Few modern mathematicians have ever achieved the public renown of Alan M. Turing (1912-54), a pioneer in the fields of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. Turing was a graduate student at Princeton University from 1936 to 1938, studying under Professor Alonzo Church (1903-95), Class of 1924, who taught at Princeton from 1929 to 1967 and was the editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic from 1936 to 1979. After Turing received his PhD in 1938, he returned to the University of Cambridge. A slightly revised version of his dissertation, “Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals,” was published in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, series 2, vol. 45 (1939). In the same year, Turing was recruited to work at the British Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, located some fifty miles northwest of London. There he played an important role in World War II code breaking efforts. His signal contributions to breaking the Nazi Enigma code greatly aided the Allied war effort, especially the Battle of the Atlantic, and probably shortened the war in Europe by several years. The movie “The Imitation Game” (2014), starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, had brought wider public appreciation of his work at Bletchley Park.

Turing’s remained in touch with his mentor, as we see in the Alonzo Church Papers (C0948). They exchanged letters about current mathematical research interests and publications. One of Turing’s autograph letters to Church, probably from 1940, had a Bletchley Park return address. The letter includes a reference to the work of the celebrated mathematical logician Kurt Gödel (1906-78), Institute of Advanced Study, whose papers (C0282) are also housed in the Manuscripts Division.(sSee image below.) But Alonzo Church’s correspondence with Turing ends during the 1940s, well before his death in 1954. In a horrible twist of fate, Turing was criminally prosecuted for homosexual acts and cruelly forced to submit to chemical castration, as a result of which he probably committed suicide. Two years later, his mother Sara Turing (1881-1976) wrote to Princeton for details about his graduate work. She occasionally exchanged letters with Alonzo Church, mostly in connection with researching a biography of her son and with possible publication of a volume of his collected papers. In a letter of 6 August 1956, Sara Turing expressed her belief that her son’s death by cyanide poisoning was an accident. She wrote: “I am very sure that Alan’s death was through some tragic accident. He was very absent-minded when engrossed in any project and the experiment evidently associated with his death … was still going on after it and had been going on for weeks before. Moreover letters ready for post accepting invitations were on his table and he was full of plans scientific and social.”

Alonzo Church retained copies of his responses to Sara Turing. While offering no vivid anecdotes about Alan Turing, Church did give considerable advice about her publishing plans and even suggestions of names of people. On 6 October 1956, Church mentioned John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel as people who might offer more information about her son’s work with “computing machinery.” The final item in the two folders of correspondence with Sara Turing is a printed change-of-address post card, announcing tersely that after 2 September 1974 she would be living at the Stonycrest Nursing Home, in Surrey.

For more information about Alan Turing and Princeton, see W. Barksdale Maynard’s article, “Daybreak of the Digital Age,” in the Princeton Alumni Weekly, 4 April 2012.

Alan Turing, Letter to Alonzo Church

Curators have various options when trying to provide research or instructional access to original materials that are in poor physical condition. At times, condition problems are a result of the “inherent vice,” such as the acidity of the ink, pigments, or writing support. Problems can also result from centuries of use and abuse, water and insect damage, and other environmental factors. Curators have to make treatment decisions in consultation with the professional staff of the Library’s Preservation Office when collections are is such compromised condition that they cannot be consulted safely in the reading room, seen by visiting classes, or exhibited without some form of intervention. Conservation treatment is just one aspect of the responsible custody of rare and unique materials—part of the Library’s behind-the-scenes work to collect, preserve, and provide access.

We can see this in the Manuscripts Division’s extraordinary holdings of nearly ten thousand bound manuscripts in the Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and other languages of the Islamic world, dating from the eighth to nineteenth centuries. So many of these manuscripts are in poor condition and disbound that the Curator of Manuscripts must decide which ones are important enough as texts and artifacts to be recommended for time-intensive conservation treatments. A case in point is an Arabic manuscript of 730 AH/1330 CE, containing Naṣīr al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad Tūsī (1201-1274), Kitāb Taḥrīr Uqlīdus. It is designated Islamic Manuscripts, no. L153, and was part of the 1942 gift of Robert Garrett (1875-1961), Class of 1897, one of Princeton’s premier manuscript collectors.

It is a relatively early scribal copy of Tūsī’s redaction of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, and merited attention because of its age and poor condition, as well as the strong academic research interest in Arabic science and transmission of ancient learning. Indeed, the manuscript had been recently used for a Princeton graduate seminar (June 2014) on Arabic paleography and codicology, taught by François Deroche, an eminent authority on Islamic manuscripts. The text block suffered from water damage and subsequent mold growth primarily on the rear leaves. There were worm holes and damage throughout the textblock from insect infestation. The last three signatures were detached (and possibly out of order), and the sewing was compromised and broken throughout. There were minor leather losses to the spine, board edges and corners of the case. Moreover, there was evidence of prior (heavy) repairs along the inner hinges and throughout the text block along the signature spine folds.

Don C. Skemer, Curator of Manuscripts, referred the manuscript for conservation assessment and treatment to Mick LeTourneaux, Rare Books Conservator (Preservation Office). The correct order of the leaves first had to be established with the assistance of James Weinberger, Near Eastern Bibliographer (Collection Development). LeTourneaux then pulled the textblock down to individual leaves in order to clean the gutter margins, remove the heavyweight repairs where possible, and mend the signature folds, paper losses, and reinforce mold weakened areas with Japanese kozo tissue and wheat starch paste. The textblock was resewn employing a two-station link-stitch and the spine was lined with airplane linen extending from the joints to create hinges. The case spine and board corners were reinforced with dyed tissue and the board edges were consolidated with paste. The textblock was hung back into the case via the linen hinges which were melded into the joints with colored kozo strips. A drop-spine box was fabricated to house the manuscript. Conservation treatment took a total of 42 hours, including a custom drop-spine box, and will enable safe consultation of the manuscript, now and in the years to come.


Euclid manuscript, before (above); after (below)

The Manuscripts Division is pleased to announce the recent donation of the papers of Sonya Rudikoff (1927-97), a Princeton-based writer, literary critic, and independent scholar of Victorian literature. Rudikoff’s papers include personal and professional correspondence, unpublished fiction writings and lectures, notebooks, and diaries from her undergraduate years at Bennington College. The papers were a gift of Rudikoff’s children: John Gutman, Class of 1983; and Elizabeth C. Gutman, Class of 1985. For twenty years, Rudikoff served as an advisory editor and frequent contributor of literature and art reviews for The Hudson Review, whose extensive archives (C1091) are also in the Manuscripts Division and contain her correspondence with the magazine. Rudikoff also contributed essays and reviews to many other major publications throughout her career and was the author of Ancestral Houses: Virginia Woolf and the Aristocracy, posthumously published in 1999.

Most important for research is Rudikoff’s extensive correspondence with her close friend Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), the acclaimed second-generation Abstract Expressionist painter. Included are more than 500 letters and postcards from Frankenthaler to Rudikoff, 1950-97. They met at Bennington College, Vermont, in the late 1940s and became close friends based on common interests in art and its history. After graduation, the two shared a New York City studio apartment in 1950. There Frankenthaler introduced Rudikoff to Robert Gutman (1926-2007), whom she would later marry. The couple eventually settled in Princeton, where Robert Gutman became a professor of sociology and architecture at Rutgers University. He and later taught at Princeton University’s School of Architecture. Following Rudikoff’s departure from New York, Frankenthaler sent frequent and detailed correspondence, ranging from postcards during her European travels to long letters about her art career and personal life.

During the early 1950s, Frankenthaler had a close relationship with the influential art critic Clement Greenberg (1909-94), who introduced her to many major figures in the art world and encouraged her to be represented by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. She had her first solo show there in 1951, and a year later her painting Mountains and Sea helped launch her career. Frankenthaler’s letters detail her thoughts about her early paintings and gallery shows, as well as the vibrant New York art scene in the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout the correspondence, Frankenthaler expresses her view on contemporary art, exhibitions visited, and other subjects. Her letters often contain thoughtful descriptions of her own work processes and studio spaces, her reasons for selecting certain paintings for exhibitions, and her reactions to reviews and publicity surrounding her work.

In 1958, Frankenthaler married the Abstract Expressionist painter Robert Motherwell (1915-91), who is also represented in the correspondence by a few brief letters he and his daughters sent to Rudikoff in the mid-1960s. After Frankenthaler’s marriage to Motherwell, the couple traveled widely together and resided between New York City, Connecticut, and Cape Cod, where they worked in different studios, often throwing extravagant parties for many well-known artists, critics, and writers. Frankenthaler’s letters from this period often describe her impressions of friends, acquaintances, and party guests, including Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann, David Smith, Shirley Jackson, Jean Dubuffet, Kenneth Burke, Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, Peggy Guggenheim, Ralph Ellison, Lionel Trilling, and Stanley Kunitz. Coincidentally, the Manuscripts Division also holds the Stanley Kunitz Papers (C0837).

In addition to describing her own paintings, Frankenthaler’s letters also often include her thoughts on her friends’ artwork, including that of Robert Motherwell, as well as her fluctuating relationship with the New York art world. Throughout her life, Frankenthaler also wrote regarding her political views, thoughts on aging, international travels, literature, health issues, psychoanalysis, and personal relationships, including her 1994 marriage to investment banker Stephen DuBrul. While Frankenthaler’s letters in the 1980s and 1990s are increasingly personal in nature, they offer frequent reflections on her career in earlier years, as well as document her later artwork, exhibitions, and lectures.

Researchers interested in learning more about Sonya Rudikoff’s papers, including Helen Frankenthaler’s letters, should consult the finding aid For information about using the papers, contact rbsc@princeton.edu . The Helen Frankenthaler correspondence is stored onsite, but other papers are offsite. Please consult with the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections about having offsite materials recalled to Firestone Library, a process that normally takes 48–72 hours notice.

Photograph of Helen Frankenthaler (left),
in conversation with Sonya Rudikoff (center).
She is seated next to her husband Robert Gutman,
whose hand is touching Stephen M. DuBrul,
Frankenthaler’s second husband.

The Manuscripts Division is pleased to announce the recent gift of manuscripts, correspondence, and other papers of Charles William White (b. 1906), an American author who wrote under the pseudonym Max White. Not well known today, White was active from the 1930s to 1950s. His most interesting files, dating from 1958, pertain to a proposed “real” autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1877–1967). The well-known Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) was actually the work of Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), who authored this memoir as though it had been written by Toklas. White was to have assisted Toklas in writing a new autobiography told in her own voice. The correspondence provides a glimpse of the friendship and working relationship of White and Toklas up until the dissolution of the book contract. It is interesting that Stein herself thought highly of White as an author. In an undated letter to the author about one of his manuscripts, she said, “I think it will be a successful book, of course that is another matter but I think it will, it has some of the human clarity of a writer whom I think…very great…it is clear and it is complete it has white light and it has depth, and it is darn good.…”

White was a friend of the painter Alice Neel (1900–84) and moved in the same artistic circles in Greenwich Village during the 1930s. He spent much of his later life in Europe, chiefly in Paris. Not well known today, White specialized in historical novels about artists: Anna Becker (1937); Tiger, Tiger (1940); In Blazing Light (1946), about the turbulent life of the Spanish painter Francisco Goya (1746–1828); The Midnight Gardener: A Novel about Baudelaire (1948), and The Man Who Carved Women from Wood (1949). Several of his books were published by Harper & Bros., New York, whose archives in the Manuscripts Division (C0103) contain author files for White. The papers also include manuscripts, typescripts, and copies of White’s The Matchless Pleasure, The Ballad of the Dead Sailor, Mr. Gaffajoli’s Looking Glass, and other unpublished novels and plays, chiefly dating from the 1950s to 1970s.

The Charles William White Papers (C1484) are the gift of Thomas Colchie, Class of 1964. He is a New York literary agent, editor, and translator, who specializes in the work of contemporary Latin American authors. For a full description of the papers, consult the finding aid

Alice Neel, Oil portrait of Max White, 1935
Smithsonian American Art Museum