Global Commodities: Trade, Exploration and Cultural Exchange provides a vast range of visual, manuscript and printed materials sourced from over twenty key libraries and more than a dozen companies and trade organisations around the world. These original sources will help scholars to explore the history of fifteen major commodities and to examine the ways that these have changed the world.

Please send additional comments to Chris Africa.

Pontiac Ill. Oct. 31st 1862

My Dear Husband.

I did not mean that most of a week should elapse before I wrote you again, but I have been expecting to hear every day that Gagan was going, & have put it off thinking he would take it to you sooner than the mail would. I have at last succeeded in getting a picture of Baby & Mary. I was almost discouraged I went so many times to the daguearian [rooms?] before I could get them. I will send them by Gagan, he starts next thursday I believe. I received yours of the 25th this afternoon. I do not get all your letters, & I presume you dont get mine, all of them I mean. Mrs. Dr. Johnson has had but one letter from her husband since he went away, & a number of others are the same. I guess their husbands are not a thoughtful as mine. I wrote to your Mother the other day. I have not heard from either Hanna or Jennie yet. I cant think the mails are to blame for Mrs. McGregor & Emma hear regularly from Charlie. He always speaks of your folks so I guess the are well as usual. Our letters may have been miscarried. I rec’d your watch all safe saturday evening with a letter. Mr Smith wrote to his wife for some mittens do you not want some? I will try and get a pair done to send with the pictures. Mrs. Smith & Mrs. Armstrong were here today, we had a very pleasant visit. Mrs. Smith seems very cheerful, and looks well. I never felt dear Frank how thankful I ought to be for having a fat healthy baby, until I saw Eveline’s It is certainly the poorest little thing I ever saw, & suffers so much. It seems to me if it were mine I should be glad to see it die & be at rest. Mrs Bayer has but two children left, little Mary was buried yesterday. Rosa and Willie are better. there have been a number of other cases of diptheria this week but none have proved fatal as yet. Ida Gagan & Ida Buck are both sick with it. We press our little ones closer to our bosoms thinking to shield them from harm & disease, but God only knows where the next stroke may fall, & he alone can give us strength to bear our trials. Our baby is well. I wish I could feel that you were. Why do you try to keep up with the Regt? Cant you stop and recruit a while? You know you are so likely to take colds & relapses when you expose yourself so. Jonnie is some better today, he took cold three days ago & it put him back a good deal. He came down stairs to day for the first time. I am going home to morrow to stay for at least a couple of weeks before we break up houskeeping. Sis feels very badly about going & I feel tempted to stay by the old house as long as possible Mrs Rennick has not got home yet & she has had a quarrel with Abbie so she wont go there I expect she will go to Mrs Custers. Leander showed me a $20 green back bank note the other day & told me to tell Frank not be to troubled as there was plenty more of the same sort he also told me to tell you to send home all of your old boots as that boy would need them shortly I asked Mr. Russel about that note which you spoke of and he said Wolverton had never said anything to him about it & he thought not to Dehner either Smett spoke here night before last & the band played. I think it is the first time since the Regt. left they dont practice either I wish you would ask Mr. Smith what his wife writes in the letter that she sends by Gagan I have had a talk with her & will have another if she writes so to her husband. I think it is too bad. Jonnie thinks she does it to annoy him because she so opposed his going and will stop when she thinks she has punished him enough. Jack Young and Alice are married I got a card last week they are in Camp Delaware state of Delaware, he is Captain of a company & Joe is Lieut. I dont know whether Mary is there or not. In your next letter will you give the names of those who are sick in the Regt & whether they are likely to recover Take good care of yourself & may God bless you & permit you to return in safety to your Wife & baby

M. M. C.

Nov 1st Jonnie is not so well to day he took cold again yesterday the poor fellow is quite discouraged Jonnie says our baby has a splendid head, If you would like any medicine of any kind won’t you let me know & I will watch for an opportunity to send it. I will send you some papers by Gagan if he will carry them. I suppose if you go to Nashville there is no probability of your coming home this fall. The time looks very long May God help us both to be patient baby & wife send love with numerous friends

Third in our series on Frankenstein related holdings from Peter Balestrieri.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was published in 1818 by the firm of Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones. The deal worked by Percy Shelley called for printing five hundred copies, a short run even by the standards of the day. What kind of firm was Lackington’s?

Temple of the Muses Exterior (Wikipedia)

James Lackington was a bookseller and publisher who began a career in shoemaking but switched to bookselling to satisfy his bibliophilia and his desire to provide books to people of all economic backgrounds. This desire came out of a deeply religious nature combined with a firm belief that all lives are improved by the reading and study of books. The story is told that he once spent his last coins on a book of poetry rather than food because the former would “feed” himself and his wife longer than the latter. His famous bookstore, named “The Temple of the Muses,” was an immense building in London, so large that a coach drawn by four horses was driven round the counters at its opening. Its catalogue, in 1803, featured 800,000 titles. Lackington was an innovator, who rankled his competitors with his revolutionary ideas. He invented remaindering, buying up unsold books from other dealers and selling them cheaply. He also accepted cash only, without exceptions, published authors’ manuscripts, and bought whole libraries. While making him extremely successful, these practices placed him outside the norm of traditional publishers.

Temple of the Muses Interior (Wikipedia)

In reading biographies of Mary Shelley and books on Frankenstein, I’ve come across disparaging remarks aimed at Lackington’s.I believe these originate from accounts of the day by rivals who sought to harm Lackington’s reputation out of jealousy. Histories of English publishing by Feather and Mumby set the record straight and give Lackington his due as one of the most remarkable of booksellers and publishers.

James Lackington wrote two books of memoirs and both can be found in Special Collections:

Memoirs of the First Forty-five Years of the Life of James Lackington

Special Collections Springer Collection B .L141L

The Confessions of J. Lackington

Special Collections x-Collection CT788.L25 A3 1804

The University of Iowa Health Sciences Policy Council will host “Rebalancing Health Care in the Heartland 5 : Shaping Iowa’s Health Care Landscape” with keynote speaker Susan Dentzer.

November 13, 2012 at Embassy Suites in Des Moines, Iowa.  Register online (http://rebalancinghealthcare.uiowa.edu/).

Iowa’s health care landscape continues to be shaped by powerful forces.  The Supreme Court’s ruling on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the upcoming elections, and new legislation could profoundly influence the future direction of health policy.  Despite the uncertainty, changes are occurring that will likely continue–such as providers and insurers working together to increase accountability for the cost and quality of care, and payments based on value, not volume.

Join fellow Iowans for this non-partisan, one-day conference focused on the significant changes and resulting challenges in health service delivery today.

Hardin Library for the Health Sciences is also a sponsor for this conference.

“Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature” is a National Institutes of Health (NIH) traveling exhibit that explores  the original novel, adaptations, and cultural uses.  Published in 1818 by Mary Shelley when she was still in her teens, Frankenstein has captivated people ever since, exposing hidden, sometimes barely conscious fears of science and technology. The exhibit considers how Shelley’s unfortunate creature frequently provides a framework for discussions of contemporary biomedical advances such as cloning, which challenge our traditional understanding of what it means to be human.

The exhibit is on display at the second floor south entrance of University Capitol Centre (UCC) through Nov. 2.

A public talk will echo the exhibit’s themes. “Genetics in Literature, Life, and the Laboratory,” will be the subject of a talk by Ellen Wright Clayton and Jay Clayton, Vanderbilt University professors who have worked together on NIH projects. The talk begins at 7pm., Thursday, Nov. 1 at the Iowa City Public Library, Meeting Room A.

A panel discussion follows the talk.  Panelists include Sheldon Kurtz, Law Professor, Dr. Christian Simon, Associate Professor, Internal Medicine and Bioethics and Humanities, and Amy Sparks, In Vitro Fertilization and Reproductive Testing Lab, UIHC.

For more information on Frankenstein, please see the guide prepared by Hardin Library Staff: http://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/frankenstein

Visits to our web pages typically drop over the weekend, so we were very pleasantly surprised this morning to see traffic for our crowdsourcing site, DIY History, up almost 2000% thanks to an entry on the link-sharing site MetaFilter. Even better than the statistics are the hundreds of newly transcribed pages, including the one below featuring a grisly recipe for stewed calf’s head (“let the calfshead be split open and cleaned…”), now available for full-text searching.

We’re on the waiting list for a MetaFilter account so we can provide belated responses to some of the comments, but in the meantime let us state here that: (1) we are definitely interested in adding more manuscript cookbooks to the project, please get in touch with our Special Collections department if you have one you’d like to donate; and (2) the cookbook collection does indeed date back to 1600, we’re still in the process of digitizing everything, but we just bumped this item with its “records of pasley, and preserbes, wax work and Limning & fruits Artificial” to the head of the queue — all of you Elizabethan handwriting fans, check back soon!

Photo by Tom Jorgenson

Want to make historic recipes?  Or how about reading handwriting, converting measurements, recreating historic cooking implements, food photography, or writing and blogging?

300+ years of handwritten cookbooks with thousands of recipes from Chef Louis Szathmary’s culinary collection from Special Collections & University Archives are now online in DIY History, the newest transcription project from the University of Iowa Libraries.  Helpful people around the world are trying to puzzle out what the handwriting says.  But is that where it ends?  Unlike letters, diaries, or even menus, recipes are not done even what you can read what it says.  They are instructions just calling out to be tested to bring a slice of history back to life one piece of hardtack at a time.

Sound interesting?  Come to the first meeting and have a voice in determining what the group should be.

If  you can’t make the meeting but want to be in the loop, e-mail colleen-theisen@uiowa.edu to be added to the e-mail list.

Tuesday, November 13th, 2012

6:30-8PM

PS-Z, 120 N. Dubuque St.

(3 blocks north of PS1, on the lower level of the Wesley Center)

Confused about Open Access?  Check out this PHD Comic to get a good overview of what is open access and how it can benefit you.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1533