“From the Classroom” is a series that features some of the great work and research from students who visit our collections. Below is a blog by Lisa Tuzel from Dr. Jennifer Burek Pierce’s class “Reading Culture History & Research in Media” (SLIS:5600:0001).
It isn’t hoarding if it’s books – or is it?
By Lisa Tuzel
Image from boredpanda.com
In her NYT Best Seller The Life-Changing Magic of Cleaning Up, Marie Kondo made headlines with her strategy for minimizing belongings, including books. Kondo claimed to winnow down her own collection to just 30 titles (93 – 95). Book lovers and readers on social media had a visceral reaction to Kondo’s plan – “30 books, you mean on my nightstand, right?” Kondo’s tendency toward minimalism is one that has been common in the United States since World War II, however, this tendency is at odds with an older aspect of book culture: bibliomania.
Bibliomania, the passion for collecting books, was coined by John Ferriar, a physician at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, in an 1809 poem dedicated to his friend, Richard Heber. The term was commonly used through the nineteenth century to describe obsessive book collecting. It is widely agreed that a tense bidding war over Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decamerone between Lord Spencer and the marquis of Blandford in 1812, which ended in a staggering price of £2,260, marks the “central, defining moment in what was known as the ‘bibliomania’” (Connell 25). From this moment, writings concerning the trend of book collecting flourished. In them, the obsession of book collecting by the upper classes in the 19th century is optimistically attributed to saving the literary and cultural history of a nation, to a more cynical view of “book gluttony” that saw collectors “preserve learning … almost in spite of themselves” (Connell 36).
Table of Contents in Bibilomania or Book Madness (Z99.D56 1811, x collection)
One of the seminal works regarding bibliomania is Rev Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s Bibliomania or Book Madness (1811), of which two editions can be found in the University of Iowa Special Collections & Archives. Written as a series of dialogues about book collecting, the work offers up a satiric mock-explanation of the disease bibliomania, its symptoms, and possible cures.
In the 20th century, Holbrook Jackson, a British journalist and avid book lover, published a number of essay collections that extolled the virtues of books and reading. UI Special Collections owns a copy of The Anatomy of Bibliomania (1930) and Bookman’s Pleasure: a recreation for book lovers (1945). Anatomy of Bibliomania explores questions that all book lovers and collectors mull over, such as The Art of Reading, The Uses of Books, and How Bookmen Conquer Time
Table of Contents for The Anatomy of Bibliomania (Leigh Hunt Collection 010. J12a)
and Place . The Table of Contents proceeds beyond the love of books to Parts XXIII through XXIX, a discussion of the evolution to bibliomania.
The conversation regarding bibliomania was not confined to Great Britain. In the United States, Eugene Field, also a journalist, published The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac in 1896, which became part of the canon of books about books. Following a fictionalized bibliomaniac protagonist, The Love Affair highlights the sensual nature of loving books (Shaddy 53-54).
Maybe the most unique title book about book collecting from UI Special Collections is The Joys and Sorrows of a Book Collector by Luther A. Brewer. It is an essay Brewer wrote about his hobby: book collecting. But what makes this specific item so interesting is that it was not for national or international consumption. The Joys and Sorrows of a Book Collector was privately printed in Cedar Rapids, IA, and given to friends for Christmas in 1928.
Title page of The Joys and Sorrows of a Book Collector (Z992.B84, x collection)
The conversation around book collecting has continued for more than 200 years. Why does this conversation persist? It could be the symbolism attributed to books: that the number of books on one’s shelves is directly proportional to the value placed on knowledge and learning. Perhaps the number of books is equal to the intelligence of the collector. Or maybe a full bookshelf is aspirational. Perusing the Table of Contents of these foundational works about bibliomania demonstrates the varied paths collectors take. Whether they collect for love of knowledge, appreciation of the physical artifact, preservation of text, or for vanity, book collectors enjoy the meta-exercise of thinking about why they collect books. Whatever the reason, critics and authors continue to delve into what it means to be a collector of books and whether or not the tendency is symptomatic of mania.
Works Cited
Connell, Philip. “Bibliomania: Book Collecting, Cultural Politics, and the Rise of Literary Heritage in Romantic Britain.” Representations, vol. 71, 2000, pp 24 – 47.
Kondo, Marie. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Ten Speed Press, 2014.
Shaddy, Robert A. “Mad About Books: Eugene Field’s The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac.” Midamerica: The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, Vol.24, 1997, pp. 53 – 73.
The following is written by Olson Graduate Research Assistant Matrice Young
Sean Sherman foraging. Photo from The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen taken by Nancy Bundt
Sean Sherman, a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, was born in 1974 and spent the early days of his childhood on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Much of his childhood was spent on his family’s ranch, playing out on the edge of the Badlands. Coyotes, rattlesnakes, jackrabbits, mallards, sandhill cranes, prairie dogs and more were a common populace of the area. At seven, Sherman was hunting animals like grouse and pronghorn antelope, while also helping gather chokeberries, and dug up wild turnips and timpsula. Along with his cousins he pitched in to help around the family farm, moving cattle, tracking horses, and mending fences.
Sherman and his cousin Justin on Pine Ridge in 1982, from The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen
However, his childhood wasn’t all work. Much of it was spent immersed in his culture: attending powwows, Sun Dances, holiday parades, and family gatherings. Even in school, the Lakota-language class they had was just as important as their English, math, and social studies classes. While he was close to his culture, Sherman remarks that the land around them wasn’t the best “growing area,” supporting mostly cactus and desert plants.
In an interview with American food journalist Francis Lam, Sherman states that “We didn’t have a lot of the traditional foods growing up; we definitely had a lot of commodity foods. … But looking backwards as a chef much later in life, I realized there should’ve been a lot more knowledge of the traditional foods of the Lakota. That’s what set me off on the path; I was trying to figure out the food of my own heritage.”
After his parents separated, Sherman, his sister, and his mother moved to Spearfish, South Dakota so his mother could pursue her college degree. He and his sister put food on the table for the family as their mother was now a single parent working two jobs and busy with school. During this time of his life, chef-hood crept closer into his life, into his future.
At 13, he bussed tables and prepped food at Sluice, a restaurant nearby. The next summer he worked at the Sylvan Lake resort as the youngest on staff, working on the grill, where the college-age kids experimented with meats, switching from steaks to rattlesnake and beaver. Sherman remarks “I knew then that I loved this work.”
Sherman’s culture has always been a large part of his life, and as such, so has Indigenous food. When Sherman’s grandfather was a child, he was one of the first Native American children to attend a mission school on their reservation. The forced assimilation that started during the 19th century eliminated a lot of Native American food culture across the country, and that was no exception for Sherman’s family. Despite this experience, Sherman’s grandfather still maintained parts of his tribe’s food culture, becoming one Sherman’s first teacher. He passed when Sherman was 18, leaving the budding chef with a plethora of unanswered questions, both in general and about the culture of their food.
After spending his early 20s in Minneapolis as a sous chef and becoming an executive chef at La Bodega in 2000, Sherman decided he wanted to create a Lakota cookbook. Finding the research on plants and game native to the Great Plains severely lacking, Sherman devised his own research plan to study ethnobotany. He spent time talking to elders and looking at how Native Americans in other parts of the country had their own food systems and pieced together what commonality they shared.
At 29 he moved to San Francisco, Nayarit in Mexico. This region was colonized by Europeans later than other areas, leaving much of the native plants and foods intact. He found the culture there very similar to his own back home in the Midwest.
Sherman states in his introduction to his book The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, “In an Epiphany, I tasted how food weaves people together, connects families through generations, is a life force of identity and social structure. After seeing how the Huicholes [the native individuals in the area] held on to so much of their pre-European culture through artwork and food, I recognized that I wanted to know my own food heritage. What did my ancestors eat before the Europeans arrived on our lands?”
Sherman spent a lot of time reading cookbooks, magazines, research publications, along with traveling across the US to visit other Indigenous Americans to learn more about their food cultures. He states that one of the biggest parts of Native American cuisine was the method of preserving their food, as during the summer they were preparing for the next winter. He relied on a food dehydrator and experimented with drying by wood fires or using the sun. His research is continuous, but in 2014 he was able to put his work into fruition by creating the organization The Sioux Chef. He describes The Sioux Chef as “a mission-driven enterprise of Indigenous team members.” It includes the Tatanka Food Truck which is a full-service catering company, Indigenous Food Labs, an Indigenous kitchen and training center, and Sherman’s restaurant: Owamni.
Owamni was started by Sherman and his wife Dana Thompson in Minneapolis, MN in July of 2021. Thee restaurant is run by an over 80% Indigenous staff. Many individuals on the Owamni team and in the community find the restaurant to be more like a community service than a regular restaurant, according to Thompson. Even the name of the restaurant is integral to the communal history and the mission of the restaurant.
Owamni was named after a map of the Eastern Sioux that Thompson’s grandfather and his best friend made. Without this map, many of the original names of the natural landmarks before colonization would’ve been lost. Owamni sits on an area which used to be full of waterfalls with sacred islands to the Dakota and Anishinaabe people.
Owamni, like the organization The Sioux Chef, is dedicated to de-colonizing food. Thompson, who is of Dakota ancestry has stated that “These foods were systematically removed by forced assimilation and genocide and the culture was almost erased. The fact that we have these foods here is an act of resistance itself.”
The name origin of Owamni, the food that they serve, and The Sioux Chef entirely are part of Sherman’s mission to engage the community in conversations about race, equity, sustainability, and the history of Indigenous Americans. To teach a history that has often been left out and erased.
Sherman states “I’ll never learn everything about Indigenous foods, but we’re setting up structures and systems to be able to preserve it and maintain it for the following generations … We envision eventually being able to drive across the U.S. or anywhere in North America and having the option of Indigenous food businesses: to be able to stop there and to experience the immense diversity and culture and language and stories and food.”
In our library here at University of Iowa, we have Sean Sherman’s book, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, so, if you’d like to learn more about Sherman, his journey, different Indigenous foods and their importance, and want to learn to cook some of his recipes yourself, this book is worth a read!
“From the Classroom” is a series that features some of the great work and research from students who visit our collections. Below is a blog by Kelli Brommel from Dr. Jennifer Burek Pierce’s class “Reading Culture History & Research in Media” (SLIS:5600:0001).
Mass Market Ads of a Bygone Era
By Kelli Brommel
Cover of Archie’s Girls Betty and Veronica, Issue 91, July 1963
Amongst the wide variety in the female-driven comics in the Jen Wolfe Comic Book Collection (MsC 879), you will find a well-worn copy of Archie’s Girls Betty and Veronica from July 1963. If you’ve never read an Archie comic, what might strike you first is the unabashed stereotyping of the characters. The second thing to catch your eye will most likely be the advertisements. Taken as a whole, the comic manages to be aimed both at everyone and no one in particular.
Imagine scrolling through your social media and being confronted with an ad that seems so off, so… not you. Chances are this off-putting ad will leave you feeling misunderstood, even angry. We are now so accustomed to targeted ads that mass marketing feels laughable, the relic of a bygone era.
Step into that era with Archie’s Girls Betty and Veronica.
Popsicle safety awards featuring prizes for those winners who “do the most for safety” in 1963
Within the pages of this issue, readers are tempted with a “live sea circus,” Bendix bike accessories, Popsicle brand safety awards in which cartoon characters announce that anyone up to age 16 can be nominated to win, and 147 model cars for only $2.49. These promotions are clearly geared toward children with enough money to spend on novelties.
The intent of this ad from Wilson Chemical Company is buried in an avalanche of giveaways and prizes
However, there are also ads which feature adults and teens, where one can learn to play guitar in seven days, attend international correspondence school to finally get that high school degree, buy a set of “self-teaching” encyclopedias to “fill the gaps in your Family’s Education,” and learn to hypnotize in “just one evening.” Inside the back cover is an especially confusing ad calling on “Boys! Girls! Ladies! Men!” to sell Cloverine Brand Salve and be rewarded with prizes ranging from air rifles to jewelry boxes to “a real live pony for your very own.”
Archie Comics has been around in one form or another since 1939, founded initially as MLJ Magazine (Wikipedia, 2022). The lack of ad targeting could very well have resulted from a confusion about audience and a desire to reach anyone who might pick up a copy.
“The first decades of comic book publishing were experimental in many ways, as creators and publishers tried out formats, genres, and narrative strategies in an effort to determine what was most saleable. Presumably, they were also figuring out who would read comic books and what products could be sold to them.” (Beaty & Woo, 2021)
Archie comics have sometimes been described as “romance” comics, with adolescents as the intended audience. Romance comics, as opposed to the typical superhero fare, are thought to have “helped define the role of the American teenager as a viable entity in society” (Andrus, 2021). However, Archie comics have also been described in terms of their cheap accessibility, making their presence as a “lowbrow art form” nearly ubiquitous (Beaty, 2014). This meant that anyone could get their hands on these comics, therefore people of all ages could be (and probably were) reading them.
Parental concern with inappropriate comic book content, stemming from the publication of the book Seduction of the Innocent and subsequent congressional hearings, resulted in the creation of the Comics Code Authority (CCA) in 1954. The CCA oversaw the enforcement of thirty-seven laws related to comic book production, which included a code for “advertising matter.” The obvious prohibitions were nudity, weapons, gambling, and fireworks. They also hoped to exclude ads which made false claims and did not “conform to fact.” (Andrus, 2021). In 1974, the Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU) was created by the Council of the Better Business Bureau. One of the basic principles they hoped to reinforce was that advertisers should not give “unreasonable expectations of product quality or performance” (Heinzerling & Chandler, 1992). While the CCA was specific to the comic book industry, CARU dealt with any advertising aimed at children, in all available media. Both were established as self-regulating entities. In the 1963 issue of Archie’s Girls Betty and Veronica, several of the ads proffer wild claims, most notably the one for a hypnotism course, making the CCA seal of approval on the front cover feel, itself, like false advertising.
Palmer-Jones Publishers ad for “25 Miracle Lessons” in hypnotism
One of the most endearing qualities in Issue 91 of Archie’s Girls Betty and Veronica, is that so many of the mail-order coupons have the original owner’s information filled out in what appears to be a child’s handwriting. Pinkie Smith of St. Louis, Missouri seemed interested, at least temporarily, in many of the ads, including the sea circus and the set of encyclopedias, but none of the coupons were taken out and mailed. We will never know whether this was because Pinkie had a change of heart, the comic was misplaced, or a parent intervened. Whatever the case may be, Pinkie was wise enough to avoid the hypnotism ad entirely.
Many of the comics in the Jen Wolfe collection were previously owned. This issue once belonged to Pinkie Smith.
Primary Source
Doyle, F. & Edwards, J. et al. (1963, July). No 91. Archie’s Girls Betty and Veronica. [Comic book]. Close-Up Inc.
Secondary Sources
Andrus, W. (2021). The Infinite Crisis: How the American Comic Book Has Been Shaped by War. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.
Beaty, B. (2015). Twelve-Cent Archie. Rutgers University Press.
Beaty, B. & Woo, B. (2021). From Mass Medium to Niche Medium: Advertising in American Comic Books 1934-2014. Comicalitiés. https://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/6468
Heinzerling, B. & Chandler, T. (1992). A Review of Advertisements in Children’s Magazines. The Journal of Consumer Education, 10, 32-37. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.590.3823&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Wikipedia contributors. (2022, February 20). Archie Comics. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved March 4, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_Comics
For Further Exploration
Berube, L. (2020). Context is Everything: A Review of Comics Studies: A Guidebook. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 10 (1). https://doi.org/10.16995/cg.221
Duke University Libraries Repository Collections and Archives, Ad*Access, John. W. Hartman Center for Sales Advertising & Marketing History. https://repository.duke.edu/dc/adaccess
Wertham, F. (1954). Seduction of the Innocent. Rinehart & Company, Inc.
“From the Classroom” is a series that features some of the great work and research from students who visit our collections. Below is a blog by Abbie Steuhm from Dr. Jennifer Burek Pierce’s class “Reading Culture History & Research in Media” (SLIS:5600:0001).
Private Catholic: Zines for Catholic School Kids
By Abbie Steuhm
In the U.S. education system, private schools are unique as scholarly institutions that stand outside of government funding and therefore government regulations. Catholic private schools in particular mix religion and education for young students. While there is a lot of debate around these schools, we find ourselves knowing little about the stories and thoughts of the students themselves who attend. However, some of these stories are told within the minor-league zine Private Catholic found within the Sarah and Jen Wolfe Zines Collection (MsC0878) held in the University of Iowa’s Special Collections & Archives.
“Zines” are handmade booklets self-published by a variety of people, usually members of alternative subcultures. Due to the accessibility of self-publishing and lack of mainstream censorship, many zines detail deeply personal experiences relating to issues of misogyny, classism, racism, anarchism, and empowerment. This makes zines rather difficult to collect and showcase to a wide audience, since these stories were meant to be seen by a small group of collectors and self-publishers instead of an entire academic institution. However, the University of Iowa Libraries staff—many of whom are part of the zine subculture—are dedicated to preserving this small history. This allows stories from unheard voices like Catholic students to be read and experienced by researchers today.
The unnamed creator of the Private Catholic zine gave their personal statement in the first issue, starting with an all-caps statement “OK, LET’S BOND.” They continue by saying they had “originally intended this zine to be a handbook… for poor souls like me who are stuck in Private Catholic school—and trust me, it is HELL” (Private Catholic, no. 1). While the average reader may take this statement as an intense dislike for private Catholic schools, the author explicitly states in issue two how they are “not decidedly for or against Private Catholic schools… They can be pretty cool (uniform means you don’t have to worry what to wear), etc.” Private Catholic allows teenage Catholic school-goers a place to vent their frustrations and air some outrageous stories. For example, underneath the “True Stories” section of the zine’s first edition, someone named Gina tells her single-sentence story of how she received detention for, quote, “being bad at volleyball.”
Author Note found in Private Catholic
Private Catholic earns its place within the zine subculture as it details narratives that go against the strict grain of private Catholic schools. In the first issue, one contributor talks about how the spelling book Wordly Wise “introduces and incorporates alternative philosophies and lifestyles” besides an image of Alice from Alice in Wonderland surrounded by definitions of various words such as “anarchy” and “funeral.” Within the same issue, a two-page spread of cut-and-paste pictures from popular magazines displays various images of girls posing in Catholic school uniforms. The commentary on these pages tells how those magazines were selling the look of a Catholic school girl as “sexy, alternative” despite how students were conforming to authoritarian standards with those uniforms.
Both current and former students cognizant and articulate difficult topics that even adults find trouble voicing at times. This is the reason zines deserve their space within Special Collections & Archives; the original, unedited thoughts of underrepresented groups, minorities, and the youth of the past are scissored, glued and typed in various, abstract ways into self-published magazines, a feat worthy of preservation and admiration from fellow students who made their way from Catholic school to public university.
Wordly Wise page layoutSchool Girls Comic
Further Reading:
Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism by Alison Piepmeier (2009)
Stolen Sharpie Revolution by Alex Wrekk (2014)
Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture by Stephen Duncombe (1997)
“From the Classroom” is a series that features some of the great work and research from students who visit our collections. Below is a blog by Luke Allan from Dr. Jennifer Burek Pierce’s class “Reading Culture History & Research in Media” (SLIS:5600:0001).
Poems That Just Are
By Luke Allan
FIG 1: Ian Hamilton Finlay with his poem acrobats on the wall of his house in 1965. Photo by Jonathan Williams
In a letter to a friend in the late 1950s, Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006) admits to feeling that he must be “about the only contemporary writer who believes that the purpose of art is to—oh dearie me, I forget exactly what—let’s say: be beautiful.” Finlay is in his early thirties, living alone on a remote Scottish island, recovering from the collapse of his marriage, struggling with his mental health problems, and desperately poor. In 1959 he’ll move to Edinburgh, and from there to a dilapidated farmhouse in the Highlands. In the meantime he’ll meet his second wife, Sue, and in 1966 the young couple will move into a slightly less dilapidated farmhouse in the Pentland Hills, called Stonypath, and have their first child. For the next fifty years Ian and Sue will transform Stonypath, and the square acre of wilderness it sits on, nicknamed Little Sparta, into a unique “poem garden”, cultivated by the world’s first self-proclaimed “avant-gardeners”.
But let us take a step back. At some point in those years between moving to the city and leaving it again with Sue, Ian meets Paul Pond and Jessie McGuffie, and together they start a small poetry magazine, Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. The title is borrowed from a Robert Creeley poem, “Please”, and this borrowing itself hints at one of the motivations behind Ian’s interest in running a magazine: the wish to establish a community of likeminded poets and friends. In the mid-sixties Ian was diagnosed with agoraphobia, an event that, if nothing else, gave a name to the feelings of anxiety and alienation that had troubled him for many years, and which fenced him off from the world. Running a magazine would be, whatever else it would be, a way of having friendships in exile.
Editing POTH took Finlay on a long journey into the contemporary poetic avant-garde that would radically reorient his own writing. He already sensed that he no longer cared for poems that were merely “about” things, that he wanted instead poems “that just are” (letter to Gael Turnbull, 29 April 1963). But it was his encounter with the work of the Brazilian poet Augusto de Campos in winter 1962, while editing issue 6 of POTH, that lit the fuse for Finlay. De Campos’s poems were concretos—concrete. They demonstrated a way of thinking and writing that short-circuited traditional logical and grammatical structures. Feeling alienated from the “ordinary syntax” of “social reality”, as he put it in a letter to Jerome Rothenberg in 1963, Finlay found in concrete poetry a mode of thinking and writing that freed him from the grammar of a world he didn’t recognize as his own: concrete poetry became, for Finlay, “a model of order” within a world “full of doubt” (letter to Pierre Garnier, 17 September 1963). The encounter is crucial for Finlay. In POTH 8 (1963) Finlay publishes his first concrete poem, “Homage to Malevich”, and over the next five years he produces some of his greatest hits, including “acrobats” (1964) and “wave/rock” (1966). Much as Finlay used the magazine to establish a safe social space inside a larger, unstable world, so the concrete poem served as a microcosm of stillness and clarity within the disorder of modern life.
The poem-object shown in the images below is a calendar. Published in 1968, it collects twelve of Finlay’s early concrete poems, and is his first real encounter with a US readership. The calendar’s title, The Blue and the Brown Poems, is a reference to Wittgenstein’s Blue and Brown Books, transcriptions of lecture notes in which the philosopher first develops his destabilizing ideas about the relationship between words and meanings. The calendar is larger than you might think: at 20 inches tall, it’s probably too big for your fridge door or the space beside your desk. It asks, unusually for a calendar, for a more monumental setting, hung on a large wall like a framed painting or poster.
The calendar begins, also unusually, in September. This may be a reference to the calendar of the Roman Empire, in which case it’s an early example of Finlay’s interest in classical culture, a central theme of his later work. Each month features a concrete poem printed in color on white paper, accompanied by a short commentary by the critic Stephen Bann.
FIG 2: The title page of The Blue and the Brown PoemsFIG 3: ‘acrobats’ (January). This is the same poem seen in the background of the photo at the top of this blog post, an example of the way Finlay reiterated his poems in different ways throughout his career—on walls, in print, in stone, and in glass, as well as in various contexts: in the home, in books, in galleries, and in public spaces.
Finlay believed that concrete poems were for contemplating, so it followed that their ideal presentation was in a place where they could be readily contemplated. The calendar, like the wall or the garden, is a quintessentially Finlayian form. It is a way to turn the poem into something we can live around or within. Underpinning these considerations of form and space is a more fundamental belief in the relationship between poetry and ordinary experience: the calendar is a bridge between the heavens of literary culture and the ovens of real life in the home.
In ‘wave/rock’, the words “wave” and “rock” bear the colors of the sea and the land, and where the two words overlap there is a sonic collision that produces the “wrack”—seaweed washed up on the shore. Visually, the superimposed blue and brown letterforms give an impression of seaweed-covered rocks. A “wrack” is also a wrecked ship, the word suggesting sudden violent damage, and as these two words collide the wreckage miraculously takes on the form of a word for wreckage. In this sense the poem borrows the kind of forces found at sea as metaphors for the kinds of forces found in language.
FIG 4: “wave/rock” (February) The poem was first realized as a glass poem-object in 1966 (pictured here) and later exhibited as a sculpture in a park in Dunfermline, Scotland, in 1969. It was also printed across a page spread in the magazine Aspen. Later still it was realized as a fabric wall hanging
Finlay started out as a writer of short stories and plays. In the middle of his life he found concrete poetry, and he set out on a journey into small-press publishing that would serve as his primary medium of friendship. In the final third of his life he realized the full potential of the concrete poem as a part of a landscape. Later, Finlay disassociated himself from concrete as a movement, because he felt that it did not share his views on the important function of tradition within the avant-garde. Today it is his garden domain, Little Sparta, for which he is best remembered, but at one level the garden is only the final manifestation of a poetic impulse to make enclosures that characterized Finlay’s oeuvre. The social enclosure of the magazine and the press, the aesthetic enclose of the concrete poem, and the physical and philosophical enclosure of the garden: these were ways of dealing with a sickness Finlay had diagnosed in the world and for which he spent his life discovering—oh dearie me, I forget exactly what—let’s say: beautiful cures.
FIG 5: “you / me” (April). The yellow of “you” and the blue of “me” combine to make the compound green of “us”. The two colors then separate again, continuing on a path that is at once shared and separate, on which they are, so to speak, alone together. The metaphor of color—one crucial to Wittgenstein too, we should remember—reminds us that relationships, like compound colors, are more than the sum of their parts. Blue and yellow make something unique, called green, that was in neither, and that cannot be kept if the colors are separated back out.
* * *
When the University of Iowa acquired The Sackner Archive in 2019, work began to unpack and classify the 75,000 works of visual and concrete poetry that Ruth and Marvin Sackner had collected over the course of their lives. Ruth Sackner passed away in 2015, and Marvin Sackner joined her just a few weeks after the Archive’s inaugural exhibition, in September 2019. The work required to process the many books, prints, periodicals, letters, and objects that make up their enormous collection continues behind the scenes, and items from the archive are currently available to view by special request. Over time, the archive will be fully integrated into ArchivesSpace, but even now it is possible to browse the archive here.
Over the course of forty years Finlay published more than a thousand books, booklets, cards, prints and poem-objects, many through his publishing imprint Wild Hawthorn Press. It’s clear that Ruth and Marvin Sackner were enormous fans of Finlay’s work, because their collection contains several hundred of these publications. It’s a rich seam, and one that is still largely unexplored.
FURTHER READING
In print:
Yves Abrioux and Stephen Bann, Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer (London: Reaktion Books, 1985; 2nd edition, revised and expanded, 1994)
A Model of Order: Selected Letters for Ian Hamilton Finlay, ed. Thomas A Clark (Glasgow: Wax366, 2009)
Patrick Eyres, “Gardens of Exile”, New Arcadian Journal 10 (1983)
Ian Hamilton Finlay: Selections, ed. Alec Finlay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012)
Wood Notes Wild: Essays on the Poetry of Ian Hamilton Finlay, ed. Alec Finlay (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1995)
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Rapel: 10 Fauve and Suprematist Poems (Edinburgh: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1963)
John Dixon Hunt, Nature Over Again: The Garden Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay (London: Reaktion Books, 2008)
Caitlin Murray and Tim Johnson, eds., The Present Order: Writings on the Work of Ian Hamilton Finlay (Marfa, TX: Marfa Book Company, 2011)
Jessie Sheeler, Little Sparta: The Garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Photographs by Andrew Lawson (London: Frances Lincoln, 2003)
Online:
Carli Teproff, “A force on the Miami art scene, Ruth Sackner dies at 79”, Miami Herald, October 12, 2015. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/obituaries/article38777727.html
Andres Viglucci, “Marvin Sackner, a physician, inventor and renowned collector of word art, has died”, Miami Herald, September 30, 2020 https://www.miamiherald.com/article246121525.html?fbclid=IwAR1Tur1UbivcjHp3HaTx6AN2r8KJNNYXIcdFQc0meVeUXPieXJvQYhuUEJ8
Padded Cell Pictures, Concrete! (documentary about Marvin and Ruth Sackner) https://www.kaltura.com/index.php/extwidget/preview/partner_id/1004581/uiconf_id/15920232/entry_id/1_bv84gwjw/embed/dynamic?
The following is written by Community and Student Life Archivist Aiden Bettine
The University Archives is embarking on a new, hands-on project to collect the history of student organizations on our campus, Student Organizations Archiving their Records or SOAR. The Purpose of SOAR is to ensure that the legacy of each student organization on the University of Iowa campus is being actively preserved. This project provides student organizations with archiving kits for their materials so they can engage in the archival process. Involving students in the organization, description, and care for their organization’s archival collection is an integral part of making the history of student organizations visible on our campus. Organization leaders will work closely with our Community & Student Life Archivist, Aiden Bettine, to ensure their collections move into the University Archives.
Students are an integral part of our campus history. One of the primary ways that students make an impact on our campus is through student organizations whether as founders, members, or leaders. Yet a challenge with collecting this history is the reality that leadership and organizational records change hands every couple of years. Through SOAR, our goal is that when a student organization has a leadership change, the awareness of being able to work closely with the University Archives is passed down.
Although the organizational records will vary from group to group, there are some consistent types of materials we collect to capture the history of an organization:
Constitution/Bylaws
Meeting minutes/notes
Event flyers/posters
Marketing materials
Correspondence/email
Newsletters/publications
Annual financial budgets
Handbooks
Petitions
Photographs/videos
T-shirts, buttons, stickers, etc.
Website
Whether physical or digital versions of materials, the University Archives is ready to help preserve your organization’s history on our campus.
For student organizations that are affiliated with a center, office, or department on campus, SOAR offers the opportunity for archival storage outside of the University Archives in another campus space. This affords students the opportunity to keep their records close to where they gather regularly for ease of access and use. Storing materials on campus but outside of the Main Library also invites library patrons to learn more about an organization in context, to understand how institutional spaces for student organizations function on campus.
The University Archives is here to support the preservation and accessibility of each student organization’s history, regardless of where the materials are stored on our campus. We will work directly with each group to ensure the best decisions are made for the preservation and use of their collection. We want all our Hawkeyes to SOAR! To learn more about SOAR visit here.
Are you part of a student org and want to get involved in preserving your org’s history? Fill out the SOAR participation survey to tell us more about the materials you have.
The following is written by Elizabeth Riordan and Anna Holland for Silent-ology‘s Buster Keaton Blogathon
Sitting in a dark auditorium in Iola, Kansas, two friends watched Our Hospitality with a live band accompaniment. The annual Buster Keaton Celebration had begun, and the audience around them clapped and cheered as the screen illuminated Keaton donning his signature pork pie hat. The utter glee of watching the antics of this silent cinema star filled the room almost a century later.
But there lies the magic of Buster Keaton. Time may pass, but Keaton’s stunts and storytelling continue to intrigue audiences, old and young alike. Associate Curator of Iowa Women’s Archives Anna Holland and Lead Instruction and Outreach Librarian Elizabeth Riordan sat in that auditorium back in 2012, partaking in the Keaton Celebration. Neither one realized that they would soon be working in the archives that held the research files of Marion Meade, Buster Keaton biographer.
Meade undertook the monumental task of capturing the life of Joseph Frank “Buster” Keaton for a biography on the actor. She had already made a name for herself in the literary world with a series of feminist-themed novels and had broken into the biography scene in 1988 with a book on American poet Dorothy Parker. By the mid 1990s, she was ready to discover what was under the “Great Stone Face.”
Mock up for front cover for Cut to the Chase book
Buster Keaton – Cut to the Chase by Marion Meade hit bookstores in 1995 nearly 30 years after Keaton’s death. Published on the 100th anniversary of Keaton’s birth, it aimed to underline his cinematic legacy with a definitive biography and introduce him to a new generation of cinephiles who may not have gotten a hold of a VHS copy of The Navigator or encountered his 1960 autobiography. Since its release, the book has received critiques for its sometimes-harsh take on Buster’s early life, as well as a general lack of objectivity. Despite critiques, the book still holds sway, with rumors that it will soon be turned into a film with 20th Century Studios.
Meade’s chapters are reminiscent of silent film shorts, barely any exceed 20 pages, making Keaton’s life easily digestible. She sets scenes artistically, and engagingly. Meade introduces Keaton by transplanting us in a noisy, cold Times Square before describing a 21-year-old who “looks younger, with a solemn, pretty-boy face and a shock of straight dark hair” (Meade, 1). After setting the mood, she takes a deep dive into the history of Keaton’s family and then on a step-by-step journey through his life and career. The book gives ample attention, and several pages of photographs, to the joys and scandals in his personal life along with his films.
Tape of interview with Eleanor Keaton
Despite its shortcomings, Meade’s meticulous research is evident throughout the book. Not only did she dig into details like Keaton genealogy, but Meade also held dozens of interviews. She went out to gather oral histories with family, friends, and colleagues of Keaton. Tapes and tapes of interviews soon stacked up, including interviews with Keaton’s third wife Eleanor, his son John, and those who worked behind the scenes on his famous film The General. Meade took advantage of something biographers today can only dream of: still-living vaudevillians, actors from the golden age of Hollywood, and members of Keaton’s own family who all told detailed stories of their lives and Keaton’s. These interviews, doggedly pursued by Meade, are perhaps the most important and lasting contribution of Cut to the Chase.
Meade’s research and interviews on Buster Keaton were bought by the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections & Archives, along with her work on Woody Allen, Nathanael West, and Eileen McKenney. Meade’s papers are open to researchers, or simply the curious public, and anyone can find out more about what is in the collection by exploring the online finding aid here.
For Keaton fans Elizabeth and Anna, using this collection at work has been a dream come true, but anyone can access these research files. For those of you interested in following in the research footsteps of Marion Meade, contact UI Libraries’ Special Collections & Archives , and we’ll walk you through visiting the collections.
Elizabeth Riordan enjoying Buster Keaton’s AutobiographyAnna Holland strikes a pose with Buster at Muskegon Lake
The following is written by Kathryn Reuter, Academic Outreach Coordinator for Special Collections & Archives and for Stanley Museum of Art
In 1938, Chester Carlson invented the process of electrophotographic printing. Later rebranded as xerography, this process is what fuels photocopy machines around the world. Carlson’s invention forever changed the nature of office work and schoolwork, but it also sparked creativity for artists around the globe. While many of us associate the Xerox machine with the monotony of paper pushing and working nine to five under office florescent lights, members of the International Society of Copier Artists (I.S.C.A.) saw the copy machine as an artist’s medium and eagerly embraced the possibilities of this tool.
Neaderland with her cat Muffin, International Society of Copier Artists Records (MsC0768)
Louise Neaderland founded the I.S.C.A. in 1981 as “a non-profit professional organization composed of artists who use the copier both alone and in conjunction with other medium to create prints, murals, billboards, postcards and an innovative array of bookworks.” (I.S.C.A. Quarterly vol. 1 no.1, 1982) Neaderland is a printmaker, book artist, and alum of Bard College and the University of Iowa. Beginning in the early 1980s, her New York City studio became a hub of copier artist activity. Rather than gathering and sharing their work in person, artists corresponded with Neaderland primarily through the postal system. In addition to artists, membership in the I.S.C.A. was open to art collectors and institutions like libraries and archives.
At the core of the I.S.C.A. was the I.S.C.A. Quarterly, a publication of work by member artists. Neaderland published the first volume of the I.S.C.A. Quarterly in April of 1982, and aside from the occasional guest editor, it appears that the operation was largely a one-woman show. Artists would mail copies of their work to Neaderland, who would organize the submissions and publish the pieces in the Quarterly. Then she would package and mail each issue to I.S.C.A. members and subscribers.
The first issue of the Quarterly contained the work of all 48 copier artist members and was released as a file of loose papers in a flat folder. By the third issue, the Quarterly had grown to over 120 members and had found its form as a plastic comb bound volume of pages, a format it would (mostly) maintain until the final issue in June of 2004.
Vol. 16 No. 1 (1997) folded pages by Susan Gold
Copier artists creatively stretch the expectations of photocopies by using different colors, sizes, and textures of paper. In issues of the I.S.C.A. Quarterly there are works that have pasted on collages, unique paper cut-outs, applied paint, ink, and sewed on appliques. So long as an artist was using a photocopier as a component of their work, their pieces were fair game for submission to the Quarterly. While some issues were a hodgepodge of works with vastly different subject matter, Neaderland frequently issued calls for work based on a theme, resulting in I.S.C.A. Quarterly issues on “Statues of Liberty”, “Walls”, “The Artist’s Studio”, and “Charles Dickens”, just as a few examples.
In the summer of 1986, Neaderland published the first of what would become an annual issue of the I.S.C.A. Quarterly: the Bookworks edition. The Bookworks issues featured xerographic artists books and book objects and were packaged in cardboard box mailers. Printed on the back of the catalogue for the first Bookworks edition are the opening lines of Ulises Carrion’s essay “What A Book Is”:
A book is a sequence of spaces. Each of these spaces is perceived at a different moment—a book is also a sequence of moments. A book is not a case of words, nor a bag of words, nor a bearer of words. A writer, contrary to popular opinion, does not write books. A writer writes texts.
This series of statements makes clear that the Bookworks editions of the I.S.C.A. Quarterly were meant to challenge our notions of what makes a book.
Items from the first annual Bookworks edition – including a matchbook
Because they corresponded and submitted art through the mail, the I.S.C.A. was undoubtedly embedded in the “Eternal Network”. Dating back to the 1950s and still active today, the Network is an informal, global network of artists who communicate by exchanging their mail art via the postal system. Postage stamps, envelopes, and other postal themes frequently appeared in the work of I.S.C.A. members.
Like the Network, the I.S.C.A. was truly international in scope, in Neaderland’s files of correspondence with other artists, there is mail from Japan, Greece, Panama, Spain, Uruguay, and what was formally Czechoslovakia and West Germany. Neaderlander must have gotten quite a lot of mail; in her Editorial Letter from December 1995, Neaderland urges fellow I.S.C.A. members to send packages to a separate mailing address instead of to her Brooklyn address because she had “a small mailbox here in Brooklyn, and a very angry postman.”
Sitting at the intersection of book works and mail art, the work of the I.S.C.A. attracted the attention of Ruth and Marvin Sackner: a Miami based couple who became leading collectors of concrete poetry, artist books, and book objects. When the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry arrived at the University of Iowa in 2019, their issues of the I.S.C.A. Bookworks editions, which Neaderland had mailed out to Miami over the course of over two decades, were shelved just five rows away from Neaderland’s own personal copies of the I.S.C.A. Quarterly, which had never left New York City until she gifted her records to Special Collections and Archives in 2003.
Cover of Vol. 17 No. 1 (which followed a postage theme) Emma Goldman artistamps by Magda Lagerwerf, from Vol.17, No.1Katie Bronson, Vol. 21 No. 1 & 2 (2002)
The records of the International Society of Copier Artists are in good company here in Iowa City with the thousands of pieces of mail art in the ATCA, Fluxus, and Sackner collections. The I.S.C.A. Quarterlies and Bookworks editions are truly delightful to page though. They serve as records of how copier artists responded to major political, environmental, and social issues of their time. In addition, they are reflections of the rapidly changing technology of the 90s and early aughts. For instance, in 1995 Neaderland wrote in her editorial letter that she would soon be purchasing her first personal computer and was excited to not have to literally cut and paste her letters from typewritten pages. Two years later, she had established an email address for the I.S.C.A. and was working on a web site. At their core, though, the I.S.C.A. Quarterlies are a testament to artist’s abilities to find creativity and inspiration within the drudgery of the ordinary, like copy machines – and the twenty-one-year run of the Quarterly serves as a shining example of the radical power of self-publishing.
He’s served as the University of Iowa’s institutional memory for the last 21 years, which includes writing the beloved Old Gold series. Now, University Archivist David McCartney is starting a new chapter.
McCartney, who is retiring on March 1, has been dedicated to ensuring access to Iowa’s history and also highlighting voices that are underrepresented in the University Archives. Throughout his career, McCartney also developed relationships across campus, working with classes or faculty in every department, as well as with many different people throughout the state, region, and beyond.
“David has tied together research questions and historical threads across campus, from the College of Medicine to the School of Art and Art History. He has such a passion for constantly learning more about the people and events represented in our collections and for uniting materials with those who need them,” said Margaret Gamm, director of Special Collections & Archives in the University of Iowa Libraries.
After publishing an award-winning article on the life of UI student Stephen Smith, a young man from Marion, Iowa, who found his voice through civil rights activism in the 1960s, McCartney organized the Historical Iowa Civil Rights Network to bring together related repositories and collections from across the state. He also established the Stephen Lynn Smith Memorial Scholarship for Social Justice. David has served as a consultant for many smaller archives and libraries throughout the Midwest, and volunteers much of his time with smaller nonprofit organizations. In addition, McCartney received the 2020 Staff Excellence Award from the Board of Regents, State of Iowa. He’s also held many positions in the Midwest Archives Conference, including president, and made invaluable contributions to the Big Ten Academic Alliance University Archivist Group and the Consortium of Iowa Archivists.
Throughout his time at the University of Iowa, McCartney has proven to be not only a leader in his field, but an advocate for growing the archives to include the many voices that make up Hawkeye history, as demonstrated in the current Main Library Gallery Exhibit “We Are Hawkeyes: Celebrating 175 Years of Student Life at the University of Iowa.” Curated by McCartney, along with Denise Anderson and Aiden Bettine, the exhibit is a fitting final showcase of McCartney’s work of collecting and lifting all voices to be heard.
“David’s contributions and dedication during his time serving as university archivist are unmatched,” said John Culshaw, Jack B. King University Librarian. “We wish him well and know that current and future generations will continue to benefit from his preservation of university history.”
University Libraries is now reviewing applications for the university archivist position and would like to have someone begin serving in the role in the next several months.
“Duke” Slater at University of Iowa, 1920s (Fredrick W. Kent Photograph Collection, RG30.0001.001)
The following is written by Olson Graduate Research Assistant Matrice Young
Frederick Wayman “Duke” Slater was born in 1898 in Normal, IL to George and Letha Slater. Slater’s first experience playing football came on the streets of the Southside of Chicago, playing pick-up games with the neighborhood kids. During their time playing, Slater discovered a love for tackling, while many of the other kids in the neighborhood much preferred carrying the ball. As such, Slater always had a spot as a lineman in the games he played as a child.
When Slater was 13, his father, who was a nationally recognized Black Methodist minister, moved his family to Clinton, IA to become the pastor of the A.M.E. church. When Slater became a freshman at Clinton High School, he told his father he wanted to play football. His father forbade it, feeling that football was dangerous.
Slater, however, didn’t really take no for an answer. He secretly joined his high school’s football team during the summer leading into his sophomore year.
Slater’s father discovered his son’s football career when he came home one day and saw his wife, Slater’s stepmom, sewing and repairing a uniform that Slater had inherited. Slater’s father told his son to quit. Instead, Slater went on a hunger strike in protest, which lasted several days. Eventually, his father relented and gave Slater the condition that he be careful when he played, that he did his best to avoid getting hurt. With that in mind, Slater often hid his injuries instead of talking about them.
After Slater joined the Clinton Football team in 1913, he was faced with a tough choice: helmet or shoes. During this time, students had to pay for their own football equipment, and that left lower-income and poor families stranded. Slater’s family was no different. He was the oldest of six children, and had to pick between a helmet, or shoes that had to be custom made to fit him. Slater picked the shoes, which, given his 14 ½ FF size, would’ve likely been harder to find, or play without. Though after he’d picked the shoes, Slater went his entire high school and most of his college career playing without a helmet.
Slater attended the University of Iowa for his undergraduate career and was involved in a variety of extracurriculars including track, an all-Black Fraternity: Kappa Alpha Psi, and of course football.
Slater’s career at University of Iowa held many accomplishments: he was the first Black All-American football player, one of the inaugural class members of the College Football Hall of Fame, and in 1946, he was selected on “an all-time college football All-American team” by a panel of nationwide voters.
One of his biggest accomplishments on the Hawkeyes football team, however, was his play on the field versus Notre Dame. Hawkeyes ruined Notre Dame’s 20 game win streak, and Slater’s helmetless form is not only featured in the forefront of this famous picture but is also now immortalized as a statue at Kinnick Stadium.
Duke Slater blocking Notre Dame line, The University of Iowa, October 8, 1921 (Fredrick W. Kent Collection of Photographs, RG30.0001.001)
After Iowa, Slater joined the NFL’s Rock Island Independents in 1922, where he became the first African American lineman in the NFL, briefly played for the NFL’s Milwaukee Badgers (only for two games), came back to the Independents, and then after the Independents went bankrupt, Slater played for the Chicago Cardinals. By the late 1920s, the NFL was going to ban Black players, but Slater’s reputation as the best lineman in the game held the NFL at bay. Slater was one of the few African American players in the NFL during the late 1920s, and depending on the year the only African American player on the field. He was also named all-pro from 1923-1930 and was the first NFL lineman to make all-pro teams for seven different seasons. Slater’s presence in the NFL delayed the implementation of the color ban until he retired in 1931.
After his retirement, Slater still took part in sports, however, it was more on the lines of being a social justice advocate for Black Americans. He was the head coach of the Chicago Negro All-Stars in 1933, the Chicago Bombers in 1937, the Chicago Comets in 1939 and the Chicago Panthers in 1940. When the NFL banned Black players in 1934, Slater coached the barnstorming teams that had Black players to fight against the color ban. His fight for representation didn’t end with sports either, it also transferred into his law career.
While playing for the NFL, Slater attended the University of Iowa for law school. He received his degree and passed the bar exam in 1928, then began his professional law career while playing for the Chicago Cardinals.
Slater started his practice on the South Side of Chicago and became an assistant district attorney and the assistant Illinois commerce commissioner. In 1948, Slater became Chicago’s second Black-American elected judge on the Cook County Municipal Court. In another great feat, in 1960, Slater was the first Black judge to be appointed to Chicago Superior Court, which was the highest court in the city during that time. In 1964, Slater left the Superior Court to help the newly created Circuit Court of Cook County. Slater’s career as a judge, while not as largely documented, was a push against stereotypes against Black individuals, particularly Black athletes. His almost two-decade career as a respected judge on the South Side of Chicago proved that not only could Black athletes succeed, but that they weren’t unintelligent as well.
Judge Roger Kiley, who played at Notre Dame; Judge Fred W. Slater, who played at Iowa; Judge Norman C. Barry, another Notre Dame man; and Judge Robert Dunne, who played at Michigan, pose in a photo on Dec. 7, 1959. (Image by Harold Norman from Chicago Tribune )
In 1966, Judge Slater passed away from stomach cancer. He was buried at Mt. Glenwood Memorial Gardens in Greenwood IL, a historic cemetery where many prominent Black Americans were buried. To honor him, in 1972, the University of Iowa renamed their newest residency hall on campus from Rienow II to Slater Hall. Still, Slater’s story and accomplishments are swept away in the tide of history, and so University of Iowa honored him again in 2019 by erecting a relief of the famous picture from the Notre Dame game, placing it at the North End Zone of Kinnick Stadium. In early 2021, the playing field at the Kinnick Stadium was named Duke Slater Field.
Duke Slater was not just a football star, he was an advocate for Black Americans, a loving brother and uncle, a respected and highly regarded judge, and according to his niece, Hoskin Wilkins, “A man of character.”
You can learn more about Judge Slater’s football career at the University of Iowa through the book Slater of Iowa in our University Archives, and more on his life afterwards through his vertical file.
