February 20, 2015 by rness | Comments Off on February
With the heavy snowfall and bitterly cold temperatures we have been experiencing this month, there is something that doesn’t quite ring true about John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “February.” Suffice to say that the snow-plumed Angel of the North has Not dropped his icy spear. Until such time, we offer Whittier’s words as a gentle reminder that beneath the winter’s snow lie germs of summer flowers!
July 31, 2014 by btylr | Comments Off on Circus Poetry (“While traveling with a circus almost had a fallin’…”)
The Harris Broadsides collection in the John Hay Library contains many poetry ephemera (limited edition posters, broadsides of various sizes, letterpress printed cards). Below is Leonard N. Lawrence’s poem “O Syndia…” (c. 1905), printed in purple all-caps, which seems to have been typeset or stamped in haste. Additional circus-related artwork will be on view August 1, 2014 – February 22, 2015, at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum‘s new Circus exhibit.
“O Syndia O My Syndia Bane” (c. 1905)
There are generally few personal revelations in the review and exportation of digital files. Once a group of materials has been scanned, I export the folder of digitized images into Adobe Lightroom, click through each image, checking that it is properly cropped, aligned, and does not contain any artifacts. It is fairly fast paced work, and does not allow for much reflection on subject matter. However, I did take notice during the review process of a box of 
Harris Broadsides. I was reviewing digitized images from “The Order of Exercises for Class Day, Monday, July 30, 1860, Bowdoin College.” As the third page appeared on the monitor, the name AMERICUS FULLER jumped out at me.
Americus Fuller is one of those solid and patriotic 19th-century names that one remembers if it figures in your family ancestry. My first association with Americus Fuller, is in connection to his exotic Turkish leather ottoman, passed down to me in the 1970s. Was the poet named on the broadside I was reviewing, my grandmother’s great uncle Reverend Americus T. Fuller, missionary to Turkey?
Reverend Americus T. Fuller
The fact that the publication was from Bowdoin boded well…my family is from Maine. A quick check on Ancestry.com confirmed that Americus Fuller graduated from Bowdoin in 1859, prior to attending Bangor Theological Seminary. It was clear now that I was reading a poem written by my ancestor, a melancholic farewell for the graduating class of ’59 reflecting on the past toil of study, and looking forward to an unknown future.
Having the new knowledge that Americus was a “published poet”, I did a quick search for Americus Fuller in the Brown Digital Repository and our library catalog to see if perhaps he had penned anything else in our collections. Viola! He had also written a poem for the Freshman Supper at Bowdoin College, July 31, 1856.
In this Ode, Fuller reflects upon freshman year spent in “happy strife”, and looks ahead to becoming a dignified sophomore. Fuller’s life story, albeit interesting, is now known and passed. He was a member of the Christian Commission during the Civil War, and served as a pastor in Maine and Minnesota, until his appointment as a missionary, first at Antitab, Turkey, then Constantinople. In 1880, Fuller became President of the Central Turkey College.
Displayed in my home are 19th-century Turkish textiles, handiwork, and objets d’art collected by Americus and passed down to me. I have now added copies of two odes from Brown University Library’s Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays to my collection of Fuller family related items. Yes, archives are full of secrets, and hidden gems are lying dormant in dark stacks waiting to have light shed on them. What a privilege it is to have the type of employment that such genealogical gems can be stumbled upon in the course of daily work.
Bowdoin College Campus, ca. 1860
December 11, 2012 by btylr | Comments Off on “Walt Whitman” by Edwin Honig, inscribed to Roger E. Stoddard
Below is “Walt Whitman,” a 1965 concrete poem in the shape of a pine tree by Edwin Honig (1919 – 2011, founder of Brown’s graduate writing program), personally inscribed to Roger E. Stoddard (Brown class of 1957, and former curator of the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays at Brown University Library). Books relating to Stoddard’s bibliographic work are currently on exhibit at the John Hay Library through December 14, 2012.
December 7, 2012 by lelgin | Comments Off on 360 Degrees of Advent
Although I generally photograph books and flat documents, I occasionally have the opportunity to photograph three-dimensional objects. Depending on the type of object (this fold-up calendar, cuneiform tablets, a mummified crocodile!), I use different lighting setups and camera techniques. As I photograph these rare objects, I’ve become more and more interested in trying to represent them in as close to three dimensions as possible.
In lieu of a 3-D scanner, I have been experimenting with creating 360˚ rotating views of the objects. Done as sort of a proof-of-concept project, I photographed this Advent calendar, part of our Harris Broadsides Collection, using 360˚ rotating processes.
The process is actually pretty straightforward: you set up your camera and lights (all your settings and positioning must stay the same); and your object must be stable, and centered on a surface that can be rotated in small increments (as close to every 5˚ or every 10˚ as possible). While you can buy these devices, we took a more DIY route and made one using a lazy susan. To ensure that I rotated each shot only 10˚, my coworker generated an Adobe Illustrator file that had each 10˚ marked out exactly. While we have since started using a 5˚ model for better accuracy and more smooth rotations, it worked quite well:
I then used the Illustrator printout to mark off 10˚ on the lazy susan, centered the calendar on the surface, and began shooting. I lined up a spot on my shooting table which I could line up with each marking, and made my shots. I ended up with 36 images, and removed the background from each one.
While we can upload the images to the web and create interactive rotation using HTML5 & JavaScript, we can also produce movies that allow for a similar viewing experience. We also hope to work with our repository team to add zoom and angle-of-view functionality. Below is a sample movie:
There are over 13,000 broadsides from the Harris Broadsides Collection currently available in the digital repository, with more being added as we work our way through digitizing the collection. This week, a brochure prepared by the American Society of Poets in the 1950s stood out as an artifact of interest. Walt Whitman’s Manhattan of the Forties: A Walk Through Printing House Square and Environs features a walk which reconstructs aspects of Walt Whitman’s New York in the early 1840s, when the city was “speeding toward the line separating the Knickerbocker town from its future materialization as an industrial metropolis”, and is peppered with Whitman’s poetry and anecdotes of mid nineteenth century life in the city.
The walk begins at St. Paul’s Chapel crosses over Broadway, continues up Ann, with a left onto Nassau to Park Place, on to City Hall, ending at Duane and Broadway. The brochure identifies sites and buildings with Whitman’s early career, at the time when he started to write for the newspapers. “It was here that Whitman worked as a reported in a milieu of corrupt politicians, cutthroat newspaper practices, yellow journalism.” The reader is urged to try and visualize Whitman at age 22, “a natty dresser, he probably looked like his stylish counterparts, who piddle and patter here in collars and tailed coats.” 
The buildings and sites identified along the walk are the Astor House, the American Museum, The Evening Tattler (where Whitman served as editor in 1842), the printing shop of Park Benjamin (where Whitman worked as a printer upon first arriving in New York), and The Evening Mirror (Edgar Allan Poe began writing for the Mirror in 1844 and spent his noon hours across the street at Sandy Welsh’s (a famous beer cellar and popular hangout for newspaper men.) The New York Leader, Fowler’s Phrenological Cabinet (“where charts and physiological exhibits were on display to advertise this pseudo-science”), The Broadway Journal (also edited by Poe), Democratic Review, Tribune, Evening Post, The Aurora, The Evening Tattler, and Printing House Square are also identified. Printing House Square is the former home to The New York Times, The Sun, and the Tribune. All that remains of the square today is a memorial plaque and statue of Benjamin Franklin. The walk continues past Tammany Hall, the Empire Club (“gathering place for Five Points gangsters”) , Five Points (at that time, “a squalid cesspool of crime”), City Hall Park, the Tabernacle (deplored by contemporary writers as “a huge unsightly pile” and “a dingy mongrel place”), and many Boarding Houses, where in the 1840s “possibly more than half the population of the city lived, not only single young men like Walt Whitman, but couples like Mr. & Mrs. Edgar Allan Poe.”
The brochure cites several texts, suggesting that “taking one or two along on this tour would give the walker the best of all companionship.” The following titles from the list are available at the Brown University Library.
The times of Melville and Whitman
Last days of Knickerbocker life in New York
Nooks & corners of old New York
A tour around New York, and my summer acre
Domestic manners of the Americans
The memorial history of the City of New-York, from its first settlement to the year 1892
Autobiographia; or, the story of a life