Library Blog

Inscription in Del Martin's "Lesbian/Woman"

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One of the most exciting things about working in MARBL, is the unexpected surprises that accompany archival materials. I was most recently surprised by the inscriptions I came across while surveying some of the rare books that comprise MARBL's LGBT collections.

MARBL holds many book titles that earn their status as "rare" due to their having one or more of the following qualities: being a first edition or limited printing, being formerly owned and/or annotated by a historically significant figure (such as a writer, activist, scholar), or being inscribed by the author. This information is generally accessible through discoverE, where researchers can view the details that qualify a book as rare and determine whether it is a book they would like to consult (as opposed to a copy held in General Collections). The status of "inscribed" only tells researchers that a book was, at minimum, signed by the author or another person involved in the publication process. Inscriptions can, of course, be longer notes that take on a variety of forms.

Here is a brief survey of some of the inscriptions that I have found:

Comprising part of the library of the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA), Lillian Smith's One Hour (1959, first edition) has an inscription dated August 15, 1965. Smith writes, "For Paula (the second) as a memento of your visit with us in the mountains. Affectionately, Lillian Smith." At first glance, this inscription is a sweet and simple note. Another look at the inscription gestures to Smith's life as a lesbian in the American South. Due to the political climate in which she lived, Lillian Smith and her life-partner, Paula Snelling, lived the majority of their life closeted. This inscription "for Paula" indicates the significance of Paula Snelling who was undoubtedly a more primary "Paula" in Smith's life. It witnesses the relationship of Lillian and Paula, and how they opened their mountain home to other writers and activists. 

Inscription from Lillian Smith's "One Hour"

Also part of the ALFA library, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon's Lesbian/Woman (1972, first edition) contains the inscription "For our Atlanta Lesbian Sisters- With thanks and appreciation for all you are doing to free our sisters- Love to you all, Del Martin" Martin's inscription, dated April 20, 1977, is a simple note that acknowledges solidarity in the gay and women's liberation movements. As founding members of the Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian social and activist organization formed in 1955 in San Francisco, Del Martin's inscription documents the need for continued work to end discrimination against lesbians. (shown above)

Brion Gysin inscription in "A Problem in Greek Ethics"

MARBL's copy of the book A Problem in Greek Ethics: Being An Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion by J.A. Symonds offers a haunting example of an inscription that documents how inscriptions can serve multiple purposes. The book was privately printed for the AEOПAГITIГA Society in 1908. Somehow, the already rare book made its way into the social circle of W. H. Auden and his contemporary, Brion Gysin. The inscription, written by Gysin, is a short story of how the book came into his possession. Gysin writes, "This book was picked off the Christmas tree for me by Wystan Auden to whose house I was brought as an unexpected guest on Christmas Eve 1946. "Is it all right?" [Auden] asked Peter Walsh who had brought me. "We're off to mass now; to do our duties and then back to the jollities." At this point I left with an odd woman named Emily Tompkins Fairelly, a worshipper of the feet, who had to see if her baby was well. I believe that later, she threw it or dropped it out a window, possibly a coward." The inscription is followed by Gysin's signature of ownership. Gysin's "note to self" is no longer a private memory, but has become part of the public history of the literary circles in which writers such as Auden and Gysin participated. More specifically, Gysin's inscription documents how a small group of gay writers spent their Christmas in 1946—not with relatives or children, but with another kind of family, a family that was literary, gay, and welcoming of like-minded strangers such as Gysin.  

In addition to these books, MARBL is home to many more books whose inscriptions gesture toward histories that can only be understood by piecing together fragments of the materials they left behind. Some of these fragments are accessible through public history resources such as local libraries and online encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia. Other fragments are accessible through MARBL that preserve additional manuscript and archive materials contextualizing the significance of these inscriptions. Complementing these incriptions, MARBL houses some of the personal papers of Brion Gysin, the library of W. H. Auden, the library of the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance, and many other collections that tell the stories of LGBT life in the 20th and 21st centuries.

In the spirit of public history and democratic access, MARBL is committed to keeping our doors open to any interested researcher, regardless of institutional or national affiliation. While no appointment is necessary to work with MARBL materials, we encourage researchers to contact Research Services so we can have materials ready upon your arrival, offer resources for additional materials related to your interests, and otherwise support your visit.

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In preparation for Emory's Primary Evidence QEP, the library has just purchased 18 additional primary source databases from the vendor Adam Matthew that can be incorporated into course assignments or aid scholars researching a broad array of subjects. 

The Medieval Family Life database provides access to the only five existing letter collections from fifteenth-century England: the Paston, Cely, Stonor, Plumpton, and Armburgh papers. Many topics are covered in these letter collections, such as marriages, inheritance, estate management, financial dealings, and women and their role within the family. These manuscripts would be of great interest to researchers interested in medieval domestic life, economics, politics, and family dynamics. The database provides full-color digital images of all of the manuscripts alongside searchable transcriptions.

Medieval Family Life also features:

• An interactive map that students can use to look at places relating to the Paston, Stonor, Cely, and Plumpton families.
• Family trees for the Paston, Stonor, Cely, and Plumpton families.
• A gallery of images from manuscripts housed in the British Library.

The database also provides an extremely helpful tutorial with eighteen sections that cover aspects of medieval cultural and social history. These sections, which discuss topics ranging from courtship and marriage to trade and economic conditions, also list relevant primary source documents that students and researchers can consult as they investigate a topic.

In preparation for Emory's Primary Evidence QEP, the library has just purchased 18 additional primary source databases from the vendor, Adam Matthew, that can be incorporated into course assignments or aid scholars researching a broad array of subjects. 

The Grand Tour database contains accounts of the English abroad, c1550-1850, and serves to highlight the influence of continental travel on 18^th century British art, architecture, urban planning, literature and philosophy.  Students can find primary source  (letters; diaries; account books; guidebooks; published travel writing; paintings, drawings; and maps) material to illuminate everyday issues and illustrate larger themes of the age of enlightenment and politics of the day.

• Explore interactive maps  of 18^th century Europe
• Study photographs of key Grand Tour locations in Florence, Venice, Rome, and Naples
• Research paintings and sketches inspired from by the Grand Tour, many from the Yale Center for British Art 

Click on the “popular searches” directly below the search box and find topics from Ancient Monuments to Women Writers, as well as pre-set searches on countries, regions, cities/towns, and people.

The database also digitizes the secondary source reference book, A DICTIONARY OF BRITISH AND IRISH TRAVELLERS IN ITALY 1701-1800, with easy to search  biographical entries on grand tourists,  students of the fine arts diplomats, merchants, Jacobite exiles, and British and Irish families already living abroad.  These entries also link directly to images of archive notes, when available, from the Brinsley Ford archive.

There are helpful essays, chronologies, and bibliographies BUT the meat of this database collection is the primary documents and images from impressive archives and museums.  Martha Fogg, Project Editor for The Grand Tour, picks the following three examples to show the range and variety of sources 

• Susan Horner Collection: Journal, 1861-62 (British Institute, Florence)
• Joseph Wright of Derby, Vesuvius from Posillipo, c1788 (Yale Center for British Art)
• Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy, 1766

Take a tour of this database now and remember it when starting an project dealingh with 18th century Europe.

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Emory Libraries now have an online subscription to the Association of Research Libraries electronic SPEC Kits, giving anyone using an Emory Internet Protocol address an opportunity to learn more about the practices and policies used in ARL libraries. Although the library has previous editions in print, the library didn't have access to electronic versions of the entire catalog of many newer kits. The electronic SPEC kits are listed in discoverE.

Although the SPEC Kits were originally intended for academic librarians, over time they've proven useful to information professionals working in different environments. Librarians chosen to write the kits work with ARL staff to survey librarians, develop and write the SPEC Kit, which includes results of the survey, documentation, and any selected resources that support the kit.

Digital SPEC Kits are available via the ARL website back through 1993, although older kits are available in electronic format via the HathiTrust digital library. Hard copies of Emory's holdings can be found on the fourth floor of the Woodruff Library's Stacks Tower.

Among the kits available for digital download via the new subscription is the November 2011 SPEC Kit on Digital Humanities, co-authored by Tim Bryson, Miriam Posner, Alain St. Pierre, and Stewart Varner, all of whom worked in the Emory Libraries at the time.

Emory University is a member of the Association of Research Libraries.

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Kathleen Fitzpatrick will discuss how scholars, publishers, librarians, and administrators all reconsider their ways of thinking in order to give digital scholarly communication, as well as the MLA's new scholar-social network.

On 28 March 2013, the Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC) will host Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association, for two talks on the present and future of how scholars communicate and interact with each other.

The first talk, "MLA Commons: Scholarly Societies and Social Networks," will take place at 12pm in the Jones Room of the Woodruff Library. MLA Commons (http://commons.mla.org/) launched in January 2013 as a network within which MLA members can create group discussions, share their work, publish individual or group blogs, and generally communicate with the other scholars in their fields. This presentation will explore the Commons's possibilities as a platform for scholarly communication and publishing.

The second talk, "Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy," will take place at 4pm in the Jones Room of the Woodruff Library: 

The future of scholarly communication undoubtedly lies online, but the most significant challenges faced in transforming scholarly practices are not technological, but instead social and institutional. How must scholars, publishers, librarians, and administrators all reconsider their ways of thinking in order to give digital scholarly communication its future? This talk will explore some of those changes and their implications for our lives and work within universities.

We hope that you will join us for one or both of these talks!

In addition to Director of Scholarly Communication of the MLA, Fitzpatrick is Professor of Media Studies (on leave) at Pomona College and Visiting Research Professor of English at NYU. She is author of Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, published in 2011 by NYU Press and previously made available for open peer review online  (http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence), and of The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television, published in 2006 by Vanderbilt University Press. She is co-founder of the digital scholarly network MediaCommons (http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org).

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The Digitial Curation Center has been overseeing the digitization of a large corpus of Methodism materials to add to the American Methodist Project, currently housed at the Internet Archive. Much of this digitization has made been made possible by a Sloan subsidized grant from Lyrasis.

Here is the official summary of the cross-institutional project:

"The American Methodism Project is a digitized collection of interdisciplinary and historical materials related to American Methodism. The primary goal of this project is to provide both the digital tools and the digitized texts of American Methodism to better understand both Methodism and the United States. Contemporary questions of church and state boundaries, the role of government, moral development, education, leadership, labor, immigration, family, etc. are topics which can benefit from debates and reflections contained within this corpus of materials.

The scope of the project focuses upon described and published materials of American Methodism that are of value to researchers for access, searching, and analysis. From local churches to global missionaries, the project will document American Methodism's role and reach within local communities and the broader society by published minutes of meetings, local church histories, magazines, papers and pamphlets, books, reference works, and dissertations.

American Methodism is especially well-documented and can provide significant insights into the debates and developments of local communities, regions, and the nation. Once established, Methodism grew with the United States so that it included more than 34 percent of all American church members by 1850. Nathan Hatch and others have noted how American Methodism uniquely parallels the development of the United States and its culture over time. Methodists established hospitals, orphanages, and colleges (at one point more than one per year), and even today the United Methodist Church claims to be the only Christian body to have established a congregation in every county of the United States. The varied sources, voices, and perspectives of these documents will provide a rich resource for interpreting the past. The project also hopes to stimulate the creation of tools to analyze this corpus of material.

The project is a partnership between the United Methodist-related seminary libraries, the Internet Archive, the United Methodist Commission on Archives and History, and the Methodist Librarians Fellowship. Additional materials will be selected from the partner libraries, other related institutions, historical societies, scholarly societies, publishers, other libraries and archives, annual conferences, United Methodist agencies, local churches, and other Methodist-related denominations."