Arthur Bonfield: 60 years of collecting rare books from 1490-1800
For the last 60 years Professor Arthur Bonfield has collected rare books— original copies of books on several subjects written, published, printed, and bound between 1490 and 1800. In this talk he will discuss the why, how, what, and result of his 60 years of rare book collecting. He has collected over 1,000 original copies of books from that period on voyages, travels, exploration, and geography; encyclopedias; English and continental history; English literature; English translations of classical Greek and Roman literature; political philosophy; and herbals. In his talk he will explain how and why his life has been enriched by his continuing attachment to and preoccupation with this very absorbing avocation.
Professor Arthur Bonfield received his legal education at the Yale Law School and recently retired from the University of Iowa Law School after serving 53 years on the faculty. As a teacher and scholar his specialty was Constitutional Law and Administrative Law. While on the Law School faculty he was actively involved in the reform of state administrative procedure law, state freedom of information law, and state civil rights legislation, and drafted many of the Iowa statutes adopted on these subjects. He recently was awarded the Iowa Freedom of Information Council Friend of the First Amendment Award for proposing and drafting the recently enacted Iowa statute creating the Iowa Public Information Board.
December 14, 2016 at 7PM in the Special Collections Reading Room, 3rd Floor Main Library. Refreshments will be served before the talk at 6:30PM.
Statements from the American Library Association and the Society of American Archivists confirming a commitment to diversity and inclusion:
American Library Association:
“As an association representing these libraries, librarians and library workers, ALA believes that the struggle against racism, prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination is central to our mission. We will continue to support efforts to abolish intolerance and cultural invisibility, stand up for all the members of the communities we serve, and promote understanding and inclusion through our work.” – Julie Todaro, ALA President. Read the Full Statement
Society of American Archivists:
“SAA strongly rejects any acts of hate, discrimination, bias, or intimidation against anyone on the basis of ability, race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, or religion.” Read the full statement.
New Artist Books Browsing Collection:
We’ve started a new project to simulate browsing the artists’ books in the stacks. Every week, John Fifield will be refreshing the shelf with the
next ten books in the call number range, moving alphabetically by artist. Come visit us in the reading room this week to check out the first set.
The University of Iowa Museum of Natural History is crowdfunding support for “Project Lio-Rama” to preserve Harry and Josephine, two lions that lived in the zoo in City Park in the 1920s-1930s that need a habitat build in order to put them on display. Support the project here: https://goldrush.uiowa.edu/project/3351
“Why the Librarian is Your Story’s Best Friend” – A review of Special Collections Outreach & Engagement Librarian Colleen Theisen, and SLIS faculty member Jennifer Burek Pierce’s session at “Nerdcon: Stories” a storytelling conference held in October: http://winningedits.com/blog/why-the-librarian-is-your-storys-best-friend
Staff Publications:
Instruction Librarian Amy Chen and Outreach & Engagement Librarian Colleen Theisen have written book chapters in “New Directions for Special Collections” which will be available Nov 30, 2016 from Libraries Unlimited. See the book here.
Chapter 4: Developing K–12 Outreach Methods for Special Collections Centers Amy Chen, Lisa Crane, Melanie Meyers, Charlotte Priddle, and Abby Saunders
Chapter 21: Towards a Culture of Social Media in Special Collections Colleen Theisen
“Spanning the converging worlds of academic and special libraries, rare book collections, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions, this book will be useful to newcomers and seasoned professionals alike. The essays address the recurring themes of managing and welcoming change and the impact of digital technologies throughout the book, whether regarding new approaches to outreach and instruction, the acquisition and curation of non-traditional collections, new structures for discovery and access in a digital world, or the nature of special collections work now.”
Upcoming Events:
Historic Foodies November 30th Meeting
Historic Foodies is a community group supported by Special Collections and the Old Capitol Museum dedicated to testing an trying historic recipes. Stop by for their November meeting, taste test the results! 6PM-7:30PM, Coralville Old Town Hall.
Arthur Bonfield, “The Why, How, What, and Result of 60 Years of Rare Book Collecting”
In December the Iowa Bibliophiles’ guest speaker will be Arthur Bonfield who will speak about his 60 years of rare book collecting.
Arthur Bonfield is a Professor at the Iowa Law School and has been collecting books published between 1490 and 1800 for 60 years. He has collected about 1,000 books printed during that period and focuses his collecting on voyages, travels, and geography; English and European history; encyclopedias and dictionaries of the arts and sciences; political philosophy; and herbals.
Wednesday, December 14, 2016 at 7PM in the Special Collections Reading Room, 3rd Floor Main Library
Featuring UI Libraries staff Rob Shepard: Daily Iowa article: Keeping an Eye on Segregation in the Nation: https://goo.gl/EcmXhI
Featuring photo from UI Archives: Iowa Now article: Celebrating points of pride, UI reflects on milestones in creating a welcoming environment for LGBTQ community https://goo.gl/6D51Dg
Chautauqua Printer’s Blocks Update from Margaret Gamm
Special Collections recently received several small but hefty boxes of printers’ blocks from the Smith-Zimmermann Heritage Museum in Madison, South Dakota. Printers used these heavy metal and wood blocks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to create promotional flyers and forms for Lake Madison Chautauqua events. One box contained several blocks related to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
South Dakota had just become a state four years prior, so many people saw the World’s Fair as a prime place to promote the state. Several groups formed to raise funds for a display, and the state legislature eventually approved funding as well. By the time of the Fair, South Dakota had put together a building’s worth of exhibits. More information on South Dakota’s involvement in the fair is available through the University of South Dakota Archives and Special Collections Blog here: https://archivesandspecialcollections.wordpress.com/2011/10/21/south-dakota-and-the-worlds-columbian-exposition-of-1893/
The Lake Madison Chautauqua Association would have been a natural fit for an exhibitor. Chautauqua organizations sponsored community education programs that usually included lecturers in special topics like religion, astronomy, and history. Many presenters travelled around the country, allowing headliners to grow in fame.
The blocks in the images here were created with a variety of techniques and were meant to be used with different types of ink according to different methods. One of the newest types was photogravure, which allowed mass printing of photographic images.
Upcoming Events:
Arthur Bonfield, “The Why, How, What, and Result of 60 Years of Rare Book Collecting”
In December the Iowa Bibliophiles’ guest speaker will be Arthur Bonfield who will speak about his 60 years of rare book collecting.
Arthur Bonfield is a Professor at the Iowa Law School and has been collecting books published between 1490 and 1800 for 60 years. He has collected about 1,000 books printed during that period and focuses his collecting on voyages, travels, and geography; English and European history; encyclopedias and dictionaries of the arts and sciences; political philosophy; and herbals.
Wednesday, December 14, 2016 at 7PM in the Special Collections Reading Room, 3rd Floor Main Library
Amy Chen occasionally posts in the blog for the Newly Composed PhD: Writing Across Careers. This blog supports the efforts of the Next Generation PhD, a planning grant the University of Iowa received from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support inquiry to better understand challenges to doctoral education. Her most recent piece is called “PhDs in the Library.”
From Our Online Communities:
Iowa Women’s Archives on Tumblr highlighted some of the papers of female politicians that are held in the archives.
Collection spans five decades of work as TV journalist, correspondent for NBC
Tom Brokaw, former anchor of the NBC Nightly News and co-anchor of the Today show, attended the UI early in his academic career and has been a longtime Hawkeye supporter. This morning he announced on the Today show that he was donating papers and artifacts representing his 50 year career to UI Libraries.
In describing his donation on the Today Show on November 10, 2016, Brokaw praised the UI Libraries and cited the “World Class” library as being one of the reasons for his donation. Stay tuned to this space to learn more about the collection, how to access it, and for future news about Mr. Brokaw.
Join us in congratulating Amy Chen, Alonso Avila, and Margaret Gamm on the successful completion of their 2016 First Year Seminar classes. Amy Chen taught, “The History of the Book: The Game,” Margaret Gamm taught, “Constructing Reality in Fiction: Using Primary Sources to Write More Creatively,” and Alonso Avila taught, “Liberation: A Hip-Hop State of Mind.”
For updates on our Instruction Program, and a lively feed of other content, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter.
Upcoming Special Collections Events & Events of Interest:
Iowa Bibliophiles Present Blaine Greteman:
Shakeosphere: Visualizing Shakespeare’s Networks
This event is part of SHAKESPEARE AT IOWA (August 29 – December 30), a celebration hosted by the University of Iowa Libraries.
Refreshments at 6:30pm – Program at 7:00pm – Special Collections Reading Room – Third Floor, UI Main Library
What can new digital technologies tell us about old books and the people who made them? Renaissance scholar and UI English Professor Blaine Greteman will discuss and demonstrate his digital project, “Shakeosphere,” which has mined information about publishers, booksellers, printers, and authors from half a million books published between 1473 and 1800. Shakeosphere uses this data to map relationships between these people, so that we can discover how Shakespeare and his contemporaries were connected by a rapidly changing communications network. By employing some of the same algorithms that Facebook uses to find your friends – or the NSA uses to find potential terrorists – Greteman and the team working on Shakeosphere are also able to identify the “hubs” in this network. This talk will explain some of the ways that such work reveals a hidden history of the printers, publishers, and booksellers who gave us Shakespeare.
UI Libraries’ and UICB William Anthony Conservation Lecture with Barb Korbel
Date: Thursday, November 10, 2016 – 6:00pm
Location: 2032 Main Library
Join us at the Main Library for the third annual William Anthony Conservation Lecture featuring Barbara Korbel. Korbel is the Collections & Exhibitions Conservator at Newberry Library in Chicago, IL.
University Lecture Committee: An Evening with Lois Lowry
Special Collections partnered with the Old Capitol Museum this year for a Shakespeare themed Creepy Campus Crawl. Despite the Cubs’ World Series game, 750+ kids and parents from across the region wandered from room to room, played in a Renaissance village, learned a period dance, played games like throwing skulls with Hamlet, made crafts like paper ruffs, wrote with quill pens, made Shakespeare buttons with a University of Iowa Librarian, and even met The Bard himself (played by Shakespeare Professor Adam Hooks from the Department of English). Many thanks to the Iowa City/Coralville Convention and Visitor’s Bureau whose grant funding helped make this year such a success.
ICON Science Fiction Convention, October 28-30, 2016
University of Iowa Special Collections made our yearly trip to the ICON Science Fiction Convention in Cedar Rapids, now in its 41st year. In addition to running an information table about our science fiction collections and the Hevelin Fanzine Digitization Project, special collections librarians updated the community on the progress processing and digitizing the Rusty Hevelin Science Fiction Collection, taught sessions about Gene Wilder, and along with UI Librarian Lisa Martincek, taught a session about using University Library resources as a writer. The ICON community designated The Hevelin Collection digitization as one of the recipients of proceeds from their annual charity auction. A previous fundraising effort from the community in 2014 raised $1955.
Halloween Guests in Special Collections:
Princess Elsa and the Winter Soldier visited the library this week.
Twitter recently announced that they will be closing down Vine, a social media platform for short looping videos that we have been using to bring you “box opening” videos showing our new acquisitions as they arrive. Stayed tuned to this space as we soon reveal our new plans to bring you similar content in a new way.
Our delightful Hawkeye Ghost says goodbye to Vine and expresses our feelings better than we can do in this space:
Dracula has been a name that has instilled fear and fascination in the imaginations of readers and viewers since its original publication by Bram Stoker in 1897. There have been many adaptations and remakes of the novel since then, including F.W. Murnau’s silent film Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Graunens, the 1931 Universal Studios version of Dracula starring Bela Lugosi, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula starring Gary Oldman and directed by Francis Ford Coppola in 1992.
There was even a play adaptation about the captivating vampire. In 1924, Hamilton Deane adapted Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula into a stage play with the permission of Stoker’s widow. The play toured in England and was brought to Broadway in 1927.
Dracula was revived in 1977 under the direction of Dennis Rosa. Sets and costumes were designed by Edward Gorey, who is well-known for his quirky cat drawings on T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and other Gothic illustrations that have graced the covers of numerous classics, poetry books, and various other publications. With the set and costume design for Dracula, Gorey channeled his obsession with bats. Bats can be found in the walls, in the cobblestone, in the furniture – there are even bats incorporated into the characters’ clothing, like Renfield’s bat-buttoned pajamas.
The set and costumes were so enthralling that the play soon became known as “Edward Gorey’s production of Dracula,” instead of being fully credited to the director. Gorey’s designs were nominated for Tony Awards, and the production received a Tony in 1977 for the best revival of a play.
Dracula closed in 1980 after a strong run of 925 performances.
Edward Gorey’s vision of Dracula did not die with the close of the play. The designs rose once again in 1979 when Scribner’s published them as a spiral-bound book called Dracula: A Toy Theatre. The book contains Gorey’s original designs of the sets and characters, as well as a synopsis of the characters, scenes, and acts. The images of the characters, furniture, and set could be cut out from the pages and taped together so the reader could create their own interactive version of the original stage.
More recently, Pomegranate Communications picked up the book and made it into a box set of the toy theater with loose leaves of die-cut fold-ups and fold-outs. Once the theatre is constructed, the reader can have a full 3-D model of all three acts of the play.
Dracula Toy Theatre Act 1Dracula Toy Theatre Act 2Dracula Toy Theatre Act 3
Here at the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections, we not only have a copy of Scribner’s publication of Dracula: A Toy Theatre, but two copies of the Pomegranate publication as well.
If you want to see them in person, you can swing on by to the Special Collections on the third floor of the Main Library. Otherwise, on October 28th, 11:00am – 3:00pm, we will be hosting a Halloween Pop-Up Exhibit on the first floor of the Main Library, where the complete construction of Dracula: A Toy Theatre will be the star of the exhibit, along with a showcase of some of our spookiest comics and fanzines.
Read more about the event at the link below, and we hope to see you there!
This Halloween Pop-Up Exhibition is hosted by the University of Iowa Special Collections. We will be displaying Halloween-related materials from the collections. We will be serving popcorn, and students can make their own free buttons from spooky comic book images.
David McCartney, University Archivist, presented a talk for LGBTQ History Month on Wednesday evening, sponsored by Delta Lambda Phi fraternity. Extensive holdings in the Iowa Women’s Archives and the University Archives provided the background for David’s presentation, including this 1980s-era notice from the Gay People’s Union, and an image from the 1971 Hawkeye yearbook depicting Gay Liberation Front’s entry in the 1970 Homecoming parade, its first public action. The University of Iowa that year was the first public university in the nation to officially recognize a gay student organization.
This visitor has been appearing for #FridayFrights on Twitter. Follow along for the rest of October.
https://vine.co/v/5g1Xn0Dr7W5
Libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies all over the country (including @uispeccoll) are celebrating the build up to Halloween using the hashtag #pagefrights across social media channels. Here’s a list of participating institutions: http://pagefrights.org/participating-institutions/
The University of Iowa has a series interviewing students and graduate student about their favorite spot on campus. One of the students chose the UI Main Library. (We’re awfully partial to the third floor).
Iowa Reads Shakespeare was the closing event for the First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare exhibition traveling from the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Last Saturday, sixteen readers performed and recited passages from Shakespeare at the Riverside Festival Stage in City Park. The Combined Efforts Theater performed as well as Rubén Villeagas who performed scenes from Hamlet, the play that garnered the most votes from around Iowa and was dubbed “Iowa’s Favorite Shakespeare Play.”
A New Feature on the UI Libraries’ Homepage: Martin Luther King, Jr. Recording from 1959
The UI Libraries homepage has a new banner featuring an item from the University of Iowa Archives that was recently digitized as part of the Uptight and Laid-back: Iowa City in the 1960’s online exhibition.
Chancery Papermaking from the UI Center for the Book, 2016
Successful test of historic papermaking techniques yields 2000 sheets of paper in one day.
A New Video: Step by Step Conservation Treatment for a Map of Canada
Step by step tour through the process of treating a map of Canada and removing the acidic backing.
New Acquisition: Book of Hours c. 1450
We are very excited about this new arrival! Books of Hours are some of the most frequently called up items for our class sessions and this newly acquired Italian Book of Hours from c. 1450 includes incredible illuminated miniature paintings inside of the initials. Watch here for more information as we get it cataloged and described!
https://vine.co/v/5rIUwM7xhF1
And Finally:
A familiar title found while processing the DuGarm Comic Book Collection:
Readers and Revelers needed to bring back the celebration of Shakespeare in City Park just like 100 years ago for the closing event to send off the First Folio exhibition to its next location.
Amy Chen, the Special Collections Instruction Librarian, is now the interim English and American Literature Librarian. The position is currently open – please find the job ad here. Feel free to contact Amy at amy-chen@uiowa.edu if you have questions about research, instruction, or acquisitions for the English department, although please note that research and instruction requests will be cooperatively shared with other librarians in the Research and Library Instruction (RLI) department.
Fun from the Archives:
Let’s have fun with boxes! This image, undated but probably 1950s, is of a student-produced children’s television program originating in the Communication Center for on-campus closed-circuit use.
The photo is one of over 500 images acquired earlier this week by the University Archives from the Dept. of Communication Studies. Nearly all of the photos depict student-produced television productions during the 1950s and 1960s.