Yesterday I posed a question on Facebook: What do Albrecht Durer, Thomas Rowlandson, Frans Masereel, and Art Spiegelman have in common? The answer: they all published works of sequential art, which are now on view in our latest exhibition, Beyond Words: Visual Narratives from the Block Book to the Graphic Novel.
If, as the popular saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, then pictures and words together form an even more powerful tool for communication, expression, and storytelling than either would alone.
The materials in this exhibition are from the Rare Book Collection and the Comic Art Collection. In each, artists and writers have used sequential art to construct narratives that are complex, subtle, sophisticated, and powerful. Rather than presenting an evolutionary history of visual storytelling, these selections allow us to situate woodcuts, engravings, comic strips, and graphic novels in a long tradition of word- and image-making, in order to consider the roles of image and narrative in our culture.
Beyond Words will be on view in the Ellis Library Colonnade May 3-31, 2013.
We're happy to announce that an exhibition of selected materials from the Lanford Wilson Collection, curated by our colleagues at the University Archives, is on view in the Ellis Library Colonnade.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lanford Wilson made a legacy gift of his papers to the University of Missouri in 2011. Wilson grew up in Springfield and Ozark, Missouri, and spent most of his life in New York. He began his career at Caffe Cino, a pioneering Off-Off Broadway theater run by Joe Cino that produced plays by many young, aspiring playwrights.
Wilson wrote plays for La MaMa Experimental Theater Club and the Circle Repertory Company, a project organized by Wilson and three of his associates from the Caffe Cino and La MaMa. Plays that premiered at the Circle Repertory Company included Talley's Folly, Serenading Louie, The Mound Builders, Fifth of July, and The Hot l Baltimore. Wilson's plays were critically acclaimed and won several awards and nominations. In 1980, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Talley's Folly. Wilson was elected to the Theatre Hall of Fame in 2001 and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004.
The Lanford Wilson Collection includes 53 linear feet of correspondence, manuscripts, notebooks, posters, photographs, and over 100 books. Researchers can access the finding aid online, and the collection is available for use in the Special Collections reading room.
The Lanford Wilson exhibition is presented in conjunction with a conference, "Angels in Performance: Documenting LGBTQ Lives in Theatre & Performance," hosted by the MU Department of Theatre, April 24-28. The conference will feature guest artist and award-winning playwright and screenwriter, Tony Kushner. The exhibition will be on view through the month of April.
The graphic above is a Wordle of all the Library of Congress subject headings in the collection – so you can see that it really is a collection of philosophy. Johnson was interested in Plato and focused his collecting in that area. The oldest imprint is 1494, and there are several hundred volumes with publication dates from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The majority of the collection dates from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Thomas Moore Johnson (1851-1919) was an attorney, collector, and student of philosophy in Osceola, Missouri. Johnson began collecting Greek texts while a student at the University of Notre Dame and his library eventually grew to about 8,000 volumes.
A portion of his library was presented to the University of Missouri-Columbia Libraries in 1947 by his son, Franklin P. Johnson. Another part of the collection remains in Osceola as the Thomas Moore Johnson Library.
It's a wonderful collection of rare Kipling first editions and other Kiplingiana, donated to the Libraries by the estate of a generous donor, Helen Jenkins. Staff members took a first look at the collection yesterday and found some great materials, including first editions, pamphlets, ephemera, and limited editions.
We will be working on cataloging this collection and making it available to researchers in the Special Collections reading room. Email SpecialCollections@missouri.edu with any questions.
The week before spring break is traditionally a difficult time for students to remain focused on their books. Our collection of historic textbooks offers evidence that this trend is not new. Wide margins have always provided opportunities to practice one's signature. The bald pates of historic personages have always asked to be filled in with comb-overs.
Historic textbooks are an excellent resource, not only for those investigating the history of pedagogy, but also for those interested in getting a picture of the values and ideologies of any given historical moment. Ours is a diverse collection, comprising volumes from 1770 to 1929 and representing such core subjects as Arithmetic, and "Rhetorick," as well as less conventional subjects. American Handy Book of the Brewing, Malting, and Auxiliary Trades sits next to a handwriting manual. Some textbooks defy disciplinary boundaries altogether. The title page of Thomas Wise's The Newest Young Man's Companion of 1770 (right) announces that it includes "a compendious English grammar, letters on compliment, arithmetic and bookkeeping, a compendium of geography, the management of horses, and the art of painting in oil and water colours."
Though in many respects historic textbooks differ from their modern counterparts, in one respect they are the same. They all bear witness to their owners' distraction. Paste downs can be filled in with faces. Margins provide space for recording personal notes that will perplex later generations, such as "This is a day of days," (below) scrawled next to the life cycle of the mosquito.
In between reading about the Monroe Doctrine and the history of the American flag, a student using an 1885 edition of A Brief History of the United States found time to compose the following message to the reader: "Before you find out what I have got to say, page 28 you'll have to see." On page 28, the student continues, "It grieves me to think of the trouble you have taken but look on page 4." There follow a total of seven directions until the final injunction concludes, "You fool don't you know better than to chase this book from cover to cover?"
One wonders if amidst so many pages of instructions, students liked to issue some of their own. Ella Allen was a seventh grader at Potts School in 1920. She provides the following instructions on the pastedown of Primer of Sanitation, Being a Simple Textbook on Disease Germs and How to Fight Them. "If this book should go to Rome, Just give it a kick and send it home." Her book did not make it to Rome–Potts School was in Columbia, Missouri. But maybe Ella made it to Italy one spring. One would hope she had paid enough attention to her primer to avoid the Roman fever that did away with so many of her headstrong, fictional contemporaries.
Happy Valentine's Day! Today we're taking a look at Emblems of Love by Philip Ayres, a book "dedicated to the ladys" in 1683.
Ayres, a poet and translator, was a tutor to the Drake family and is known primarily in this century for his Lyrick Poems (1687). However, his Emblems of Love was a well-known success in his own time. Emblem books generally have engraved images or symbols with accompanying text or poetry, and they were popular during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Emblems of Love was one of the last of the genre to gain wide popularity in England.
The images for Emblems of Love feature putti and human beings in various activities, and are based on two earlier works: Amorum emblemata by Otto van Veen (1608) and Thronus cupidinis (1618). Some of the verses are also borrowed from these sources, although the English versions were composed by Ayres.
Today marks the 400th anniversary of Thomas Bodley’s death. Although his name is not as well known on this side of the Atlantic, Bodley’s contribution to research and learning has had lasting impacts in the English-speaking world for centuries.
Though English, Bodley spent his childhood and adolescence abroad in Europe. He had the misfortune to be born into a Protestant family in the last year of the reign of Henry VIII in 1545. After the short reign of Henry’s son, Edward, Mary took the throne and spent the entire five years of her reign persecuting Protestants. His family escaped to mainland Europe, and there, Bodley studied under the tutelage of John Calvin in Switzerland and attended services by John Knox. When Mary died and was succeeded by Queen Elizabeth, the family returned and Bodley enrolled in Magdalen College at Oxford University.
After finishing college, his career took him to Parliament and eventually he served as a diplomat and sent on secret missions to the Netherlands, France, and Denmark. In 1596, he returned home and settled back in Oxford. Two years later, Bodley was given a large dinner in his honor. It is speculated that it was that fateful evening in 1598 when 53 year-old Thomas Bodley, while speaking to old friends and colleagues, came up with the inspiration to do one last project that would make his name live on 400 years later.
Over 120 years earlier, the main library at Oxford University had been presented as a gift from Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. However, after Queen Elizabeth had ascended to the throne, the library had been stripped and abandoned. In 1598, after the dinner in his honor, Bodley determined to restore the library and spend the rest of his life working in it. Oxford immediately and graciously accepted his offer. In 1600, Bodley began collecting books to donate to the library that would use his name.
To motivate others to donate money and books, he created a large book bound in vellum, a “Benefactor’s Book”, which would remain on display in the center of the library. The book would contain the names of all those who had contributed to the library. This novel idea is used to this day in libraries around the world.
The Bodleian Library is one of six legal deposit libraries in the United Kingdom and Ireland. A copy of every book, CD-Rom, website, and other public materials published in the UK and Ireland is deposited at the Bodleian. As such, space is limited and larger facilities are used as depositories to hold all of the materials the Bodleian possesses. Some of the treasures of the Bodleian include a copy of the Magna Carta, one of 42 complete 1455 Gutenberg Bibles still in existence, the Ashmole manuscripts, the Song of Roland, the Book of Hours (shown here) and the Codex Bodley.
Special Collections has various items relating to the Bodleian Library and its long history. The items depicted in this blog post are all materials you can find by visiting us up on the 4th Floor West in Ellis Library. We would be happy to help you and answer any questions you might have.
Giovanni Boccaccio was born seven hundred years ago in Tuscany, Italy. Special Collections and Rare Books celebrates this important anniversary by displaying editions of Boccaccio’s work as well as that of influential contemporaries and predecessors.
Boccaccio made an inauspicious start as the illegitimate son of Boccaccino di Chellino. He was adopted by his father, but along with security and status came the duties associated with being an acknowledged scion of the merchant class. Boccaccio received training in banking and law–both of which he resented– before abandoning both for poetry.
Though Boccaccio is best known today for The Decameron, he wrote over fifteen works, many of which were valued over The Decameron in his own lifetime. Beyond the passing tides of literary taste, what remains certain is that Boccaccio’s work reflects the uncertainty of his era. Fourteenth-century Italy, with its dynastic wars, popular uprisings, and plagues favored resourcefulness. There were times to cast off the past, and there were times to cling to past models. Boccaccio began writing in the vernacular early in his career with Caccia di Diana of 1334. It is to this phase that we owe The Decameron, a work that has been called the “epic of the merchant class”and "Boccaccio’s human comedy that stands next to Dante’s Divine Comedy." His work would take a sober turn after he became acquainted with Petrach. With Petrarch’s encouragement, Boccaccio studied the classics and began writing in Latin. To this phase we owe the existence of De genealogia deorum gentilium.
Highlights of our exhibition include a combined edition of De genealogia deorum gentilium and his other reference work, de montibus & siluis de fontibus: lacubus: & fluminibus, published in 1494 in Venice. The Italian translation, Geneologia degli dei, published in 1547, also in Venice, will also be displayed. Other items of interest include sixteenth-century works of Ovid, Petrarch, Dante, and Villani. These include a first edition of the Italian translation of Dante’s De Volgare Eloquenzia.and an edition of Petrarch published by the famous printer, Aldus Manutius, in 1533. We will also display of early twentieth-century deluxe editions of Boccaccio’s Decameron, rated PG-13 for the portrayal of clerics in compromising poses.
Branca, Vittore. Boccaccio: The Man and His Works, trans. Richard Monges. New York: New York UP, 1976.
Serafini-Sauli, Judith Powers. Giovanni Boccaccio. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982.
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause.
– President Lincoln’s public response to Horace Greeley’s open letter published in the New York Times, August 22, 1962
Today, the brand new start to a New Year, marks the 150th anniversary of what is arguably the most important document of the 19th century. Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not outlaw slavery, nor make former slaves citizens, the Proclamation did announce that all slaves in the Confederates States that were still under rebellion were free and ordered the Union Army to treat any slaves they found in the rebellious states as such. However, there were five slave states not under rebellion. Of the estimated 4 million slaves in the United States at the time, the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to 3.1 million.
And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God
Slavery, of course, had been a contentious issue not only in American history, but in the history of many different nations for centuries. At Special Collections, we have many different print and microform sources on the subject of slavery and abolitionism. Even though slavery nearly tore apart the United States, a great majority of our sources were published in London. Before and after the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 by the British Parliament, abolitionists from all over wrote impassioned speeches and sermons decrying the evils of slavery. Pictured here is one such speech delivered by Reverend Benjamin Godwin of Oxford to the General Anti-Slavery Convention.
One of the greatest, and certainly the most earnest, British abolitionists was William Wilberforce. Wilberforce took up the cause of ending slavery in 1787. It took a full twenty years of fighting before Wilberforce saw his first victory.
The Slave Trade Act of 1807 ended the commerce of buying and selling human beings throughout the British Empire, but it did not end slavery itself. Buoyed by his success in 1807, Wilberforce and his compatriots assumed that a full ban on slavery would be forthcoming. They were wrong. It took another twenty-six years for slavery to end throughout the British Empire, only three days before Wilberforce passed away at the age of seventy-three. The story of his lifelong work to end slavery was told in a major motion picture, Amazing Grace, which was released in 2007 to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the Slave Trade Act of 1807.
Back in the United States, many of the great statesmen of our nation changed their mind on the subject. Thomas Jefferson is known as a slaveholder, but also someone who spoke on the eventual dismantling of the institution. In 1807, Jefferson signed into law a bill that banned the importation of slaves into the United States. In Missouri, our very own Representative James S. Rollins, known as the Father of the University of Missouri, was also a slave owner. Rollins was reticent at first to completely abolishing slavery. However, he opposed the expansion of slavery and the secessionist movement that turned into the American Civil War.
Despite initially stating that the Emancipation Proclamation was legally void, he was eventually one of the most important supporters of the 13th Amendment in 1865, which completely outlawed slavery everywhere in the United States. His speech on the floor of the House was pivotal in bringing in the two-thirds majority needed for the amendment to become law. That speech is reproduced in a volume in Special Collections’ MU collection.
As for President Lincoln, his Emancipation Proclamation fundamentally changed the Civil War. The proclamation provided for the addition of former slaves into the Union forces, increasing the number of soldiers and sailors by almost 200,000. While the Confederate States were being depleted of fighting men, the Union was gaining more. Furthermore, the proclamation ignited a new fervor in the north, the idea that with every square mile of ground gained by the Union was more land that was now free from bondage and slavery gave the North the needed boost and a moral imperative to win the war. Today, the original Emancipation Proclamation resides in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. alongside other famous documents including the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and one of the original copies of the Magna Carta.
