In this long overdue blog entry, I’ll recount the work I’ve been doing and the experiences I’ve had as a student assistant at Special Collections over the past month. I’ve been assigned with the conservation and digitization of the Friendly Association Papers, a collection of documents from the mid-eighteenth century that chronicle the efforts of a bunch of Philadelphia Quakers as they sought to arrest the escalating violence between Native Americans and settlers in Pennsylvania . The Papers contain a fascinating mix of journals, letters, minutes of conferences, receipts of trade between merchants and Native Americans, land deeds etc. The details of this effort to resolve conflict by  fiercely  advocating pacifism are worthy of several separate blog posts. For now, I’ll focus on my role in preserving this collection for posterity.

Within a few days of starting my job, I was left wondering about the extent to which the alkalinity of a solution of ammonium hydroxide decreases after a container of it is left open overnight. Let me backtrack and elaborate on my duties to shed some light on how I managed to land myself in such a quandary. I alternate between working in the main Special Collections section located towards the back of Magill and the bindery on the library’s 1st tier.

In Special Collections, I operate the camera-stand shown on the left to photograph the documents after they’ve been treated in the bindery and catalog the images before they are uploaded online to Triptych, the tri-college digital library. All of the above tasks take place under the watchful eyes of Anne Moore, the Digital Collections Librarian, and Bruce Bumbarger, the Library Conservator responsible for the bindery. The bindery is a pretty neat place, containing books and manuscripts in varying stages of disrepair as well as housing the hardware and chemicals needed to treat these books and bring them back into a satisfactory condition. The ammonium hydroxide I previously mentioned is one such chemical used in the conservation of the Papers to insure the documents are thoroughly de-acidified before they are re-housed. Besides being treated with ammonium hydroxide, the documents are also put through a series of baths (pictured above) to make them less brittle and remove the iron in the ink responsible for the corrosion endangering the documents. Recently, Magill hired two summer interns (one of whom is the possessor of the appendage in the right picture)  specializing in library conservation to speed along the process of conserving the Papers. Hopefully, you’ll be hearing from them soon.

In my time at Haverford, I’ve developed the lucky habit of meeting interesting people in the most random of places. My streak continued when I ran into David Cook, MD, class of ’64 in the bindery where he occasionally volunteers. I remember a conversation with David in which I was really struck by the numerous changes Haverford has undergone since he was a student here. Apart from the obvious dearth of XX chromosomes, there were many open areas of land that are now carrying the weight of buildings which we take for granted, including Gummere. After being forced to live there in the 1st week of summer, I have to say that sounds like a reasonably fair trade-off, even though I’m sure most of my peers would beg to differ. Anyway, I’m veering off-track now. It just seems really cool that an alumnus  has continued to maintain such a close association with the college after the elapse of such a long time. I can only wish that I have the same relationship with Haverford long after I graduate.

I’ve recently been introduced to one of the more exciting sides of working in the archives–hunting for buried treasure much more literally than is usual in the archives.
While going through the papers of Julia Cope Collins, a member of an important Quaker family and wife of a Haverford professor, I found a small envelope, labeled ‘Bryn Mawr Trust Company’. Below this was scrawled ‘Safe Deposit Box Keys.’ Indeed, there were three keys on a small keyring in the envelope, one with a number on the base.
For obvious reasons, this discovery excited me. The Bryn Mawr Trust Company is very close to Haverford’s campus–it was certainly possible, I thought, that the bank had kept a record of the items in the safe, or at even that the safe had been forgotten by the family and that the contents were still there.
A little quick googling provided a name of someone who might, it seemed, have some information about the fate of the box. I sent her an email, asking whether the safe might still be in use, or whether they might be able to give me any information as to what might have been in the safe.
While we were waiting for a response, everyone at Special Collections did some thinking and discussing of what might be in the safe, and what we could do with it. The consensus was that while we had a clear right to whatever was in the safe, sending the valuables to her heirs was the right thing to do. We would, however, probably keep the papers from the safe. We are, after all, a library.
A few days ago I got a call. Their Safe Deposit Box specialist told me that (shockingly) they don’t keep unpaid safe deposit boxes for fifty years, nor do they keep records for that long. The knowledge of what was in that safe deposit box has been lost to history.
Even after that disappointment, it’s certainly been an adventure. I’ve learned that even seemingly serious, grown-up people will get excited when they find an old safe deposit box key. And I’ve learned that most real places, unlike libraries, don’t keep records from fifty years ago.

As I mentioned in a previous post, a few weekends ago was alumni weekend. On that Friday, an alumnus came in and asked to see an item that caused most work in the library to stop. All of the student interns came to see the book the alumnus requested, namely a copy of Shakespeare’s first folio.

Oooh. Ahhh. I was really surprised that we had something as rare and precious as a first edition Shakespeare work. There are 228 still in existence of the approximately 1,000 originally printed. A copy stolen from Durham University was valued at 15 million pounds or approximately 25 million U.S. dollars. I was astounded that I could read through this book just for fun.

Then John Anderies, the Head of Special Collections, told me that this was only one of a few astounding works that we had in special collections. Apparently we also have a 1472 Foligno edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy. This astounding book is even rarer than Shakespeare’s first folio; there are only 14 copies of the Foligno edition in the world, and it is the first printed edition of the book. It is so old that the book still has illuminations, ornate pictures or letters done in gold leaf and painted.

I and a few other students came to the archives the next day to study the Foligno copy.

I was thrilled and astounded to be able to handle amazing manuscripts like the Foligno Dante and Shakespeare’s first folio. These pieces are part of the William Pyle Philips collection. Philips was the class of 1902, and donated a number of priceless artifacts to the library including a first edition of Paradise Lost, the famed Descartes letter, and a copy of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium. Seeing and leafing through these pieces reminded me of the amazing hidden resources that our library holds, and wish that more students availed themselves of the absolutely unique opportunities that Special Collections provides.

Summer students, interns, and staff take a workshop on using "Archivist's Toolkit" from PACSCL archivist Holly Mengel

Summer is a special time in Special Collections.  Gone are the regular Haverford student and faculty researchers that we work with during the school year.  And instead we keep busy with a steady stream of visitors, including faculty and graduate students from other institutions. And we’ll soon be welcoming a group of Gest Fellows to study in the Quaker Collection.  It’s also a time when we employ a team of student assistants to do intensive work on a variety of special projects we don’t usually have time for during the school year.  This summer we have a terrific team of seven students.  Together they work about 245 hours a week, and it’s always exciting to see how much gets accomplished during this time.  Our students this summer are working on several projects: Deanna Bailey and Patrick Lozada are processing papers from the William Warder Cadbury and Catharine J. Cadbury papers; Janela Harris and Jon Sweitzer-Lamme are processing the Morris-Shinn-Maier Collection; Christina Hurley is working on the Meeting House digitization project; Abdullah Ali Khan is working on the Friendly Association records conservation and digitization project; and Karl Moll is our “jack-of-all-trades,” helping out with a number of projects including our Online Finding Aids and learning the ropes of processing College Archives materials. Like summers past, they will be meeting regularly with Professor Emma Lapsansky to discuss the historical aspects of their work.  New this summer, they will be posting regularly on this New and Noteworthy blog (some have already started!) to tell you, dear reader, about their work as they go along.  Comments are open on the blog, so we invite you to join in the conversation!

Yesterday, I came across a box of Anna Morris Shinn Maier’s personal books. They are mostly diaries from her adult life, but included in the box were a guest book, and autograph book, and two sketchbooks, as well as an assortment of “Cookery Cards.” While the sketchbooks are largely blank, they are interesting because the pages Anna did fill hold careful sketches that are simple yet charming. 
Most of the drawings are pen and ink images of scenery; mountains,  trees, and lakes. I was curious about the forest-like setting  of the sketches, which were initialed “A.M.S.,” (Anna before she married Paul D.I. Maier), and dated. I spent a little time investigating the diaries in the box, found the year, 1896, and read several of the August entries. There, Anna wrote about a trip that she took with a number of family members and friends. Thanks to Anna’s detailed diary accounts,  I now know that their weather was nice and clear, even “splendid” on the third day. For five days, the party spent their time together or in groups, walking the mountains and boating. Anna recorded that she enjoyed spending a lot of time with “Nancy,” and when the others went fishing, she preferred to sit on the shore and read or draw.
Reading these accounts of what sounds like a delightful trip makes me simultaneously remember summer trips I’ve been on in the past, and muse about the possibility of someone else skimming one of my journals in the future, looking for clues to what my life is like now.

For more information on this (or other) collections, please feel free to come in to Special Collections, or email hc-special@haverford.edu.

Today marks my completion of going through half of all the links in the finding aid for Special Collections. This means that I have read the descriptions of, and checked the links for, HALF of all the collections in Special Collections. That is a lot of collections. And I have to say, there is some really interesting material in here. For instance, in the ” Baltimore Monthly Meeting Homewood records,” there are signed letters by Abraham Lincoln! Then, there are pictures of William Lloyd Garrison, noted abolitionist and newspaper editor, in the “Friends Historical Association” collection. Add to that documents from 1 A.D. (“Dean Putnam Lockwood”), correspondence with John Updike (“John R. Hawkins”), letters from Alexander Graham Bell (“Edward Drinker Cope”), documents from William Penn (“William Penn papers”), hundreds of recordings of concerts by Haverford students, faculty and others (“John Davison papers”), and a sampling of letters by U.S. Presidents (“William Pyle Phillips collection”)! And those are just the things that immediately jumped out at me! There are definitely some major gems for the curious explorer to find here. If one is interested in people standing up for there beliefs, there are multiple mentions of a Thomas Story (1670?-1742) who was a former fencer and musician turned Quaker, a friend of William Penn, discussed Quakerism with Tsar Peter the Great,and was arrested for preaching Quaker faith in Kilkenny (the warrant for his arrest is in the “British Friends’ letters”). For those interested in the history of the library, there are the “James Phineas Magill papers” (after whom our library is named) and the “Michael S. Freeman papers” (who was a major proponent of Tri-Co library cooperation). If your fancy is more American history, I would direct you to the “John Ewer letters” which are from one merchant to another regarding the early signs of the American Revolution.

If you aren’t necessarily interested in the above topics, but you are colored intrigued, you can always check out the Finding Aid (which I would generally recommend!). I’ve been working here for a semester, and I didn’t have any idea that this was all here. This leads me to believe that most of the college doesn’t even know what awesome resources are back here. So come check it out!

If you have any questions, you could email me at kmoll@haverford.edu, or, if you want the good help, email Haverford College Special Collections at hc-special@haverford.edu.

Margaret Abruzzo’s book, Polemical Pain : Slavery, Cruelty and the Rise of Humanism, has just been released by Johns Hopkins University Press. The author discusses the development of humanitarianism and how the slavery issue helped to shape modern concepts of human responsibility for the suffering of others.

Abruzzo was a Haverford Gest Scholar in 2003 and spent four weeks in Special Collections conducting research on this topic. She graciously acknowledges the help of Haverford and the staff of Special Collection in this, her latest, publication.

In 2003 Abruzzo was just starting her research for her dissertation at the University of Notre Dame in History. At the time of her residency at Special Collections she focused her work on examining the place of pain in the rhetoric of slavery, public and private and was interested in comparing Quaker anti-slavery writings to proslavery proponents. Her time was well spent at Haverford and later she wrote, “I had an extremely productive time at Haverford, in large part because of your expertise.”

In 2004 Margaret Abruzzo won a Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship awarded to doctoral students whose study will advance scholarship related to ethics and religion. This honor allowed her to continue her research full time and to complete her dissertation in 2005. Today Abruzzo is an assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama.

What about parody?  Check out this new-ish online student publication, The Bi-Co (On A Budget), which includes a clever send-up of the Descartes letter discovery from 2010.  Professors, administrators, and school traditions are lampooned on the pages of this Tumblr microblogging site.  Even the Cricket Library isn’t spared!

Gest Fellow Katharine Gerbner is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University. Her research is on Protestantism and Slavery in the early Atlantic World.

Katharine Gerbner 2010 Gest Fellow

During my month at Haverford, I have examined the early Quaker stance on slavery. Quakers—renowned abolitionists by the late eighteenth-century—were deeply conflicted about the significance of slavery in the seventeenth-century. Hundreds of slave-owning Friends lived on Barbados, the sugar-rich British island in the Caribbean, and most found no contradiction between owning slaves and preaching equality. In Pennsylvania, Quaker merchants were active participants in the slave trade and a number of Quaker families held slaves.

Using the resources at the Haverford Quaker Collection, I have sought to understand and contextualize seventeenth-century Quaker views on slavery. My primary sources include Meeting Minutes from Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, as well as epistles and books of discipline. In these documents, I have examined not only Quaker slavery and antislavery, but also other contemporaneous debates and controversies within the Quaker community. By comparing debates on slavery to debates on other topics, I have developed a better sense of the cultural and political context that accompanied seventeenth-century Quaker slave owning.

Having the opportunity to spend a month studying Quakers and slavery at Haverford has been both productive and fascinating. I am very grateful to the staff at the Quaker Collection for welcoming me so warmly and offering such excellent advice about how to proceed with my research!

Post by Bridget Gibbons (’13), student worker in Special Collections.

This entry is part of our monthly series to highlight entries from the 20,000 letter Charles Roberts Autograph Letter Collection.

Langston Hughes was a busy man when he amiably corresponded with a biographer/ journalist on May 20, 1956.  The American-born jazz poet and face of the Harlem Renaissance was unable to give the time to search for a copy of his piece Waldorf Astoria because he was “so rushed with a new book, A Pictorial History of the Negro, that I just don’t have a spare moment for basement research.”

Hughes describes his current work and notes that some of his blues poems are being set to music, including Love is Like Whisky and Cool Saturday Night, and the most recent, Lonely House from “Street Scene” in the June Christy album, Something Cool. He comments on his own moving picture which he wrote in 1939 with Clarence Muse, Way Down South, “it is still shown sometimes on TV—to my horror!” Additionally, his play, Emperor of Haiti was produced by Elsie Roxborough, and in his letter he denies speculation that he and Elsie were engaged to be married.

The interviewer wanted to get his hands on Hughes’ stark poem, Waldorf Astoria for good reason. In it he grazes his famous themes of racial and socioeconomic equality, especially in New York City. He challengingly contrasts the luxurious hotel which opened for the social elite during the Great Depression with the lifestyles of the urban poor and in doing so, gives, as he always does, a voice to the oppressed:

Have luncheon there this afternoon, all you jobless.
Why not?
Dine with some of the men and women who got rich off of
your labor, who clip coupons with clean white fingers
because your hands dug coal, drilled stone, sewed gar-
ments, poured steel to let other people draw dividends
and live easy.
(Or haven’t you had enough yet of the soup-lines and the bit-
ter bread of charity?)
Walk through Peacock Alley tonight before dinner, and get
warm, anyway. You’ve got nothing else to do.