After almost a year at Bryn Mawr, it is still a rare week that goes by when I don’t come across some extraordinary part of the collection that I had not previously appreciated. One week might turn up early writings on Latin America; the next, illustrated 15th century printed books; and after that, pamphlets from the French Revolution, Carrie Chapman Catt’s scrapbooks of photographs documenting the suffrage movement, or Katherine Sergeant White’s papers from her career as an editor at the New Yorker. Bryn Mawr has been blessed with great collectors over the years, most recently in James Tanis, Mary Leahy, and Leo Dolenski, all of whom have retired in the last three years, and with the large number of generous Friends of the Library, whose support has made the collections possible. Building upon this legacy is a daunting, but exciting task.
Even more gratifying than the discoveries is watching the ways in which the students and faculty are making use of the collections, from class sessions devoted to hands-on presentations on the history of the book or history of prints, to individual assignments to research art objects or read texts on British women’s history. Collections of the depth and richness of those at Bryn Mawr are normally found at comprehensive research universities, not liberal arts colleges, and so most students only use original texts if they pursue graduate degrees. At Bryn Mawr, though, students get to experience the intellectual excitement of handling and analyzing original materials as part of their regular academic program.
| As impressive as the collections are, there is still much work to be done to make them more readily accessible to both the college community and the wider international scholarly world. The emergence of new information technologies over the last ten years has transformed the process of teaching and research. Twenty years ago, scholars located research materials through the laborious process of checking printed bibliographies and writing letters to institutions. Now they are using the Internet to search library catalogs and access detailed information about collections worldwide, and as a result, we are almost as likely to receive an e-mail inquiry about our collections from a scholar in Italy as we are from a faculty member across campus. In such an interconnected world, it is no longer enough to catalog collections in the traditional way. Under the direction of our new Special Collections Librarian, Miriam Spectre, we are undertaking a major enhancement of our web site by systematically mounting detailed descriptions of our manuscript, image, and other special collections, linked to cataloging records in Tripod. |
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We will be paying particular attention to our collections of prints and photographs, collections that number approximately 100,000 items and are used extensively for class projects, especially in Art History, and for book illustrations, documentary films, and exhibitions. Much of the collection is uncataloged, and information about the rest is available only through paper files and the Special Collections staff. We recently created a half-time Visual Collections Specialist position to coordinate the cataloging of images and the development of an image database that will make it possible to search our collections on the web. We were fortunate in being able to hire for this position an experienced museum curator, Barbara Ward Grubb.
Our exhibition next year will celebrate the 500th anniversary of the end of the incunable period of printing by examining the early history of the book. The exhibition will draw heavily upon the remarkable collections donated to Bryn Mawr by Howard Goodhart and his daughter, Phyllis Goodhart Gordan ‘35, collections that include more than one thousand books printed by the year 1500. Thanks to their generosity, only three academic institutions in the country have more incunables than does Bryn Mawr. We will use the books as an opportunity to explore how the development of printing influenced the intellectual, cultural and political world of early modern Europe.
The centerpiece of the exhibition will be the first great coffee-table book, Hartmann Schedel’s Liber Chronicarum, more popularly known as the Nuremberg Chronicle. This mammoth history of the world was published by Anton Koberger in 1493, with 1500 copies printed in Latin early in the year, and another thousand in German six months later (Bryn Mawr has copies of both). While Schedel’s text was mostly copied from other sources, the 1809 woodcut illustrations have kept the book alive as a window onto the world of the late middle ages. Most of the woodcuts were the work of Michael Wolgemut and his apprentices, including a young Albrecht Durer. Of course, with the treasures available in Bryn Mawr’s collections there will be many other books worth seeing as well, such as Antoine Vérard’s beautifully illustrated 1492 French edition of Josephus’s De la bataille Judaique, and the strangely elegant Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of Franceso Colonna, published by Aldus Manutius in 1499.
We hope to see you next fall at both the exhibition and the programs celebrating the history of the book.
Eric Pumroy
Head of Special Collections and Seymour Adelman Rare Book Librarian
