October is American Archives Month. We're going to spend some time over the next few days talking about archives with the team well acquainted with preserving our history for current and future researchers and historians, theSpecial Collections team at the University of Arkansas.
Late last month, Jennifer Day, director of public services for Special Collections, and Casiday Long, research services coordinator, allowed me to tour the vast collections and archiving spaces at Mullins Library on the heart of the campus. We started our trip in the Special Collections Reading Room.
“People come in to look at materials that are part of our collections, either in rare books, manuscripts, architectural records, photographs, microfilm. I could go on with the formats, but yeah, there's a lot of different things to look at here in the reading room.”
And on that day of the visit, the reading room was full of people researching. And we're going to hear more from Jennifer and Casiday about the outreach role of Special Collections on our next show.
We thought we'd begin our route through Special Collections, though, with some of the oldest items included in the collection. Miah Clark, rare books and instruction librarian, had a few items ready for discussion.
Clark: So we've got a tiny, tiny snapshot of the many rare books in our collection, starting with a 5,000-year-old cuneiform text. So this is an Uruk cone. And I'll let you hold it.
Kellams: What? Ooh.
Clark: This is sun-dried clay from over 5,000 years ago, from the region of Uruk in ancient Mesopotamia.
Kellams: And what's on it, I mean?
Clark: Yes. So ours is in a little bit rough shape compared to other cones that exist. But this inscription is cuneiform. So our earliest form of writing, and the cone itself is a dedication to a king of a palace. So noting who would have been in control of a palace or a government building in ancient Mesopotamia.
Kellams: Wow. It's time to point out no white gloves.
Clark: No white gloves. Yes. So I'm happy to myth bust. Our greatest tool for handling rare books and rare objects is clean, dry hands.
White gloves are an outdated practice for two key reasons, the first being the obvious, that it worsens your dexterity. So I tempt you to go home and flip through a book with mittens on. It's the equivalent experience.
But also white cotton gloves, they're porous. So if you were to handle something that was made of early toxic materials or was quite scratchy or had its own kind of material concerns, the gloves aren't actually going to protect you or the item. So clean, dry hands is actually best.
Kellams: I gotcha. And of course, magnifying glass.
Clark: Yes. So that's just to help with the cone. The cuneiform is quite small and hard to note. And a big thing about all of the material that we provide access to is we try to provide tools to improve that access.
So if that's a magnifier to allow you to look closer at the text, you'll also see a lot of our materials are usually going to be serviced on some form of support, be that a book pillow or these kind of foam inserts. And that's to help protect the book, but also to inform your experience of how to handle the rare object.
Kellams: This is gorgeous. The colors.
Clark: So this is a book of hours from Paris from around 1415. And this is actually the oldest publicly owned book in the state of Arkansas and the oldest book in our collection.
Kellams: You said 1415?
Clark: Yes, 1415 or 1420, somewhere in that range.
Kellams: I should know this, but Gutenberg's press is when?
Clark: So that's going to be in the later 1400s.
Kellams: So this predates.
Clark: Yes. And so this is quite humble for a book of hours, which is a medieval liturgical text. These are prayers for different hours of the day. And it's quite humble compared to some of the more boisterous royal family-owned medieval book of hours. But you're already seeing this is on parchment and you're more than welcome to touch.
Kellams: Oh, really?
Clark: Yes. So everything that we service here is for the community. So oldest publicly owned object, we do not own it and we encourage you to engage with it. That's why we have it.
Kellams: So is there any way to know who created this? Who did the illustrations?
Clark: That is a great question because for this exact book of hours, no. And I like to use the metaphor with students and patrons that similar to the way that a house being built is going to have an architect who is credited for the work, but the contractors who are doing most of that labor, medieval books are the same way.
So you usually have someone kind of leading the calligraphy or the paintings, these miniature paintings. But for the most part, these are uncredited scribes and artists.
Kellams: Someone more than 600 years ago painstakingly, beautifully created this book of hours.
Clark: Yes. And so these are all hand-calligraphed letters in an early Gothic script. And then these would have been paintings done by hand with such intense detail. And if you also think about, there weren't eyeglasses or lamps readily available. So it takes a lot.
Kellams: Shouldn't I be amazed that this just survived?
Clark: Absolutely. But if we also think about, so the pages, these aren't paper, but they're parchment. So this is calfskin. And that's a lot tougher than some of the material that we use in books that are made today.
Kellams: And you say it's a Gothic script, so.
Clark: Oh yes. So the calligraphy of medieval books kind of go through a few different phases or stylistic choices, but the Gothic script, the characteristics are these dramatic strokes. And you'll see kind of feet.
Kellams: Can you read this?
Clark: I cannot. This is in Latin and I think in the very, very front we have some Old French on these kind of palimpsest pages, but I cannot read Latin. Luckily, we have teaching faculty on campus who can.
Kellams: Yes. Now, this is a much bigger book.
Clark: Yes. So kind of going down our timeline, this is a book from somewhere over 100 years ago, 1896. This is a book from the Kelmscott Press, which was the press founded by William Morris, the founder of the fine press movement.
So in the 1800s, when we decide pulp magazines are not the way for books and literature to be experienced, we have to go back to the medieval way of bookmaking. William Morris and similar bookmakers were trying to replicate the medieval style, both in the quality of material. So this paper here, if you touch, this is rag paper, rag paper made from linen fibers that are desiccated and emulsified.
Kellams: Oh, my. And it's in English.
Clark: Yes. So this is in English. This is "The Well at the World's End," an original work by William Morris that actually goes on to inspire "The Lord of the Rings," which we probably know a lot better.
And we talked about the Gothic script. So this typeface, William Morris invented himself for his press. And this is a Gothic-inspired type known as Chaucer type, which was created for the same press making the books, their version of the works of Chaucer. And it's smaller than a Gothic type would have been, so that it can accommodate the two columns in the.
Kellams: The artwork, the borders.
Clark: Yes. So William Morris illustrated the borders himself. And these would have been woodcut stamps that he would have done on the pages. And the art, these would have also been woodcut illustrations done by his close collaborator Edward Burne-Jones.
Kellams: Contemporary times, what would this have cost someone to purchase?
Clark: Oh, boy.
Kellams: I don't imagine it would be something that just anybody could afford.
Clark: No. Off the top of my head, a good few thousand dollars modern day. And I say that as someone whose main role in this Special Collections is purchasing rare books.
But William Morris, his goal with the Kelmscott Press and books of this nature, reading was supposed to be an experience, an embodied experience where you have a really nice, high-quality book, you dedicate your full attention to it. It's very different than bending a paperback and spilling coffee on it, whatever we might do now.
Kellams: Right. Yeah. See, that's, I mean, thank you for letting me touch these pages, but I didn't want to touch them too much just because.
Clark: That makes me so sad.
Kellams: No, I don't want to damage them.
Clark: Well, it's really, really hard for you to damage them. So if you think about the way that we're stewarding these materials, they're well-supported. I gave you a kind of intro on how to engage with them. We have all these assistive tools.
You also see on the enclosures, so we do have a lot of our more rare material in protective boxes or coverings with signage indicating when to handle with extra caution.
Kellams: Gotcha.
Clark: So I know it can be scary, but these are here to be touched and engaged with. Preservation is use.
Kellams: Do you have a mental wish list of, oh, if I ever see this available, this would work for our collection?
Clark: Oh, 100%. We only have two medieval codices in our collection. So the book of hours, which you just viewed, and a Ferial Psalter from medieval Bohemia. So I would love to expand our medieval holdings to support students' understanding of the history of bookmaking.
But something I also think about is the thing that you need most for your students or your community, you might not know it's out there yet. So a lot of our collections actually are documenting the history of Arkansans.
And that's somebody's great-grandmother's handwritten cookbook. We might not know that it's out there, but once we find it, that could be our kind of white whale that we didn't know was out there.
Kellams: What if someone has something and they think, oh, maybe you're interested?
Clark: Yes. So we do accept donations. We do have a collection development scope. So there are things that we will say no to generally because it does not fit what we're collecting.
But our main areas, at least for print collections, so published books, are anything that is going to benefit the curriculum of students at the University of Arkansas and anything that is going to document the history of Arkansans and those living and working in Arkansas.
Kellams: And before the tour of very rare materials included in Special Collections ended, Miah wanted me to look just a little bit closer at one of the colorful, more than 600-year-old illustrations included in the book of hours.
Clark: This is an image of King David in prayer. But do you notice something about that image?
Kellams: Well, it's a bit distorted. Help me out, what do I.
Clark: Yes. So we lovingly in Special Collections refer to this miniature as "smush face." So the owners, the family that would have owned this book of hours at the time of prayer, they were kissing this miniature painting of King David.
And so over time, that miniature painting has become permanently distorted. And that's now part of this object's history that we get to talk to people about.
Kellams: Oh my gosh, that's so interesting. So someone 600 years ago was kissing that book.
Clark: Yes. And now we get to hold it.
Kellams: Miah Clark, rare books and instruction librarian with Special Collections at the University of Arkansas. Special Collections is housed on the first floor of Mullins Library at the UofA. This October, in celebration of American Archives Month, we'll meet some of the other members of the Special Collections team. That's on the next few editions of Ozarks at Large.
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