Recently acquired from a dealer in Philadelphia, almost 60 tracts related to a controversy that rocked the Scottish church in the 19th-century.  From about 1820 through 1843 the Church of Scotland was in turmoil over the question of lay patronage and its implications regarding civil authority over the church.  In 1843, after the “Ten Years’ Conflict” between the evangelical and moderate branches of the church, the issues were temporarily resolved by “the Disruption,” in which close to a third of the ministers of the Church of Scotland separated to form the Free Church of Scotland.  The upheaval prompted the publication of numerous pamphlets and treatises on the controversy, and its effects continued to be felt in Scotland for many years afterward.  This newly added collection contains works by many of the principal voices of the conflict.

We recently acquired just over 100 British and American plays dating from 1697 to 1880.  Aside from works by canonical authors like Shakespeare, Dryden, Congreve, Sheridan, and Voltaire, there are farces, comedies and tragedies by authors like Isaac Bickerstaff (“The Romp”, “The Adopted Child”, “Love in the City”), George Colman (“The Clandestine Marriage”, “Love Laughs at Locksmiths”, “The Mountaineers”), Hannah Cowley (“A Bold Stroke for a Husband”, “The Runaway”, “Which is the Man?”), Elizabeth Inchbald (“Everyone Has His Fault”, “I’ll Tell You What”, “The Wedding Day”), and Arthur Murphy (“The Apprentice”, “Desert Island”, “Know Your Own Mind”, The Orphan of China”).

After 3 years of looking, I have finally acquired a 4,000-year-old Sumerian cuneiform tablet!  This clay tablet was written in Mesopotamia (current-day Iraq), dates from 2230-2221 BCE, and is a receipt (as many of these documents are) for twenty bundles of sheepskin hides for garments, with a seal of the royal scribe and the date.  It originated from Umma at the city-state of Ur.

The period of the Third Dynasty of the city-state of Ur was one of the most brilliant periods of Mesopotamian history.  What we know of the workings of the government and the economy are derived from these documents.  Dated the sixth month of the eighth year of Bur Sin, King of Ur. With a fine seal impression which reads “on the authority of the Royal scribe, Ursulpe, son of Lugulsaga.”  The balance of the information on this tablet has not been translated.

PROVENANCE (history of ownership): Apparently one of the many artifacts excavated by Hormuzd Rassam (1826-1910), the famous discoverer of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and given in 1895  with a group of other tablets to Theophilus G. Pinches, LL.D. (1856-1934), an eminent Assyriologist at the British Museum.  Pinches described some of these tablets in The Amherst Tablets (1908).  The tablets passed to a student and colleague of Pinches named Chappelow in the 1920s, and after the latter’s death, went to Sotheby’s (London) for auction.  The Sotheby catalog was prepared by Dr. R. D. Barnett of the Dept. of Western Asiatic Antiquities at the British Museum and the tablets sold on July 28, 1958 to Dr. Herman Serota of Chicago.  In 1978 Dr. Serota sent the tablets to the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago  where they were transliterated by Dr. Piotr Steinkeller (of Yale).  Dr. I. J. Gelb also examined the tablets and provided some translations. Serota died in 1981, whereupon the record ends–most likely the tablets entered the trade and were dispersed, possibly moving through private hands occasionally.  The Boston dealer from whom we purchased this tablet bought it from a California dealer in February–but we trust it has arrived at its final destination!

It is a tiny artifact, shown here with a penny for scale.  In terms of book and writing history, these tablets are so important to be able to show as one of the oldest extant examples of writing.

April 23rd is traditionally given as Shakespeare’s birthday, even though the only hard date we have is his christening (he was baptized in the Church of the Holy Trinity, in Stratford, on Wednesday 26 April 1564).  In honor of this, we purchased an odd little edition of one of Shakespeare’s sources.

From another institution, we recently received the gift of a box of the papers of Trinity alumnus Steven H. Keeney ’71 (on the right in the photo), relating to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and their activities at Trinity College between 1967-1969.  These activities are documented in primary source materials such as letters and memos, newspaper clippings, and “ditto” copies of documents such as Student Senate minutes, budgets, organizational structures, and flyers created by the SDS to publicize their activities.  Of these activities, the April 1968 sit-in was probably one of the most noteworthy of the SDS nation-wide movement.  There are also indications that the uprising at Columbia just a short time later was spurred by the SDS, who urged students to become active during their 10-day “Shake-up” in 1968.

Arising from a climate of frustration and miscommunication, SDS along with the Trinity Association of Negroes (TAN) rallied together a group of 168 students in April 1968 to hold the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees and President Jacobs hostage.  In their manifesto, included in this collection of material, the agitators requested that President Jacobs and the Board consider increasing scholarship support for black students, additional classes focusing on urban studies, and community development amid other requests.  Unknown to the agitators, President Jacobs and the Board not only had the same mandate in mind but they were working at that time to achieve the same goal as the students.  Due to a series of miscommunications, this was undisclosed at the time of the sit-in.

This collection joins scores of others in the Archives which collectively document Trinity’s history and place in American society, and are rich sources for research.

The Watkinson recently accepted and took possession of some 4,000 sound recordings, mostly 78-rpm records from the 1930s, 40s and 50s (ca. 3,500), but also 33-rpm (ca. 900) and 45-rpm (ca. 300) records from the 1950s and 60s.

These recordings were collected by Bennett “Bud” Rubenstein (1917-2000), who was a jazz/swing/pop enthusiast who began collecting music as a teen, and often performed as a dee-jay at dance parties.  He was also a jazz pianist who went to Julliard Music School, but dropped out after a year because he was more interested in improvising than in theory or disciplined study.  World War II took him overseas, where he served in Italy and France.  He was a forward observer in the Army Field Artillery, managed his unit’s radio communications, and saw action in the Battle of the Bulge.

Returning with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, he married and had children, settling in Norwich CT and joining his father’s woolen mills business in Yantic–abandoning his hopes for a Big Band career.  He was a passionate collector and a great piano improvisor in his own right, both at family events and as an accompanist to musical productions at the Beth Jacob Synagogue in Norwich, CT.

[Posted by Sally Dickinson, Associate Curator]

The Watkinson purchased several intriguing pieces from two British book artists this year.  Rick Myers visited the library late in 2011 to show some of his amazing art which centers around innovative printmaking techniques with strong associations to historical artifacts and interactions with paper.  Before and After Breath (2009) is a series of 5 prints from an edition of 37 housed in a thin plywood box.  The prints are the result of a forceful interaction between a pre-1908 carbon filament light bulb and a 50 ton industrial tooling press used to crush the bulb between sheets of carbon paper.  The glass shards, which punctured the paper, and the carbon make successively fainter images with each imprint.  Ideas emerge from the event: the release of “breath” after over 100 years of being contained in a bulb, the symbolic use of carbon paper as media since carbon is one of the basic elements of life. Myers focuses on process and the use of found materials as much as the end result.  Another recent Myers acquisition is a series of 8 prints entitled Itself , described as a “removal of carbon black xerographic toner, then re-used for its reproduction.”   The edition is limited to the quantity of toner, (36 realized.) The texture of these prints evokes the surface of the moon as much as anything else.

A few months later Myers returned to the library with his friend and fellow artist Sam Winston. The synergy between the two was apparent, lightened by a dose of British humor.  I spent a stimulating couple of hours listening to Winston explain his intricate work, a blend of visual art and story, with a very high level of craft thrown in.  We bought 3 titles: Dictionary Story, Made-Up True Story, and Solace from the Romeo and Juliet series.  Winston also gave the library a letterpress print of an illustration he did for the New Yorker, a whirling vortex of letters for a book review called “The English Wars” (May 14, 2012)

Dictionary Story, written and designed by Winston, is in the form of an accordion book.  “From order to chaos and back to order … Dictionary Story graphically illustrates the balance between a world that’s safe but boring and a high risk universe full of creative possibilities.”  The graphics of the typography help explain what is happening in the story.  The story runs in one column against the outer edge of the page and the definitions opposite their words in another column on the reverse side. As the characters get out of hand, so does the graphic layout as letters tumble over the pages. Made-Up True Story based on the interaction of different kinds of literature from train schedules to fairy tales is another typographic adventure with a charming story built in.  Winston augments the effect with a fury of penciled scribbling.  In the Romeo and Juliet series he explores the text of a classic work in an analytical dissection, cutting apart the letters and arranging them into 3 emotional states: passion, rage and solace.

Both Myers’ and Winston’s paper art is in major collections in the U.S. and abroad,  including the British Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Library of Congress.

We have a small, but steadily growing collection of medieval manuscripts, both complete codices and leaves which have been cut and sold individually.  Shown here are two (of four) leaves we recently acquired which all came from the same manuscript–a fifteenth-century Book of Hours (Use of Bourges), which was once in the collection of François César Le Tellier, Marquis de Courtanveaux, the son of Louis XIV’s war minister, François Michel Le Tellier, Marquis de Louvois.  The scene is Christ’s presentation in the Temple.  Flora and fauna used as decoration is not typical for this genre.

[Posted by Peter J. Knapp, College Archivist]

The Archives has recently received a gift of books, research papers, published poems and literary correspondence from Dr. Arnold L. Lieber, Trinity College Class of 1959, a distinguished psychiatrist and clinician.  Dr. Lieber retired in 2005 after a career of over 30 years as a psychiatrist in Miami and Miami Beach. He served several years as medical director of the Clinical Neuroscience Center, St. Francis Hospital and Miami Heart Institute, Miami Beach, and was also on the consulting staff of the Mt. Sinai Medical Center, Miami Beach, until his retirement.  During his career Dr. Lieber published many clinical research reports and papers, including studies on biological rhythms.   Included are copies of his books, The Lunar Effect (1978) with 10 foreign editions, and How the Moon Affects You (1996) with three foreign editions.  In addition there are copies of Dr. Lieber’s  poems that have appeared in journals as well as an inscribed copy of his just-published collection of poems entitled Chasing the Muse. The gift also includes a small collection of correspondence with various literary figures such as Allen Ginsburg and Samuel French Morse, formerly a Trinity faculty member, as well as with members of the London school of poets he came to know during a brief sojourn in England during the 1960s.

Dr. Lieber’s interest in biological rhythms complements the pre-1950 research work of Trinity biology professors Thomas H. Bissonnette and J. Wendell Burger already contained in the Archives.  The Lieber gift also contributes to the wide range of archival material documenting the careers of Trinity alumni in various fields.