THIS JUST IN!

A collection of one hundred 18th and 19th century articles, offprints and monographs relating to bird anatomy in English, German, French, Dutch, Italian and Latin, and illustrated with 145 plates, mostly lithographs and engravings.

John Amory Jeffries (1859-1892) was one of the original active members of the American Ornithologists’ Union founded in 1883, but his interest in ornithology had developed much earlier. He and his brother, W. A. Jeffries, performed active field work which gave him, even before he entered Harvard College in 1877, “an unusually thorough knowledge of local ornithology as well as a very considerable collection of birds.” Although his love of field work continued, he turned his attention to anatomical and biological work while attending Harvard College (1877-1881) and, afterwards, Harvard Medical School (1881-1884). During those years he found time to do a surprising amount of anatomical and embryological work upon birds, giving his attention largely to the development of feathers and other epidermal structures. After receiving his M.D., he went to Europe for two more years of study, mostly at Vienna and Berlin. He returned to Boston in 1886, establishing himself professionally and continuing his ornithological studies until his premature death from pneumonia at age 33.

Recently acquired!

Autograph Letter from John James Audubon to Robert Havell, Jr., dated July 21, 1839.

With instructions to deliver casks of natural history objects to Sheffield, and wishing him a pleasant voyage to America. Having spent 1837-39 in England, finalizing the publication of the Birds of America, Audubon writes to Havell days before both men depart for America: “…We will sail on Monday next . . . from this port for New York on board the packet ship the George Washington . . . You and Mrs. Havell and daughter will sail from London on the 1^st of August . . .”

Upon their arrival, Havell and his family stayed with the Audubons in Brooklyn before moving to Ossining, NY, and subsequently to Tarryown, where he spent the remaining years of his life painting and engraving landscapes and views of the Hudson River and of American cities.

This is a nice addition to the collection, especially since our copy of Audubon’s Birds of America was Robert Havell’s own copy–it sold to a New York firm just after Havell died, and bought that same year by Dr. Gurdon Russell, Trinity Class of 1834, who gave it to the College in 1900.

[Posted by Ashley Esposito, a graduate student in American Studies doing an internship in the Watkinson]

Leigh Couch Collection in progress…

This week I spent time with the If Science Fiction magazine, also know as the Worlds of If.  IF has 175 volumes published between March of 1952 and December of 1974. It was under the same publishing umbrella as Galaxy so it often shared authors, stories and advertisers. The Leigh Couch Collection has 130 volumes of the 175 printed.

Authors included Robert A Heinlein, Keith Laumer, James Blish, A E Van Vogt and Jacqueline Lichtenberg.

It has been suggested that both Galaxy and If did not get the recognition they deserved during the 1960s because of the sloppy printing and binding that is visible in both magazines. The content of the magazines was considered quality writing.  By comparison, the 1970s volumes are much better designed and bound. When you factor in the change in cover price in the 1960s of .35 to .60 in 1970s it is easy to see where the additional funds came from to present the magazine in a better light.

I also noticed in  IF that the normal mail order correspondence course and book order forms were replaced by full color advertising inserts for tobacco products. So it seems that If  began to take departure from Galaxy.

As I continue to explore this collection, I am overwhelmed by the diverse research potential and interest that exists within its pages.

Resources:

www.sf-enyclopedia.com

www.isfdb.org

Linh Tran’17 was born in Russia, raised in Vietnam and came to the U.S for an undergraduate degree at Trinity College. She is an Economics major with a deep interest in the financial services and real estate industries. Having recently completed her spring semester in Denmark, where she was a student blogger, she explored her arts interest at Trinity as the President of Ballroom Dance Team and the contributing photographer of Humans of Trinity. Linh’s proposal is to learn about classic pottery patterns, especially on the works of Josiah Wedgewood. Inspired by Trinity and Trinity’s history, Linh intends to incorporate an image of the school’s Chapel, the year it was built and Trinity’s logo into the patterns that she will draw on pottery. She intends to show the harmonious combination of classic and modern patterns and also wants to donate to Trinity the potteries that represent the school’s spirit.

Charles Meier McMahon ’18 of West Hartford, CT, has always been fascinated by the perceived dichotomy between western and eastern civilizations. Throughout the course of this semester, he will be encountering texts that relate to this theme, from analyzing a religious manuscript to reading travel narratives, and also looking at the materials that went into producing them. He will keep a blog of his observations, and by the end of the semester intends to produce an illustrated pamphlet.

Andrew Biedermann, ’18 is an art history major currently in his junior year. He hopes to attend graduate school in art history and one day enter the art world. Andrew’s interests in art are broad but he has been drawn for some time to museums and the profession of curating. Last year he curated a student art exhibition in Trinity’s Career Development Center, selecting 50 of the roughly 100 art submissions. This semester Andrew is delving into the Enders Collection of ornithological books. He expects to compile an illustrated catalogue of books pertaining to bird hunting. While Andrew does aspire to one day begin hunting, his main interest in the topic stems from the stunning prints he has encountered.

Olivia Gibson ’17 is a International Studies, Religion, and Classics triple major at Trinity. She is also the president of the art collective on campus (The Mill) as well as Station Manager of the college radio station. Having been born in the heart of Silicon Valley and then raised in the old world surroundings of St. Andrews, Scotland, Olivia has always had a keen love of the interplay of past and present. Her proposal, motivated by her passions for history and art, is to use photos from the archives as well as her own observations to create a series of images which look at the history of student life at Trinity College, imagining how different scenes and organizations have changed over time and how different time periods can be layered over each other.

[Posted by Ashley Esposito, a graduate student in American Studies doing an internship in the Watkinson]

Leigh Couch Collection in progress…

This week I found myself focusing on Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine. My first task was to confirm the chronological order while conducting an inventory of this section of the collection. Galaxy was founded by H. L. Gold in October of 1950. Between 1950 and 1995, Galaxy was published in 262 issues, although there were various times when the publication was on different schedules. Based on the inventory I conducted we have approximately 48% of the issues printed. Some issues we have in two or three copies.

A range of now-famous writers published in its pages, including Theodore Sturgeon, Jack Vance, Larry Niven, Frank Herbert, Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Issac Asimov. Galaxy seemed to regularly reinvent itself and its direction with each new editor.

In 1953 it shared a Hugo award for Best Magazine with Astounding. As with the many of science fiction publications, Galaxy has transitioned into the digital age as Galaxysciencefiction.com and its companion, Galaxy e-zine.org.

I look forward to getting to know this title better as this project persist. If you are interested in some further information on Galaxy or science fiction in general, please use the resources listed below.

Resources:

www.sf-enyclopedia.com

www.isfdb.org

[Posted by Jennifer Sharp M’11, a Project Archivist with the Watkinson Library]

In my previous post, I mentioned that the Charles P. Wells collection would be organized into three series: personal, business, and extended family. The personal series is the largest, comprising correspondence, Bible study notes, and other material related to Wells’ day-to-day life. The bulk of the correspondence dates from the 1830s and 1840s and is arranged alphabetically by author. Among those who wrote to Wells with regularity are his wife, Jane Strong Wells (when she was out of town), Henrietta Blake, Jerusha Clark, Emily Bond, Haynes Lord, S. Wells Williams (who spent time as a missionary in China), and H. W. Warner. It is a mixture of family and friends, as many of us have today. Nineteenth-century and 21^st century correspondence have their similarities and differences, and the Wells collection provides the opportunity to examine some of these.

Over the past few decades, as email has become part of our daily lives, we have grown accustomed to strings of messages gathered together. Pull up one message, and you can read all of them. Nineteenth-century correspondence lacked threads, and extant correspondence has a greater chance of being one-sided. This is not to say that you won’t find both (or all) sides of a conversation; it just isn’t as common as with our modern day communication. As I have sorted the correspondence, I found there are in fact pairs of letters within the collection.

There are certain conventions researchers will notice in most 19^th century correspondence. While today we rely on date stamps, Wells and others would mention the date of the letter to which they were replying. This was key to determining the first matching set of letters.

Wells’ letterbook begins with a letter dated June 12, 1830 to Nathan L. Foster.

[MrNLFoster]

Looking through Foster’s folder, it was easy to see that this letter prompted Foster’s reply the following month.

[FriendCharles]

Foster wrote that Wells’ “favour of the 12^th ult” was in front of him. There are other hints that these two go together. Both mention procrastination and the concept of carpe diem. My favorite aspect of Foster’s letter is that he includes in his first paragraph a line that so many of us use all the time, “I was extremely busy.”

Though I have not yet had time to confirm a connection, there appears to be a draft of a letter to Jerusha Clark that matches with a reply in her folder.

It is quite possible for matching letters (or other writings) to be held by different repositories. As I researched Nathan L. Foster, I found that the American Antiquarian Society holds a collection of Foster’s diaries. I have no way of knowing if Foster mentions Wells at all in his diaries, but if I were a scholar of either, I might make a trip to the Society to find out.

There is far more to learn from the Wells correspondence than I can fit in a single blog post. When the collection is open for research, I encourage you to visit and explore it for yourself.

(If you are interested in properly archiving your personal email so that someone else can read it 150 years from now, the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program has a PDF with tips on preserving your own media.)