ALICE SCHREYER
Don’t throw the past away
You might need it some rainy day
Dreams can come true again
When everything old is new again.1
Works that achieve the status of “classics” sustain—perhaps demand—rereading. This is the enduring value of rare books: just as readers across time and place discover something new, strange, and illuminating in the text of a classic, physical books present endless opportunities for new ways of looking and learning. As the final line of the verse by Peter Allen and Carol Bayer Sager suggests, in special collections, “everything old is new again.”
The last two decades in special collections have been “transformative,” the term used by Judge Barrington Parker in a June 10, 2014, decision for the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.2 He upheld the decision by Judge Harold Baer, for the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, that creation of a searchable, full-text database counts as fair use and does not infringe copyright, as the Author’s Guild had claimed. The ruling determined that “a use could be transformative if the function or purpose of the use is different from that of the original work.”3 In making a corpus of digitized texts available for use by persons with print disabilities and for keyword searching, the HathiTrust transforms books into something very different from what was intended by their creators, and thus does not violate the copyrights of authors.
The transformation of special collections, however, has been quite intentional. We have “authored” our own work, embracing energetic outreach and interactive teaching to bring students—especially undergraduates—into newly designed, technology-equipped classrooms. Support from granting agencies–especially the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—enabled many libraries to reduce arrearages substantially, encouraging adoption of new approaches to archival processing and book cataloging that provide for different levels of description depending on the type of material and how likely it is to be used. And we consider pedagogical value to be an important criterion in collection development, recognizing that our collections must support diverse subjects of current teaching interest, even in areas where we do strive to build a comprehensive research collection.
As we continue to uncover hidden collections (and our work is far from complete), we are also seeking ways to expand digital access. Our initial concern that digital surrogates might diminish interest in originals has long since faded. We now realize that they attract and satisfy the needs of new audiences at the same time as they fulfill different study, research, and teaching needs for those who also consult originals. Digitization is fast becoming an expectation, not an add-on or luxury. Funding agencies including CLIR, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Historic Publications & Records Committee, which once excluded digitization, have revamped their programs to promote it. CLIR’s Hidden Collections program now focuses on “Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives.”4
Growing interest in digitization is driven by several factors. Just as we reached a tipping point where it is broadly understood that access to information about collections will be online, “access” is rapidly coming to mean page images and searchable full-text.5 In addition, preservation of digital files, another early problem, is being ensured by the growth of robust and trusted institutional, organizational, and disciplinary repositories. Globalization is also contributing to the shift toward digitization, motivating us to integrate our rare and unique holdings into a global cultural heritage. Finally—and perhaps most importantly for our consideration of the enduring value of special collections—digitizing special collections is transformative, allowing materials to be used for very different purposes than those intended by their authors as well as our predecessors. Researchers are combining descriptive bibliography, book history, and textual criticism with text-mining, geo-referencing, visualization, and linguistic analysis in ways that make “everything old . . . new again.”
Library administrators have long found it useful to describe libraries as laboratories for the humanities to make the case that institutional funding for library collections, staff, and spaces is the equivalent of building, outfitting, and staffing state-of-the-art science labs. In this metaphor, collections are the “equipment” of the library-laboratory. Specialized subject librarians and curators build collections; work with library colleagues to ensure they are discoverable; and provide reference, instruction, outreach, and bibliographical services to facilitate and promote their use. Our work has typically ended at the reading room door, when the researcher begins hers. But digital scholarship relies on knowledge across different domains, and many libraries are establishing “Digital Humanities Laboratories” that promote collaboration and experimentation and bring together collections, hardware and software, and relevant expertise. Just as an “embedded librarian” provides specialized skills to a research team and becomes a full member of it, special collections and subject librarians, metadata librarians, and digital scholarship specialists provide essential expertise as part of research teams that form around library collections.6
In the introduction to A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Jerome McGann makes a bold assertion: “Here is surely a truth now universally acknowledged: that the whole of our cultural inheritance has to be recurated and reedited in digital forms and institutional structures.”7
McGann describes his methodology as follows: “I mean to . . . explore the mechanisms of both production history and transmission history and their complex, unfolding relations. In that analytic point of view, secondary documents–posthumous editions and transformation, for instance—are as important as the authorial manuscripts and early editions. So are all those attendant materials—reviews and commentaries—that expose and further define the character and meaning of the materials.”8 What he calls “secondary documents” are especially critical in the study of antiquity: “What memory would we have of the ancient world—of Sappho and Homer, for example—except for those secondary materials? None whatsoever.”9
A University of Chicago project illustrates McGann’s point and the potential for partnerships among scholars, students, librarians, and collectors. It began as a close study of individual editions and copies of printed books of works by Homer, with a focus on transmission, reception, and translation history. In a surprising twist, crowdsourcing and digital corpora solved a mystery that had eluded the team’s efforts. Each approach drew on expertise from several disciplines and yielded new knowledge that only could have been created using their respective methods. The first resulted in a published collection catalog produced over six years by three librarians, three faculty members, two graduate students, and a collector; the second was a competition to identify marginalia in one volume that drew 50,000 online hits and took thirty-six hours to solve. Together they illustrate the complementarity of “bibliographical technologies” and the need to incorporate new methods into our research toolkit.
In 2007, Michael Lang donated his collection of 187 separate Homer editions (259 volumes) ranging from the fifteenth-century to the twentieth to the University of Chicago Library. In an essay he wrote for the collection catalog, Lang described two motivating factors in forming the collection. First, he wanted
to apply, or at least test, the collector’s belief regarding what one might call the “substance of format”: that study of the physical printed book in which a text first appeared can add to one’s understanding not only of the intentions of its author, editor, or publisher, but also of the impact that text had on its first readers.10
But he also acknowledged
another species of “value”—an incalculable, impressionistic one that, at least in library budget requests, dares not speak its name: the one generated by the physical encounter between a student or scholar and original materials. The benefit of such experience does not lend itself to clinical analysis, or even to lucid description. It is neither objective nor logical, and those who have not experienced it often dismiss it as foolish sentimentalism.11
Michael Lang chose the University of Chicago as the home for his collection because his vision for its future aligned with the University’s strong classical tradition and core curriculum. Homer has been and remains required reading for first-year students since the inaugural year of classes in 1892. Among the most illustrious and influential publications commissioned by the University of Chicago Press, founded in 1890 as one of the University’s main divisions to disseminate scholarship, is Richmond Lattimore’s translation of The Iliad, published in 1949. In accepting the Lang gift, we made a commitment to continue building the collection by acquiring editions and translations that are not in the collection as well as newly published ones; and developing the collection in new directions, for example, graphic novels, works for children, and illustrated editions. We also agreed to produce a scholarly catalog of the collection to illustrate its research value. Homer in Print; A Catalogue of the Bibliotheca Homerica Langiana at the University of Chicago Library, edited by Glenn W. Most and Alice Schreyer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Library, 2013), fills a gap in the Homeric literature that Lang recognized as a collector: the lack of an in-depth study of printed editions of Homer’s works. As it turned out, the project also allowed the donor to participate in the process by which the gift of a private collection to an academic institution contributes to graduate education as well as bibliographical research.
Our first task was to delineate the scope of the catalog and decide how best to tell the story of the production, distribution, and reception of the physical books. The Bibliotheca Homerica Langiana (BHL) is very strong in early and significant Greek editions and near-comprehensive for English translations. We decided that instead of complete bibliographical descriptions, we would highlight substantive copy-specific information such as provenance and marginalia and focus on the transmission of the text through editions and translations. Each item in the collection has its own entry and mini-essay, researched and written by a graduate student; the volume also includes scholarly essays by two faculty members and Lang’s reflections on building the collection.
Over the course of the work we identified and resolved several questions that illustrate interrelated strands of bibliographical inquiry. One was textual, the second a matter of eighteenth-century book trade practice, the third relates to the history of reading, and the most recent took us into the world of twentieth-century fine printing. The amount of time and effort devoted to investigating each puzzle is considerably disproportionate to the sentence that alludes to it in the catalog, but they are great examples of the opportunities for discovery that arise in such projects and how we functioned as a team to answer them.
Lang proposed that for the English translations, we transcribe the first lines of each edition of both The Iliad and The Odyssey. I confess that I did not at first recognize the value of this feature. But as soon as we began, I understood that they are the best way to convey the great variety of literary genres, language, meter, and syntax across the translations. The opening lines on the page thus form an essential part of the narrative entries, which explore the translator’s theory of translation and editorial antecedents in order to present the rationale for producing yet another new translation.
Diana Moser, a PhD candidate in classics, researched and wrote the descriptions of the English translations, by far the largest group. While working on Pope’s Iliad, she identified a rarely discussed revision that completely eclipsed an earlier version.
The first (1715) and second (1720) editions of Pope’s Iliad, and a 1729 reprint, begin: “THE Wrath of Peleus’ Son, the direful Spring/Of all the Grecian Woes, O Goddess, sing!” The opening lines of the third edition (1731–32) are, “Achilles’ Wrath, to Greece the direful spring/Of woes unnumber’d, heav’nly Goddess, sing!” This reading became the norm. David Vander Meulen at the University of Virginia pointed out a reference to the change in the introduction to Steven Shankman’s 1996 Penguin edition of Pope’s translation (Shankman dates the revision to the 1736 edition).12 As Vander Meulen remarked, Shankman’s translation—only available in paperback—is a reminder that collectors cannot ignore such unprepossessing editions.13 Shankman notes that the revision may have been a response to criticism by John Dennis of Pope’s phrase, “all the Grecian woes.”14 Pope seems to have adopted a reading close to that of Thomas Tickell’s translation of Book 1, which also appeared in 1715: “Achilles’ fatal Wrath, whence Discord rose,/That brought the Sons of Greece unnumber’d Woes.” Samuel Johnson, in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, remarks, “To compare the two translations would be tedious; the palm is now given universally to Pope; but I think the first lines of Tickell’s were rather to be preferred, and Pope seems to have since borrowed something from them in the correction of his own.”15
The second investigation came up in one of the catalog essays, “Quarrelling over Homer in France and England, 1711–1715.”16 David Wray looks at the “Homer Quarrel,” a skirmish in the Battle of the Ancients and Moderns. Mme. Anne Dacier’s literal, prose translation of the Iliad into French appeared in 1711 in the popular three-volume novel format. David Wray compares her translation of the Proem to several others, including that of John Ozell, who translated her prose back into English the following year.17 Wray quoted a passage in verse which, during copyediting, we discovered was printed as prose in the original. In response to a query, Wray explained that he had not transcribed it as it appears in the first edition because Ozell and all of his contemporaries understood it to be a blank-verse translation. In his preface, Ozell praises Dacier’s translation, but then expresses doubt “whether an English translation of Homer, any otherwise than in verse, can be made so as to please an English reader.” Later he asserts that “in all translations, regard ought to [be] had, not only to the sense of the original, but to the very manner of the composition, which ought to be resembled as near as possible, and not a new one introduced.” Wray is convinced that Lintot printed the work as prose simply to save paper. Of course, we kept the blank-verse form in his essay and included this explanation for the discrepancy.18 Happily, David Wray is contemplating producing the first-ever edition of Ozell’s translation printed, as he intended it to be, in blank verse.
One question hovered over the entire project and was not solved until after the publication of the catalog. Ever since he purchased his copy of the Aldine 1504 edition of Homer’s Odyssey, Michael Lang was intrigued by the script used for extensive handwritten annotations in the second volume. Over the years we worked on the project, University of Chicago linguists from several departments examined the script and declared it “not Georgian,” “not Turkish,” “not Armenian,” and definitely not Greek. Randall McLeod, a book historian from the University of Toronto, was confident it was a form of nineteenth-century shorthand, but no one was able to take it any further.19 Lang was determined not to give up. As the project was winding down—catalog published, scholarly colloquium and exhibition behind us—he offered to sponsor a $1000 prize to the first person to identify the script, provide evidence to support the conclusion, and execute a translation of selected portions of the mysterious marginalia.
We posted images of two pages with dense annotations on our website and—quite naively, in retrospect—provided information on how to examine the book in our reading room. Of course we were immediately flooded with requests for high-resolution images of all the pages with annotations, which we did immediately. News of the contest started spreading online, especially after it was picked up by the social media site Reddit and became a global news story. Within thirty-six hours we had a winner and two runners-up, all of whom arrived at the same conclusion.20
The winner was Daniele Metilli, an Italian computer engineer and software developer in Milan who is currently enrolled in a digital humanities course and training for a career in libraries and archives. Working with Giula Accetta, a colleague who is proficient in contemporary Italian stenography and fluent in French, Metilli identified the mystery script as the French system of tachygraphy invented by Jean Coulon de Thévénot in the late eighteenth century. Vanya Visnjic, a PhD student in classics at Princeton University with an interest in cryptography, was the second contestant to identify the script and provide translations, as did Gallagher Flinn, a PhD student in linguistics at the University of Chicago.
Based on the mix of French words with the script and a legible date of April 25, 1854, the Italian team concluded, as had MacLeod, that it was a system of French stenography in use in the mid-nineteenth century. They examined French nineteenth-century stenography manuals on Google Books and found a chart comparing one of them to Jean Coulon de Thévenot’s “tachygraphie” system published in 1789. Using an 1819 edition of Thévenot’s work, revised by a professor of stenography, N. Patey, and armed with two contemporary French translations of the Odyssey—one published in 1842, the other in 1854–66—they began to translate the marginalia.
In Thévenot’s system, inspired by the shorthand system of Tironian notes that are said to have been invented by Cicero’s scribe and used into the Middle Ages, “every consonant and vowel has a starting shape, and they combine together to form new shapes representing syllables,” Metilli explained.21 “The vertical alignment is especially important, as the position of a letter above or below the line, or even the length of a letter segment can change the value of the grapheme. This explains why most notes in the Odyssey shorthand are underlined, the line being key to the transcription.”22
Recently I met a collector of T. E. Lawrence. When I mentioned the BHL copy of the 1932 Bruce Rogers edition of Lawrence’s translation of the Odyssey, considered by Joseph Blumenthal and others to be the most beautiful book produced by the twentieth-century private press movement, he asked if our copy smells. After I recovered from my surprise, he explained that the special ink used in the book gives off a distinct smell. We have two copies. They both have a peppery aroma, distinct even when the book is closed, and it is stronger in the copy in finer condition. The ink is made from oil of copaiba, popular today as one of the cure-all “essential oils.” We know that the smell of individual copies of books provide evidence of the conditions in which they were read. Here is one physical characteristic of an entire edition that is unlikely—though not, of course, impossible—to be reproduced online.
In his essay on forming the BHL, Michael Lang observes that
those engaged in critical analysis or serious scholarship are not immune to sensations of affinity arising from a physical connection with the subject of their study, and it is naïve to discount the subtle effects of such sensations. On the other hand, it is equally naïve to believe that university libraries should operate on romantic principles, plunking down hard cash to acquire original material in the hope that exposure will inspire and promote a greater quality of scholarship than might otherwise be the case. Here is where the private collector, able to act in support of intangible benefits, can play a useful role.23
“The private collector, able to act in support of intangible benefits, can play a useful role.” What practical wisdom and generosity of spirit are embodied in these words. As part of the desire for accountability in higher education, university administrators are eager for data that documents impact. We need to remember that discoveries are often the result of “intangible benefits.” By their very nature, rare books, manuscripts, and archives, the sources on which original research depends, do not reveal their secrets at first glance. Gifts of these materials from private collectors are essential to the ability of special collections to support research.
Social media and electronic resources made it possible for Metilli “to identify the shorthand and translate the first fragments in a few hours on a Thursday night. . . . If I didn’t have access to online sources such as Google Books, the Greek Word Study Tool of the Perseus Digital Library, and the French corpora of the National Center for Textual and Lexical Resources, I probably wouldn’t have won. What great times we live in!”24
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, library directors were concerned about succession planning for special collections. Many curators and special collections directors were approaching retirement age and, based on recent searches, the directors were unsure where the next generation would come from. The anticipated “crisis” never materialized, and the profession is flourishing. Early-career librarians and recent PhDs are drawn to careers in special collections librarianship, seeking out training and professional development at venues that have become more robust, responsive, and accessible, including library schools, continuing education programs, and professional organizations.
Several benchmarks document this trend. In 2004 the RBMS preconference in New Haven attracted 301 attendees. Attendance always varies somewhat depending on location, although the 2009 preconference in Charlottesville, a location not known for being easy to reach, drew 412 for the organization’s celebratory fiftieth anniversary. The 2014 conference in Las Vegas was attended by 436 individuals.
Rare Book School at the University of Virginia has grown dramatically. In 2004, 337 students attended classes; in 2014, the number was 424. Over the same decade thirty-nine new courses were introduced (with another eight to be launched in 2015).25 The School is expanding beyond Charlottesville to enable year-round programming and to make it possible to offer courses in specialized topics at institutions with first-class collections of relevant primary materials. Rare Book School relies on learning by handling and close examination of “the stuff.” This approach gives adult learners the same excitement and engagement—those “intangible benefits” that fuel research—as undergraduate and graduate students experience when they use special collections materials in their courses.
RBMS and RBS offer scholarship support for those interested in special collections librarianship and for librarians who want to develop their bibliographical expertise. The Institute for Museum and Library Studies (IMLS) funded an IMLS-RBS fellowship program for early-career professionals with a “demonstrable interest” in special collections librarianship, with funding for attending RBMS and RBS.
Daniele Metilli summed it up perfectly in his statement that the Homer contest confirmed his desire to work in libraries or archives: “Where else would I find such wonderful mysteries to solve?”26 There is no end to the mysteries hidden in the pages of rare books that await new readers who will ask new questions. Collectors, curators, librarians, archivists, conservators, students, scholars, teachers, and booksellers strive to pass this ongoing process of inquiry, discovery, and learning on to coming generations. For them as for us, “everything old is new again.”
NOTES
1. Peter Allen and Carole Bayer Sager, Continental American, A & M Records SP3643, 1974, 33 rpm.
2. Authors Guild v. HathiTrust, 755 F. 3d 87 (2d Cir. 2014) at 10:19, Association of Research Libraries, www.arl.org/storage/documents/publications/agvhathitrust-decision-jun2014.pdf.
3. Jonathan Band, “What Does the HATHITRUST Decision Mean for Libraries?” Library Copyright Alliance, July 7, 2014, p. 4, www.librarycopyrightalliance.org/storage/documents/article-hathitrust-analysis-7ju12014.pdf.
4. “Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives,” Council on Information and Library Resources, www.clir.org/fellowships/hiddencollections.
5. “Hidden Collection, Scholarly Barriers: Creating Access to Unprocessed Special Collections Materials in North American’s Research Libraries,” White Paper for the Association of Research Libraries Task Force on Special Collections, compiled by Barbara M. Jones (June 6, 2013), p. 4, Association of Research Libraries, www.arl.org/storage/documents/publications/hidden-colls-white-paper-jun03.pdf.
6. David Shumaker, The Embedded Librarians, abstract, Online 36, no. 4 (July/August 2012), http://proxy.uchicago.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=c9h&AN=78235097&site=eds-live&scope=site.
7. Jerome McGann, A New Republic of Letters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 1.
8. Ibid., 8.
9. Ibid.
10. M. C. Lang, “The Architecture of Accumulation: A Book Collector’s Apology,” in Homer in Print: A Catalogue of the Bibliotheca Homerica Langiana at the University of Chicago Library, ed. Glenn W. Most and Alice Schreyer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Library, 2013), 3.
11. Ibid., 5.
12. The Iliad of Homer, trans. Alexander Pope, ed. Steven Shankman (London: Penguin Books, 1996), xviii; David Vander Meulen, email message to author, May 30, 2012.
13. Vander Meulen, Ibid.
14. Shankman, xviii.
15. Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, vol. 3 (London: Printed for C. Bathurst, 1781), 177–78, http://find.galegroup.com/ecco/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=ECCO&userGroupName=chic_rbw&tabID=T001&docId=CW3312652643&type=multipage&contentSet=ECCOArticles&version=1.0&docLevel=FASCIMILE.
16. David Wray, “Quarrelling over Homer in France and England, 1711–1715,” in Homer in Print, 300–31.
17. Ibid., 309.
18. Ibid., 330, endnote 11.
19. Randall McLeod, email message to author, March 8, 2012.
20. “Homer Mystery Script Contest Winner and Results,” The University of Chicago Library News, May 5, 2014, http://news.lib.uchicago.edu/blog/2014/05/05/homer-mystery-script-contest-winner-and-results/.
21. Daniele Metilli, “French Tachygraphic Notes in a 1504 copy of Homer’s Odyssey,” 8, http://metilli.com/files/Metilli-Odyssey-2014-05-05.pdf.
22. Ibid.
23. Lang, “Architecture of Accumulation,” 5–6.
24. Daniele Metilli, email message to author, March 30, 2014.
25. Amanda Nelsen, email message to author, June 26, 2015.
26. Daniele Metilli, email message to author, March 29, 2014.