Earlier this summer some of the items from our Tennessee Williams Papers made their way back to Morningside Heights after having been borrowed for the Morgan Library & Museum’s fantastic show No Refuge but Writing.

In the final weeks of the exhibition, its curator, Carolyn Vega, gave a tour to a group of local rare book librarians. She kindly pointed out the items loaned by Columbia, and it was striking how consistently Williams name-checked the poet Hart Crane, whose papers we also hold. Continue reading →

Next month the Columbia Rare Book & Manuscript Library will open an exhibition on the artist book and poetry publisher Granary Books: The Book Undone: Thirty Years of Granary Books. The exhibit runs in the RBML Kempner cases from September 8, 2015 through January 30, 2016, and will be open to the public during our open hours.

We are honored to hold the archive of this important publisher and to be mounting an exhibition of its thirty-year run (so far), including not only Granary publications but material from the archive that show some of the labor involved in creating these extraordinary objects. The RBML acquired the Granary Books archive in 2013 and the collection is open for research.

The opening event for the exhibit on September 16th will showcase some of the press’s most frequent collaborators, including bookbinder Daniel Kelm, book artist and graphic designer Emily McVarish, poet Charles Bernstein, critic and book artist Johanna Drucker, poet and anthologist Jerome Rothenberg, poet Vincent Katz, and book artist Buzz Spector. Their presentation goes from 6:30-7:30pm in Butler Library Room 203. A reception in the RBML follows.

Two of the artists who have work in the exhibition, Jen Bervin and Cecilia Vicuna, will give a performance in the exhibit space on Tuesday evening, November 17th. So mark your calendars and for more details, feel free to contact the RBML front desk or to check our Current Exhibition & Events page after September 8th.

On Wednesday, October 8, Butler Library’s open stacks will become both hunting grounds and laboratory. That day we are pleased to welcome Andrew Stauffer, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, and the Book Traces project to Columbia.

The Book Traces project is a crowd-sourced web project aimed at identifying unique copies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century books on circulating library shelves. Professor Stauffer founded the project after years of sending students into the University of Virginia stacks to find personalized copies of books of Romantic and Victorian poetry.

Andrew Stauffer describes the importance of the project very eloquently on the Book Traces website but I want to underscore his description of these books as constituting a massive, distributed archive of the history of reading, hidden in plain sight in the circulating collection. Viewed that way, they are a treasure. Historians of reading constantly face an evidence problem because it is difficult to find or follow past readers’ traces. However, not all post-industrial nineteenth century books look like treasure from the outside. They can be crumbly and fragile, riddled with what librarians call inherent vice. Faced with these volumes, some readers, and some library circulation managers, are happy for a rationale that justifies moving them offsite or online. There are many discoveries to made if you think to look, but we need to start looking before the evidence is moved out of sight or obliterated.

What will we find on October 8th? When I went through the Butler stacks recently with librarian colleagues Jane Siegel and John Tofanelli, for the most part we found annotations and bookplates. Many flyleaves displayed the name of Nicholas Murray Butler, former Columbia University President (from 1902-1945) after whom the building is named. On many front endpapers we found the bookplate for the Paterno library, which is split between Columbia’s Casa Italiana and the Butler stacks.

In this book from the Paterno collection above (Antonio Mirabelli’s Istituzioni de Eloquenza) you can see the traces of four separate handlers of the book: Aldo B., John Reynolds, Prof. F. Ettari, and finally the bookplate for the Paterno Library. The first two inscriptions state Italian locations: Aldo B’s dedication in Italian notes “Napoli” and Reynolds adds after his name, “Florence.” Looking at these traces we can follow the book on its journey across the Atlantic and formal incorporation into the library at Casa Italiana. For me, they were a prompt to learn more about the Paterno collection, aided by Meredith Levin, Columbia’s Librarian for Western European History and Literature.

The books in the Paterno Library arrived at Columbia through many channels but always under the auspices of Italian-American Charles V. Paterno, who made his fortune building “modern” (that is, elevator) apartment buildings around Morningside and Washington Heights. Paterno was determined to build a library of Italian culture in Columbia University’s Casa Italiana. As early as 1925 representatives of the Casa traveled to Italy on book-buying trips funded by Paterno; professors in the Italian Department ordered or donated others. Maybe Professor Ettari was one of them. We know that Butler and Paterno traveled together to Italy in 1928, where they were feted by Mussolini and given entrance to the Villa d’Este: a fascinating view on a moment in history, and for me a vista that opened up only when I opened this book.

Inspired by Professor Stauffer’s example, instructors across the country are incorporating hunts in the stacks into their courses this fall, and asking students to upload their findings to the Book Traces website. Several Columbia professors have done the same and their students will be combing the Butler stacks on October 8th. The event is not just for students, but also open to the public and other members of the Columbia and Barnard communities. To participate RSVP to Karla Nielsen at kn2300@columbia.edu with Book Traces in the subject line and the time of the orientation you want to attend.

On October 8th, Professor Stauffer will give introductory sessions to the day’s activities at 10:00am, noon, and 2:00pm in the Studio@Butler. There will be a wrap-up event in the Studio at 4:00pm on October 8th and a debriefing of the day at 6:00pm on October 28th as part of the Book History Colloquium at Columbia. If you are interested in annotated books, nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature or are curious about the project,  the history of library collections, or how library views on the printed book are changing in the digital age–come on down!

This summer I am putting together a new program that we are excited to offer for the coming academic year. The Pine Tree program will expose students to craft as well as (light) industrial book-making processes, often with hands-on exercises. It allows us to go beyond what we can offer on campus without a Center for the Book, and taps into the many resources of New York’s book-making communities. Paper is still being made by hand in Manhattan!

The students admitted to this program will be Pine Tree Scholars, named after the foundation that is funding the workshops. We did a test-run last year by bringing a group of ten Columbia and Barnard students to the New York Antiquarian Book Fair. The Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America puts on this fair each April and for the last many years in the Park Avenue Armory, which you can see set up for the fair in this photograph from the ABAA site below. I was brought around my first antiquarian book fair in 1999 by a rare book librarian so it's fun to have become the inductor, especially with a group of students as curious, bright, and enthusiastic as these were.

The Fair provides opportunities for learning about book history, printing, cartography, collecting– not just for buying–which suited our group because several books for sale cost 10,000 times the student ticket price of $10. Some of the students walked around the vast exhibition hall together or with me. Others sought out dealers whose interests matched theirs. One student focused on Early Modern science and managed to find a book on chicken embryology from the sixteenth century that recalled research she is doing in a biology lab on campus.

Many reported being most impressed by a samizdat Russian translation of Frank Herbert’s Dune on offer from Simon Beattie, a young British book dealer. Simon made a great impression on the students because he sells not only “proper books” but books about which he can tell an interesting story, and he does indeed. Thank you to Simon for being so generous with your time and to Julianne Caldarera for the photograph of the book below.

After the fair, we walked down Park Avenue the Grolier Club for lunch with Szilvia Tanenbaum, Director of the Pine Tree foundation and our generous benefactress for this new program. The Grolier Club’s members are book collectors, librarians, and rare book dealers: people with a serious bookish inclination. Szilvia described how the club works and we received a quick tour from Grolier Club librarian, Meghan Constantinou, before taking in the exhibition on little magazines that was on display there (NB: the rotating exhibits at the Grolier Club are open to the public). I snapped a photograph of the group with Szilvia at the Club..

Next month we will be announcing a full program of Pine Tree events for the coming academic year. It will include visits to Dieu Donne to make paper, to Studio on the Square to set type and print, as well as visit to the Woodside Press, a printing studio, to see not only monotype letterpress printing demos, but also linotype and typecasting machines in operation. We’ll close with another visit to the New York Antiquarian Book Fair next April. Stay tuned or message me directly if you’re interested at kn2300@columbia.edu.

Update! (2/24/14) One of the Pine Tree scholars, Columbia Ph.D. candidate in English Arden Hegele, has written a blog post for the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism about her experience in the program and the pedagogical value of these hands-on activities, which she terms the "analog humanities."

We have started collecting rare comic books and comics-related archival materials concertedly in the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library, propelled by the enthusiasm and efforts of our colleague Karen Green who has built up an impressive array of comics and graphic novels for the circulating collection. There are many points of contact between these newly arrived comics and many of our existing collecting strengths in literature, journalism, and publishing, as attested by this recently acquired 6-page manuscript by Harvey Pekar.

This draft contains preliminary writing for what resulted in a one-page panel about Felipe Alfau by Pekar drawn by Joe Sacco. Felipe Alfau was a Spanish-born Anglophone novelist now considered a precursor to James Joyce and other experimental and “proto-postmodern” authors. In the draft Pekar also compares him to Flann O'Brien, Raymond Queneau and Cervantes. Although we do not usually collect such small archival pieces, I could not resist this one because it connected not only to our recent comics and graphic novel acquisitions, but also our holdings in publishers' archives.

In the panel Pekar mentions that the Dalkey Archive Press re-issued Locos and then published a previously unpublished Alfau novel, Chromos. In fact, Alfau's typewritten manuscript of Chromos is one of the amazing documents that came to Columbia with the Dalkey Archive Press archive, which we are still in the process of unpacking and processing. 

The draft runs six handwritten pages and goes into greater detail. The differences between the manuscript and the panel show Pekar pulling out a story from the mass of details, and also the extent of his efforts to place Alfau into a literary tradition. The draft bears the scrub marks of erasers. Even when generating the text, Pekar chose his words carefully. It gives a glimpse into Pekar as a reader of experimental narrative and metafiction, an autodidact who takes on reading assignments, and book collector who sought out both autographed copies and re-issues with critical introductions.

Throughout Pekar identifies with Alfau as a genius who toils by day doing administrative work. Alfau was a translator for a bank and Pekar famously worked in a health insurance claims office. Pekar concludes “I wonder how many outstanding writers, musicians, artists there have been and are out there even less well-known than he is. Probably an appalling large number. Well maybe some day when the world is civilized things won't be so difficult.”

We now have both Pekar's draft for this panel and the published panel, which appeared in Dark Horse Presents #104 Pink Tornado. We will keep the two together as Columbia RBML MS collection #1650.