Author Archives: Joseph Watson

Welcome Kaitlin Buerge to Special Collection in Davis Library

Special Collections & Archives is pleased to welcome Kaitlin Buerge ’13 to our team as Special Collections & Archives Fellow. Kaitlin first joined us as an graduate intern last year while she was completing her Master of Science in Information Science (MSIS) at the University of Albany. She graduated from Middlebury College with a major in English and American Literature.

Kaitlin will concentrate on cataloging unique archival collections in ArchivesSpace (go/aspace), and on improving access to the historic Abernethy Collection of American Literature. It’s great to have her on board!

Historic NYC Post Card Exhibit at Davis Family Library

RRE post card banner

Who would guess that an artist born and bred on a Vermont farm would create some of the most iconic postcards of New York City? Rachael Robinson Elmer’s ground-breaking “Art-Lovers New York” postcard series is currently on exhibit at the Middlebury College Davis Family Library, on the upper level, through April 17th, 2015. The exhibition, on loan from RokebyWashington-Arch Museum and sponsored by Middlebury College Special Collections and Archives, presents all twelve cards, as well as biographical information, historical context, and the three postcards of London that originally inspired Rachael.

Rachael Robinson Elmer changed the aesthetic of American postcards. She pioneered the fine art city view card when her Impressionist paintings of popular scenes in her beloved New York City were produced as postcards by P. F. Volland in 1914. Her “Art Lover’s New York” cards were immediately copied by dozens of artists in New York and elsewhere.

artist Rachael Robinson Elmer was born at Rokeby to artist parents Rowland Evans and Anna Stevens Robinson in 1878. Her art education began before she had even started school and continued with a young people’s summer art program in New York City and later, at the Art Students League. She moved to New York as a young woman and commenced a successful career as a graphic artist. Rachael married businessman Robert Elmer in 1911 and died prematurely in February 1919 in the Spanish flu epidemic.

 

The Middlebury College Special Collections and Archives holds the extensive historical correspondence collection of the Robinson Family on long-term loan from Rokeby Museum.  The books of Rachael’s father, Rowland E. Robinson, are part of the Abernethy Collection of American Literature and the Flander’s Ballad Collection.  See our previous blog post, Reading Rowland Out Loud, for more on that.

 

Busy start to 2014 in Special Collections

Special Collections has enjoyed a busy start to 2014 with several J-term classes visiting this week to use our collections for coursework. Prof. Peter Lourie’s class Adventure Writing and Digital Story Telling came to see 17th to early 20th century examples of travel and adventure writing, as well as to view photos from the College Archives of students engaging in their own adventures over the years.

And below see some photos from Prof. Kacy McKinney’s class Space and Place in the Graphic Novel. Students learned about the history of illustrations in books, viewing everything from a 1484 illuminated Latin text, to recently published graphic novels.

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Students looking at a wide selection of illustrated books

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Special Collections Director Rebekah Irwin shares a large format art book.

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Prof. McKinney and students view illustrated books from the 16th to the 18th century.

A busy start to 2014 in Special Collections

Special Collections has enjoyed a busy start to 2014 with several J-term classes visiting this week to use our collections for coursework. Here’s a group from Prof. Kacy McKinney’s class Space and Place in the Graphic Novel. Students learned about the history of illustrations in books, viewing everything from a 1484 illuminated Latin text, to recently published graphic novels.

Students viewed a wide selection of illustrated books.

Students looking at a wide selection of illustrated books.

Special Collections Director Rebekah Irwin shares a large format art book.

IMG_0473

Prof. McKinney and students view illustrated books from the 16th to the 18th century.

Better World Books and library book sales

Instead of holding book sales to get rid of unwanted books, we’re now sending withdrawn books to Better World Books, a company that turns them into money for the good of humanity.

In recent years, the quality of our local book sales has been declining because we are receiving fewer large gifts of books than in the past. When we accepted large gifts in the past, we often sorted through them and added appropriate books, which was sometimes a small percentage of the total gift, and put the rest of the books into the book sale. Our book sales had interesting duplicate copies and fun books that wouldn’t be appropriate for an academic library. Without that influx of gift books, the local books sales just consist of withdrawn academic books that relatively few people are interested in purchasing. After all, the reason those books are being withdrawn from the library collection is because nobody is using them, so it’s not surprising that hundreds of those books were left over at the end of the last sale. (We couldn’t even give them away for free.)

Rather than sending them directly to recycling, we found the Better World Books library program. We ship our withdrawn books to them at no cost to us, they market them to a world-wide audience, and when they sell them, a percentage of the profit comes to us and a percentage goes to the BWB Literacy Partners. It’s a very efficient way to dispose of our withdrawn books while benefiting both Middlebury and the world beyond.

If we ever have a quantity of books that we think will be of interest to our local community, we’ll probably put them in a sale, but for now, no book sales are scheduled for the foreseeable future.

“Holding Walden” recently…

Snippet of The Roost blog.

Snippet of The Roost blog.

Sandy Stott of the Thoreau Farm recently visited Special Collections at Davis Family Library to see Henry David Thoreau’s personal copy of Walden with his notes in the margins. Stott wrote about his visit in this very nice blog post–   http://thoreaufarm.org/2013/07/holding-walden/

Thoreau’s personal copy of Walden is invaluable and one of Middlebury College’s most significant holdings.  Special Collections plans to digitize the pages with Thoreau’s marginalia so that this unique content can be shared widely on the web.  In order to preserve the hard copy safely for future generations, access to it is strictly limited and an advance appointment is necessary.  Please see the Special Collections page for more information.