrons and scholars from around the world, as well as curators within Brown. These requests can be of very interesting and unusual materials, and it’s often a surprise what we get to photograph.
Last year, I was heading down to the bindery when I ran into Marie Malchodi, a book conservation technician, and Michelle Venditelli, the preservation manager. Marie had just discovered an engraving tucked into the pages of a science textbook donated by Solomon Drowne, class of 1773. It was signed:
The engraving had already been moved to the Hay Library, and inspected by Richard Noble, rare books cataloger. He was able to confirm that it is indeed P. Revere as in Paul Revere, and this particular engraving has only four other known copies. I kept my eyes peeled for it coming into the production requests, since I was hoping to get to see it in person and maybe even photograph it. When it came into my photography queue a week or so later, I was more than thrilled to get to interact so closely with such a rare and fascinating find.
It was a very exciting time here at the Brown University Library, and there was a great deal of publicity regarding the find. Among other news outlets, the New York Times and NPR both ran stories; Brown also made a special news post. And I got to snag a piece of the bragging rights!
Digital Production Services routinely photographs rare or oversize items requested by researchers for use in publications. In the event that these materials are out of copyright, many of these requests are added to the Brown Olio digital collection, a group of miscellaneous items published apart from “signature collections” or other online digital projects.
Shown below is a January 1902 two-sheet supplement to National Geographic Magazine, depicting in detail “Telegraph Lines and Cables in the Military Division of the Philippines” (map produced by the U.S. Army Signal Corps). The included visual key distinguishes between “military telegraph lines, military cables, Eastern Extension Australasia and China Telegraph Company’s cable, commercial telegraph stations, military telegraph stations, telephone stations, open ports, coastwise ports, light houses, and post offices” (click on each section below for zoomable views).
Tom Standage’s popular book The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers (New York: Walker and Company, 1998) recounts the spread of the telegraph system throughout the 19th century and beyond. A more detailed account of the development of telegraph cables in the Pacific can be found in Robert W. D. Boyce’s “Imperial Dreams and National Realities: Britain, Canada and the Struggle for a Pacific Telegraph Cable, 1879–1902” (The English Historical Review, Vol. 115, No. 460 [Feb., 2000], pp. 39–70).
