The New York Public Library Announces the Top 10 Checked-Out Books of All Time

in Books, K-12, Libraries | January 14th, 2020

Pub­lic libraries are unsung heroes of their com­mu­ni­ties. Many a busy work­ing adult can take their impor­tance for grant­ed. But par­ents of young chil­dren know—the library is a qui­et haven, place of won­der and dis­cov­ery, and free resource for all sorts of edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ences. Giv­en the impor­tance of libraries in kids’ lives, it’s no won­der that six of the top ten most-checked-out books—accord­ing to the New York Pub­lic Library—are children’s books.

The NYPL cal­cu­lat­ed the most checked out books in its his­to­ry in hon­or of its 125th anniver­sary. Giv­en that it hous­es the sec­ond largest col­lec­tion in the U.S., after the Library of Con­gress, and serves mil­lions in the most lin­guis­ti­cal­ly diverse city in the coun­try, its cir­cu­la­tion num­bers give us a rea­son­able sam­pling of near-uni­ver­sal tastes.

These include time­less clas­sics of children’s lit­er­a­ture: Ezra Jack Keats’ Calde­cott-win­ning The Snowy Day tops the list, “in print and in the Library’s cat­a­log con­tin­u­ous­ly since 1962”; The Cat in the Hat comes in at a close sec­ond. Where the Wild Things Are and The Very Hun­gry Cater­pil­lar round out the list of books for the very young.

Where is the stal­wart Good­night Moon, you may ask? Here we have a juicy bit of lore:

By all mea­sures, this book should be a top check­out (in fact, it might be the top check­out) if not for an odd piece of his­to­ry: extreme­ly influ­en­tial New York Pub­lic Library children’s librar­i­an Anne Car­roll Moore hat­ed Good­night Moon when it first came out. As a result, the Library didn’t car­ry it until 1972. That lost time bumped the book off the top 10 list for now. But give it time.

For now, Mar­garet Wise Brown’s 1947 clas­sic receives hon­or­able men­tion. Clas­sic kids’ books cir­cu­late a lot because they’re wide­ly read, but also because they’re short, which leads to more turnover, the Library points out. Length of time in print is also a fac­tor, which makes the pres­ence of Har­ry Pot­ter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, pub­lished in 1998, par­tic­u­lar­ly impres­sive.

  1. The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats: 485,583 check­outs
  2. The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss: 469,650 check­outs
  3. 1984 by George Orwell: 441,770 check­outs
  4. Where the Wild Things Are by Mau­rice Sendak: 436,016 check­outs
  5. To Kill a Mock­ing­bird by Harp­er Lee: 422,912 check­outs
  6. Char­lot­te’s Web by E.B. White: 337,948 check­outs
  7. Fahren­heit 451 by Ray Brad­bury: 316,404 check­outs
  8. How to Win Friends and Influ­ence Peo­ple by Dale Carnegie: 284,524 check­outs
  9. Har­ry Pot­ter and the Sor­cer­er’s Stone by J.K. Rowl­ing: 231,022 check­outs
  10. The Very Hun­gry Cater­pil­lar by Eric Car­le: 189,550 check­outs

Like J.K. Rowling’s mod­ern clas­sic, all of the remain­ing books on the list are novels—save out­lier How to Win Friends and Influ­ence Peo­ple by Dale Carnegie—and all are nov­els read exten­sive­ly by mid­dle and high school stu­dents, a fur­ther sign of the sig­nif­i­cance of pub­lic libraries.

Some stu­dents may only be required to read a small hand­ful of nov­els in their school career, and whether they fol­low through, and maybe go on to read more and more books, and maybe write a few books of their own, may depend upon those nov­els con­stant­ly cir­cu­lat­ing for every­one through insti­tu­tions like the New York Pub­lic Library.

See the full list above and learn more about the project at NPR and the NYPL.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets Patrons Check Out Ties, Brief­cas­es & Hand­bags for Job Inter­views

The New York Pub­lic Library Puts Clas­sic Sto­ries on Insta­gram: Start with Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land and Read Kafka’s The Meta­mor­pho­sis Soon

What Are the Most Stolen Books? Book­store Lists Fea­ture Works by Muraka­mi, Bukows­ki, Bur­roughs, Von­negut, Ker­ouac & Palah­niuk

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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82 Vintage Cookbooks, Free to Download, Offer a Fascinating Illustrated Look at Culinary and Cultural History

in Food & Drink, History, Libraries | December 10th, 2019

With the hol­i­days fast approach­ing, two interns at the Sal­lie Bing­ham Cen­ter for Wom­en’s His­to­ry and Cul­ture at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty’s Ruben­stein Library turned to the center’s col­lec­tion of vin­tage adver­tis­ing cook­books for inspi­ra­tion.

Their labors, and the fruits thereof—a queasy-look­ing Crown Jew­el Dessert and a savory fish-shaped “sal­ad” as per the Joys of Jell‑O Gelatin Dessert cookbook—are show­cased above.

While the library has yet to dig­i­tize that par­tic­u­lar early-60’s gem, there are plen­ty of oth­er options from the Nicole Di Bona Peter­son Adver­tis­ing Cook­book Col­lec­tion avail­able for free down­load, includ­ing sev­er­al that are gelatin based.

The authors of the pre-Women’s‑Suffrage Jell‑O: Amer­i­ca’s Most Famous Dessert, would have bog­gled at our 21st-cen­tu­ry abun­dance of fla­vors (and our god­like tele­phones), just as our eyes widen at their lush full-col­or illus­tra­tions and hun­dred-year-old social norms.

As one might expect, giv­en the Sal­lie Bing­ham Center’s mis­sion of pre­serv­ing print­ed mate­ri­als that reflect the pub­lic and pri­vate lives of women, past and present, these vin­tage cook­books speak to far more than just culi­nary trends.

Roy­al Bak­ing Powder’s 55 Ways to Save Eggs puts a pos­i­tive spin on wartime economies by fram­ing cheap ingre­di­ent sub­sti­tu­tions as some­thing clever and mod­ern, attrib­ut­es the young house­wife depict­ed on the cov­er would sure­ly wish to embody.

(Shout out to any home bak­ers who were aware that cream of tar­tar is derived from grapes…)

Dain­ty Dish­es for All the Year Round (1900) finds its pub­lish­er, North Broth­ers Man­u­fac­tur­ing Co., sit­ting pret­ty, unable to imag­ine a future some twen­ty years hence, in which tech­no­log­i­cal advances would result in the com­mer­cial mass pro­duc­tion of ice cream, thus damn­ing their star item, Shephard’s “Light­ning” Ice Cream Freez­er, to the cat­e­go­ry of inessen­tial coun­ter­top clut­ter.

Sad­ly, not all of the deli­cious-sound­ing ice cream recipes by Mrs. S. T. Ror­er, a lead­ing culi­nary author and edu­ca­tor and America’s first dieti­cian, are includ­ed, but you can browse many illus­trat­ed ads for North Broth­ers’ built-to-last goods, includ­ing a meat cut­ter, a num­ber of screw­drivers, and a mag­nif­i­cent­ly steam­punk Christ­mas tree stand.

Would it sur­prise you to learn that our cur­rent pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with ancient grains is far from a new thing?

1929’s Mod­ern Ways with an Ancient Food was aimed square­ly at moth­ers anx­ious, then as now, that their chil­dren were prop­er­ly nour­ished.

The grain in ques­tion was not quinoa or freekeh, but rather fari­na, referred to by most Amer­i­cans by its most pop­u­lar brand name Cream of Wheat, a fact  not lost on this vol­ume’s pub­lish­er, Cream of Wheat com­peti­tor Heck­er H‑O Com­pa­ny.

His­to­ry shows that Cream of Wheat trounced Hecker’s Cream-Fari­na.

Giv­en the bland­ness of the grain in ques­tion, chalk it up to Cream of Wheat’s mus­cu­lar adver­tis­ing approach, and robust licens­ing of prod­ucts fea­tur­ing the icon­ic image of Ras­tus, a smil­ing black spokeschef whose pal­pa­bly offen­sive, dialect-heavy endorse­ments are one pit­fall Heck­er seems to have skirt­ed.

Begin your explo­rations of the Sal­lie Bing­ham Center’s Nicole Di Bona Peter­son Adver­tis­ing Cook­book Col­lec­tion here, and let us know in the com­ments if there’s a recipe you’re intend­ing to try.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Archive of 3,000 Vin­tage Cook­books Lets You Trav­el Back Through Culi­nary Time

400 Ways to Make a Sand­wich: A 1909 Cook­book Full of Cre­ative Recipes

The Futur­ist Cook­book (1930) Tried to Turn Ital­ian Cui­sine into Mod­ern Art

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC tonight, Mon­day, Decem­ber 9, as her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates anoth­er vin­tage adver­tis­ing pam­phlet, Dennison’s Christ­mas Book (1921). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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160,000 Pages of Glorious Medieval Manuscripts Digitized: Visit the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis

in Archives, Books, History, Libraries, Literature | December 3rd, 2019

We might think we have a gen­er­al grasp of the peri­od in Euro­pean his­to­ry immor­tal­ized in theme restau­rant form as “Medieval Times.” After all, writes Amy White at Medievalists.net, “from tat­toos to video games to Game of Thrones, medieval iconog­ra­phy has long inspired fas­ci­na­tion, imi­ta­tion and ven­er­a­tion.” The mar­ket for sword­play, armor, quests, and sor­cery has nev­er been so crowd­ed.

But whether the his­tor­i­cal peri­od we call medieval (a word derived from medi­um aevum, or “mid­dle age”) resem­bled the mod­ern inter­pre­ta­tions it inspired presents us with anoth­er ques­tion entirely—a ques­tion inde­pen­dent and pro­fes­sion­al schol­ars can now answer with free, easy ref­er­ence to “high-res­o­lu­tion images of more than 160,000 pages of Euro­pean medieval and ear­ly mod­ern codices”: rich­ly illu­mi­nat­ed (and ama­teur­ish­ly illus­trat­ed) man­u­scripts, musi­cal scores, cook­books, and much more.

The online project, called Bib­lio­the­ca Philadel­phien­sis, hous­es its dig­i­tal col­lec­tion at the Inter­net Archive and rep­re­sents “vir­tu­al­ly all of the hold­ings of PACSCL [Philadel­phia Area Con­sor­tium of Spe­cial Col­lec­tions Libraries],” a wealth of doc­u­ments from Prince­ton, Bryn Mawr, Vil­lano­va, Swarth­more, and many more col­lege and uni­ver­si­ty libraries, as well as the Amer­i­can Philo­soph­i­cal Soci­ety, Nation­al Archives at Philadel­phia, and oth­er august insti­tu­tions of high­er learn­ing and con­ser­va­tion.

Lehigh Uni­ver­si­ty “con­tributed 27 man­u­scripts amount­ing to about 5,000 pages,” writes White, includ­ing “a 1462 hand­writ­ten copy of Virgil’s Aeneid with pen­ciled sketch­es in the mar­gins” (see above). There are man­u­scripts from that peri­od like the Ital­ian Trac­ta­tus de mal­efici­is (Trea­tise on evil deeds), a legal com­pendi­um from 1460 with “thir­ty-one mar­gin­al draw­ings in ink” show­ing “var­i­ous crimes (both delib­er­ate and acci­den­tal) being com­mit­ted, from sword-fights and mur­ders to hunt­ing acci­dents and a hang­ing.”

The Trac­ta­tus’ draw­ings “do not appear to be the work of a pro­fes­sion­al artist,” the notes point out, though it also con­tains pages, like the image at the top, show­ing a trained illu­mi­na­tor’s hand. The Bib­lio­the­ca Philadel­phien­sis archive includes 15th and 16th-cen­tu­ry recipes and extracts on alche­my, med­ical texts, and copi­ous Bibles and books of prayer and devo­tion. There is a 1425 edi­tion of Chaucer’s Can­ter­bury Tales in Mid­dle Eng­lish (lack­ing the pro­logue and sev­er­al tales).

These may all seem of recent vin­tage, rel­a­tive­ly speak­ing, for a medieval archive, but the col­lec­tion reach­es back to the 9th cen­tu­ry, with hun­dreds of doc­u­ments, like the 1000 AD music man­u­script above, from a far ear­li­er time. “Users can view, down­load and com­pare man­u­scripts in near­ly micro­scop­ic detail,” notes White. “It is the nation’s largest region­al online col­lec­tion of medieval man­u­scripts,” a col­lec­tion schol­ars can draw on for cen­turies to come to learn what life was real­ly like—at least for the few who could read and write—in Medieval Times.

via Medievalists.net

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Why Knights Fought Snails in Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

The Medieval Mas­ter­piece, the Book of Kells, Is Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

A Free Yale Course on Medieval His­to­ry: 700 Years in 22 Lec­tures

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Internet Archive Is Digitizing & Preserving Over 100,000 Vinyl Records: Hear 750 Full Albums Now

in Archives, History, Libraries, Music | November 11th, 2019

There seems to be wide­spread agreement—something spe­cial was lost in the rushed-to-mar­ket move from phys­i­cal media to dig­i­tal stream­ing. We have come to admit that some old­er musi­cal tech­nolo­gies can­not be improved upon. Musi­cians, pro­duc­ers, engi­neers spend thou­sands to repli­cate the sound of old­er ana­log record­ing tech­nol­o­gy, with all its quirky, incon­sis­tent oper­a­tion. And fans buy record play­ers and vinyl records in sur­pris­ing­ly increas­ing num­bers to hear the warm and fuzzy char­ac­ter of their sound.

Neil Young, who has relent­less­ly crit­i­cized every aspect of dig­i­tal record­ing, has dis­missed the resur­gence of the LP as a “fash­ion state­ment” giv­en that most new albums released on vinyl are dig­i­tal mas­ters. But buy­ers come to vinyl with a range of expec­ta­tions, writes Ari Her­stand at Dig­i­tal Music News: “Vinyl is an entire expe­ri­ence. Won­der­ful­ly tac­tile…. When we stare at our screens for the major­i­ty of our days, it’s nice to look at art that doesn’t glow and isn’t the size of my hand.” Vinyl can feel and look as good as it sounds (when prop­er­ly engi­neered).

While shiny, dig­i­tal­ly mas­tered vinyl releas­es pop up in big box stores every­where, the real musi­cal wealth lies in the past—in thou­sands upon thou­sands of LPs, 45s, 78s—relics of “the only con­sumer play­back for­mat we have that’s ful­ly ana­log and ful­ly loss­less,” says vinyl mas­ter­ing engi­neer Adam Gon­salves. Few insti­tu­tions can afford to store thou­sands of phys­i­cal albums, and many rar­i­ties and odd­i­ties exist in van­ish­ing­ly few­er copies. Their crack­le and hiss may be for­ev­er lost with­out the inter­ven­tion of dig­i­tal preser­va­tion­ists like the Inter­net Archive.

The Archive is “now expand­ing its dig­i­ti­za­tion project to include LPs,” reports Faye Lessler on the organization’s blog. This will come as wel­come news to cul­tur­al his­to­ri­ans, ana­log con­ser­va­tion­ists, and vinyl enthu­si­asts of all kinds, who will most­ly agree that dig­i­ti­za­tion is far bet­ter than extinc­tion, though the tac­tile and visu­al plea­sures may be irre­place­able. The Archive has focused its efforts on the over 100,000 audio record­ings from the Boston Pub­lic Library’s col­lec­tion, “in order to pre­vent them from dis­ap­pear­ing for­ev­er when the vinyl is bro­ken, warped, or lost.”

“These record­ings exist in a vari­ety of his­tor­i­cal for­mats, includ­ing wax cylin­ders, 78 rpms, and LPs,” though the project is cur­rent­ly focused on the lat­ter. “They span musi­cal gen­res includ­ing  clas­si­cal, pop, rock, and jazz, and con­tain obscure record­ings like this album of music for baton twirlers, and this record of radio’s all-time great­est bloop­ers.” The method of rapid­ly con­vert­ing the arti­facts at the rate of ten LPs per hour (which you can read more about at the Archive blog) serves as a tes­ta­ment to what dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy does best—using machine learn­ing and meta­da­ta to auto­mate the archival process and cre­ate exten­sive, search­able data­bas­es of cat­a­logue infor­ma­tion.

Cur­rent­ly, the project has uploaded 1,180 record­ings to its site, “but some of the albums are only avail­able in 30 sec­ond snip­pets due to rights issues,” Lessler points out. Browse the “Unlocked Record­ings” cat­e­go­ry to hear 750 dig­i­tized LPs avail­able in full: these include a record­ing of Gian Car­lo Menot­ti’s bal­let The Uni­corn, the Gor­gon, and the Man­ti­core, fur­ther up; The Beget­ting of the Pres­i­dent, above, a satire of Nixon’s rise to pow­er as Bib­li­cal epic, read by Orson Welles in his King of Kings’ voice; and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Con­cer­to no. 1 in B‑flat minor, played by Van Cliburn, below.

The range and vari­ety cap­tured in this collection—from fire­works sound effects to Elton John’s sec­ond, self-titled album to clas­sic Pearl Bai­ly to 80s new wave band The Com­mu­nards to Andres Segovia play­ing Bach to the Smokey and the Ban­dit 2 soundtrack—will out­last copy­right restric­tions. And they will leave behind an exten­sive record, no pun intend­ed, of the LP: “our pri­ma­ry musi­cal medi­um for over a gen­er­a­tion,” says the Archive’s spe­cial projects direc­tor CR Saik­ley, “wit­ness to the birth of both Rock & Roll and Punk Rock… inte­gral to our cul­ture from the 1950s to the 1980s.” Vinyl remains the most revered of musi­cal for­mats for good reason—reasons future gen­er­a­tions will dis­cov­er, at least vir­tu­al­ly, for them­selves some­day.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956

An Inter­ac­tive Map of Every Record Shop in the World

25,000+ 78RPM Records Now Pro­fes­sion­al­ly Dig­i­tized & Stream­ing Online: A Trea­sure Trove of Ear­ly 20th Cen­tu­ry Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Harvard Gives Free Online Access to 40 Million Pages of U.S. Case Law: Explore 6.4 Million Cases Dating Back to 1658

in Archives, Harvard, Law, Libraries | August 26th, 2019

There was a time—a strange time in pop cul­ture his­to­ry, I’ll grant—when legal dra­mas were every­where in tele­vi­sion, pop­u­lar fic­tion, and film. Next to the barn-burn­ing court­room set pieces in A Few Good Men and A Time to Kill, for exam­ple, scenes of lawyers por­ing over case law with loos­ened ties, high heels kicked off, and mar­ti­nis and scotch­es in hand were ren­dered with max­i­mum dra­mat­ic ten­sion, despite the fact that case law is a nigh unread­able jum­ble of jar­gon, cita­tions, archa­ic dic­tion and syn­tax, etc… any­thing but brim­ming with cin­e­mat­ic poten­tial.

Do law stu­dents and legal schol­ars dis­agree with this assess­ment? It’s beside the point, many might say. The cen­turies-old web of case law—reinforcing, con­tra­dict­ing, over­turn­ing, cre­at­ing pat­terns and structures—is the very stuff the law is made of.

It’s a ref­er­en­tial tra­di­tion, and when most of the doc­u­ments are in the hands of only a few peo­ple, only those peo­ple under­stand why the law works the way it does. The rest of us are left to won­der why the legal sys­tem is so Byzan­tine and incom­pre­hen­si­ble. Real life rarely has the clar­i­ty of a sat­is­fy­ing court­room dra­ma.

Last year, The Har­vard Crim­son report­ed a seem­ing­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary shift in that dynam­ic, when Har­vard Law’s Caselaw Access Project “dig­i­tized more than 40 mil­lion pages of U.S. state, fed­er­al, and ter­ri­to­r­i­al case law doc­u­ments from the Law School library,” dat­ing back to 1658.  The Crim­son issued one caveat: the full data­base is acces­si­ble to the pub­lic, but “users are lim­it­ed to five hun­dred full case texts per day.” Plan your intense, scotch-soaked all-nighters accord­ing­ly.

Is this altru­ism, civic duty, a move in the right direc­tion of free­ing pub­licly fund­ed research for pub­lic use?  Sev­er­al Har­vard Law fac­ul­ty have said as much. “Case law is the prod­uct of pub­lic resources poured into our court sys­tem,” writes Pro­fes­sor I. Glenn Cohen. “It’s great that the pub­lic will now have bet­ter access to it.” It is indeed, Pro­fes­sor Christo­pher T. Bavitz says: “If we want to ensure that peo­ple have access to jus­tice, that means that we have to ensure that they have access to cas­es. The text of cas­es is the law.”

The law is not a set of abstract prin­ci­ples, the­o­ries, or rules, in oth­er words, but a series of his­tor­i­cal exam­ples, woven togeth­er into a social nar­ra­tive. Machines can ana­lyze data from The Caselaw Access Project far faster and more effi­cient­ly than any human, giv­ing us broad­er views of legal his­to­ry and prece­dent, and great­ly expand­ing pub­lic under­stand­ing of the sys­tem. Harvard’s Library Inno­va­tion Lab has itself already cre­at­ed sev­er­al apps for just this pur­pose.

There’s Cal­i­for­nia Word­clouds, which shows the most-used words in Cal­i­for­nia caselaw between 1852 and 2015, and Witch­craft in Caselaw, which does what it says, with an inter­ac­tive map of all appear­ances of witch­craft in cas­es across the coun­try. There’s “Fun Stuff” too, like a Caselaw Lim­er­ick Gen­er­a­tor, a visu­al data­base that ana­lyzes col­ors in case law, and “Gavel­fury,” which ana­lyzes “all instances of ‘!,’” giv­ing us gems like “Do you remem­ber if it was mur­der!” from Bowl­ing v. State, 229 Ark. 876 (Dec. 22, 1958).

One new graph­ing tool, His­tor­i­cal Trends, announced in June, makes it easy for users to “visu­al­ize word usage in court opin­ions over time,” writes the Library Inno­va­tion Lab. (Exam­ples include com­par­ing the “fre­quen­cy of ‘com­pen­sato­ry dam­ages’ and ‘puni­tive dam­ages’ in New York and Cal­i­for­nia” and com­par­ing “pri­va­cy” with “pub­lic­i­ty.”) Any­one can build their own data visu­al­iza­tion using their own search terms. (Learn how and get start­ed here.) Case law may nev­er be glam­orous, exact­ly, or fun to read, but it may be far more inter­est­ing, and empow­er­ing, than we imag­ine.

Be aware that the Caselaw Access Project could still find ways to restrict or mon­e­tize access, for a short time, at least. “The project was fund­ed part­ly through a part­ner­ship with Rav­el, a legal ana­lyt­ics start­up found­ed by two Stan­ford Law School stu­dents,” reports the Crim­son. The com­pa­ny “earned ‘some com­mer­cial rights’ through March 2024 to charge for greater access to files.” The start­up has issued no word on whether this will hap­pen. In the mean­time, pub­lic inter­est legal schol­ars may wish to do their own dig­ging through this trove of caselaw to bet­ter under­stand the public’s right to infor­ma­tion of all kinds.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bound by Law?: Free Com­ic Book Explains How Copy­right Com­pli­cates Art

Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy: A Free Course from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty

Har­vard Launch­es a Free Online Course to Pro­mote Reli­gious Tol­er­ance & Under­stand­ing

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Take a Virtual Tour of Jane Austen’s Library

in Books, Libraries, Literature | August 12th, 2019

Jane Austen read vora­cious­ly and as wide­ly as she could in her cir­cum­scribed life. Even so, she told her niece Car­o­line, she wished she had “read more and writ­ten less” in her for­ma­tive years. Her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh made clear that no mat­ter how much she read, her work was far more than the sum of her read­ing: “It was not,” he wrote in his 1870 biog­ra­phy, “what she knew, but what she was, that dis­tin­guished her from oth­ers.” What she was not, how­ev­er, was the own­er of a great library.

Mem­bers of Austen’s fam­i­ly were well-off, but she her­self lived on mod­est means and nev­er made enough from writ­ing to become finan­cial­ly inde­pen­dent. She owned books, of course, but not many. Books were expen­sive, and most peo­ple bor­rowed them from lend­ing libraries. Nonethe­less, schol­ars have been able to piece togeth­er an exten­sive list of books Austen sup­pos­ed­ly read—books men­tioned in her let­ters, nov­els, and an 1817 bio­graph­i­cal note writ­ten by her broth­er Hen­ry in her posthu­mous­ly pub­lished Northang­er Abbey.

Austen read con­tem­po­rary male and female nov­el­ists. She read his­to­ries, the poet­ry of Mil­ton, Wordsworth, Byron, Cow­per, and Sir Wal­ter Scott, and nov­els writ­ten by fam­i­ly mem­bers. She read Chaucer, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Spencer, and Woll­stonecraft. She read ancients and mod­ern. “Despite her desire to have ‘read more” in her youth,” write Austen schol­ars Gillian Down and Katie Halsey, “recent schol­ar­ship has estab­lished that the range of Austen’s read­ing was far wider and deep­er than either Hen­ry or James Edward sug­gest.”

Austen may not have had a large library of her own, but she did have access to the hand­some col­lec­tion at God­mer­sham Park, the home of her broth­er Edward Austen Knight. “For a total of ten months spread over fif­teen years,” Rebec­ca Rego Bar­ry writes at Lapham’s Quar­ter­ly, “Austen vis­it­ed her broth­er at his Kent estate. The brim­ming book­shelves at God­mer­sham Park were a par­tic­u­lar draw for the nov­el­ist.” In the last eight years of her life, Jane lived with her moth­er and sis­ter Cas­san­dra at Edward’s Chaw­ton estate, in a vil­la that had its own library.

Recon­struct­ing these shelves show us the books Austen would have reg­u­lar­ly had in view, though schol­ars must use oth­er evi­dence to show which books she read. In 2009, Down and Halsey curat­ed an exhi­bi­tion focused on her read­ing at Chaw­ton. Ten years lat­er, we can see the library at God­mer­sham Park recre­at­ed in a vir­tu­al ver­sion made joint­ly by Chaw­ton House and McGill University’s Bur­ney Cen­ter.

Called “Read­ing with Austen,” the inter­ac­tive site lets us to nav­i­gate three book-lined walls of the library. “Users can hov­er over the shelves and click on any of the antique books,” writes Bar­ry, “sum­mon­ing bib­li­o­graph­ic data and avail­able pho­tos of per­ti­nent title pages, book­plates, and mar­gin­a­lia. Dig­ging deep­er, one can peruse a dig­i­tal copy of the book and deter­mine the where­abouts of the orig­i­nal.”

These vol­umes are what we might expect from an Eng­lish coun­try gen­tle­man: books of law and agri­cul­ture, his­tor­i­cal reg­is­ters, trav­el­ogues, polit­i­cal the­o­ry, and clas­si­cal Latin. There is also Shake­speare, Swift, and Voltaire, Austen’s own nov­els, and some of the con­tem­po­rary fic­tion she par­tic­u­lar­ly loved. The Bur­ney Cen­ter “tried,” says direc­tor Peter Sabor, “to imag­ine Jane Austen actu­al­ly walk­ing around the library…. We’re basi­cal­ly look­ing over her shoul­der as she looks at the book­shelf.” It’s not exact­ly quite like that at all, but the project can give us a sense of how much Austen trea­sured libraries.

She wrote about libraries as a sign of lux­u­ry. In an ear­ly unfin­ished nov­el, “Cather­ine,” she has a furi­ous char­ac­ter exclaim in reproach, “I gave you the key to my own Library, and bor­rowed a great many good books of my Neigh­bors for you.” Austen may have feared los­ing library and lend­ing access, and she longed for a king­dom of books all her own. Dur­ing her final vis­it to God­mer­sham Park in 1813, she wrote to her sis­ter, “I am now alone in the Library, Mis­tress of all I sur­vey.”

Try to imag­ine how she might have felt as you peruse the library’s hap­haz­ard­ly arranged con­tents. Con­sid­er which of these books she might have read and which she might have shelved and why. Enter the “Read­ing with Austen” library project here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Jane Austen Fic­tion Man­u­script Archive Is Online: Explore Hand­writ­ten Drafts of Per­sua­sion, The Wat­sons & More

Down­load the Major Works of Jane Austen as Free eBooks & Audio Books

15-Year-Old Jane Austen Writes a Satir­i­cal His­to­ry Of Eng­land: Read the Hand­writ­ten Man­u­script Online (1791)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Classic Children’s Books Now Digitized and Put Online: Revisit Vintage Works from the 19th & 20th Centuries

in Books, K-12, Libraries | May 1st, 2019

Children’s books are big busi­ness. And the mar­ket has nev­er been more com­pet­i­tive. Best­selling, char­ac­ter-dri­ven series spawn their own TV shows. Can­dy-col­ored read­ers fea­ture kids’ favorite com­ic and car­toon char­ac­ters. But kids’ books can also be fine art—a venue for well-writ­ten, fine­ly-illus­trat­ed lit­er­a­ture. And they are a seri­ous sub­ject of schol­ar­ship, offer­ing insights into the his­to­ries of book pub­lish­ing, edu­ca­tion, and the social roles chil­dren were taught to play through­out mod­ern his­to­ry.

Dig­i­tal archives of children’s books now make these his­to­ries wide­ly acces­si­ble and pre­serve some of the finest exam­ples of illus­trat­ed children’s lit­er­a­ture. The Library of Con­gress’ new dig­i­tal col­lec­tion, for exam­ple, includes the 1887 Com­plete Col­lec­tion of Pic­tures & Songs, illus­trat­ed by Eng­lish artist Ran­dolph Calde­cott, who would lend his name fifty years lat­er to the medal dis­tin­guish­ing the high­est qual­i­ty Amer­i­can pic­ture books.

The LoC’s col­lec­tion of 67 dig­i­tized kids’ books from the 19th and 20th cen­turies includes biogra­phies, non­fic­tion, quaint nurs­ery rhymes, the Gus­tave Doré-illus­trat­ed edi­tion of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, and a num­ber of oth­er titles sure to charm grown-ups, if not, per­haps, many of today’s young read­ers.

But who knows, King Win­ter—an 1859 tale in verse of a pro­to-San­ta Claus fig­ure, in a book par­tial­ly shaped like the out­line of the title character’s head—might still cap­ti­vate. As might many oth­er titles of note.

A sly col­lec­tion of sto­ries from 1903 called The Book of the Cat, with “fac­sim­i­les of draw­ings in colour by Elis­a­beth F. Bon­sall”; a book of “Four & twen­ty mar­vel­lous tales” called The Won­der Clock, writ­ten and illus­trat­ed by Howard Pyle in 1888; and Edith Fran­cis Foster’s 1902 Jim­my Crow about a boy named Jack and his boy-sized crow Jim­my (who could deliv­er mes­sages to oth­er young fan­cy lads).

An 1896 book called Gob­olinks intro­duces a pop­u­lar inkblot game of the same name that pre­dates Her­mann Rorschach’s tests by a cou­ple decades. Oth­er high­lights include “exam­ples of the work of Amer­i­can illus­tra­tors such as W.W. Denslow, Peter Newell… Wal­ter Crane and Kate Green­away,” writes the Library on its blog. The dig­i­tized col­lec­tion debuted to mark the 100th anniver­sary of Children’s Book Week, cel­e­brat­ed dur­ing the last week of April in all 50 states in the U.S.

“It is remark­able,” says Lee Ann Pot­ter, direc­tor of the LoC’s Learn­ing and Inno­va­tion Office, “that when the first Children’s Book Week was cel­e­brat­ed, all of the books in the online col­lec­tion… already exist­ed.” Now they exist online, not only because of the tech­nol­o­gy to scan, upload, and share them, but “because care­ful stew­ards insured that these books have sur­vived.”

Dig­i­tal ver­sions of today’s kids books could mean that there is no need to care­ful­ly pre­serve paper copies for pos­ter­i­ty. But we can be grate­ful that archivists and librar­i­ans of the past saw fit to do so for this fas­ci­nat­ing col­lec­tion of children’s lit­er­a­ture. The theme of this year’s Children’s Book Week—Read Now, Read For­ev­er—“looks to the past, present, and most impor­tant, the future of children’s books.” Enter the Library of Con­gress dig­i­tal col­lec­tion of children’s books from over a cen­tu­ry ago (and see the oth­er siz­able online archives at the links below) to vis­it their past, and imag­ine how vast­ly dif­fer­ent their future might be.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Dig­i­tal Archive of 1,800+ Children’s Books from UCLA

Hayao Miyaza­ki Picks His 50 Favorite Children’s Books

Enter an Archive of 6,000 His­tor­i­cal Children’s Books, All Dig­i­tized and Free to Read Online

Grow­ing Up Sur­round­ed by Books Has a Last­ing Pos­i­tive Effect on the Brain, Says a New Sci­en­tif­ic Study

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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800+ Treasured Medieval Manuscripts to Be Digitized by Cambridge & Heidelberg Universities

in Books, History, Libraries, Philosophy | April 4th, 2019

West­ern civ­i­liza­tion may fast be going dig­i­tal, but it still retains its roots in Ancient Greece. And so it makes a cer­tain cir­cle-clos­ing sense to dig­i­tize the lega­cy left us by our Ancient Greek fore­bears and the medieval schol­ars who pre­served it. Cam­bridge and Hei­del­berg, two of Europe’s old­est uni­ver­si­ties, this month announced their joint inten­tion to embark upon just such a project. It will take two years and cost £1.6 mil­lion, reports the BBC, but it will dig­i­tize “more than 800 vol­umes fea­tur­ing the works of Pla­to and Aris­to­tle, among oth­ers.” As the announce­ment of the project puts it, the texts will then “join the works of Charles Dar­win, Isaac New­ton, Stephen Hawk­ing and Alfred Lord Ten­nyson on the Cam­bridge Dig­i­tal Library.”

These medieval and ear­ly mod­ern Greek man­u­scripts, which date more specif­i­cal­ly “from the ear­ly Chris­t­ian peri­od to the ear­ly mod­ern era (about 1500 — 1700 AD),” present their dig­i­tiz­ers with cer­tain chal­lenges, not least the “frag­ile state” of their medieval bind­ing.

But as Hei­del­berg Uni­ver­si­ty Library direc­tor Dr. Veit Prob­st says in the announce­ment, “Numer­ous dis­cov­er­ies await. We still lack detailed knowl­edge about the pro­duc­tion and prove­nance of these books, about the iden­ti­ties and activ­i­ties of their scribes, their artists and their own­ers – and have yet to uncov­er how they were stud­ied and used, both dur­ing the medieval peri­od and in the cen­turies beyond.” And from threads includ­ing “the anno­ta­tions and mar­gin­a­lia in the orig­i­nal man­u­scripts” a “rich tapes­try of Greek schol­ar­ship will be woven.”

This mas­sive under­tak­ing involves not just Cam­bridge and Hei­del­berg but the Vat­i­can as well. Togeth­er Hei­del­berg Uni­ver­si­ty and the Vat­i­can pos­sess the entire­ty of the Bib­lio­the­ca Palati­na, split between the libraries of the two insti­tu­tions, and the dig­i­ti­za­tion of the “moth­er of all medieval libraries” pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, is a part of the project. This col­lect­ed wealth of texts includes not just the work of Pla­to, Aris­to­tle, and Homer as they were “copied and recopied through­out the medieval peri­od,” in the words of Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty Library Keep­er of Rare Books and Ear­ly Man­u­scripts Dr. Suzanne Paul, but a great many oth­er “mul­ti­lin­gual, mul­ti­cul­tur­al, mul­ti­far­i­ous works, that cross bor­ders, dis­ci­plines and the cen­turies” as well. And with luck, their dig­i­tal copies will stick around for cen­turies of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion to come.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

Behold 3,000 Dig­i­tized Man­u­scripts from the Bib­lio­the­ca Palati­na: The Moth­er of All Medieval Libraries Is Get­ting Recon­struct­ed Online

Explore 5,300 Rare Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tized by the Vat­i­can: From The Ili­ad & Aeneid, to Japan­ese & Aztec Illus­tra­tions

How the Mys­ter­ies of the Vat­i­can Secret Archives Are Being Revealed by Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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