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 Gaffajoli’s Looking Glass, and other unpublished novels and plays, chiefly dating from the 1950s to 1970s.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

The Princeton University Library has very significant manuscript and archival holdings pertaining to New Jersey, though state and local history has never been a collecting focus of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. The Library briefly considered such a focus in 1896, when the College of New Jersey was renamed Princeton University as part of a conscious effort to become one of the nation’s leading research universities. The Princeton trustee and benefactor Moses Taylor Pyne (1855-1921), Class of 1877, envisioned an alcove or section for New Jerseyana in the proposed Pyne Library, the Collegiate Gothic library that is now East Pyne. Pyne’s interest is perhaps not surprising, since he was an amateur genealogist and manuscript collector. Pyne convinced his mother to provide financial support for the construction of Pyne Library, which served, along with the older facility at Chancellor Green (1876), as the campus library until the completion of Firestone Library (1948). At the planning stage, Moses Taylor Pyne was in discussion with the New Jersey Historical Society, founded in 1845, about the possibility of moving its collections of manuscripts, archives, maps, printed books, and other historical research materials from its woefully inadequate facilities in Newark to the new library in Princeton. William Nelson, the Society’s long-time Corresponding Secretary, organized a postcard poll of its members. But the relocation proposal was voted down handily because most of the membership was based in Newark and its environs.

Some Princetonians still had an interested in local history, especially Ernest Cushing Richardson (1860-1939), University Librarian, who from 1903 to 1924 served as Secretary of the Princeton Historical Association, which was responsible for several publications based on some of Princeton’s Revolutionary Era manuscript holdings. Publications included Fred Lewis Pattee’s edition of the poems of Philip Freneau, Class of 1771 (published 1900-1934); and John Rogers Williams’s edition of the journals of Philip Vickers Fithian, Class of 1772 (1902-1907). But by 1896, the University Library was already pursuing a broader international collecting focus, guided by faculty research interests and underwritten by generous alumni and collectors. It was surely no accident that the Library’s first Curator of Manuscripts, appointed in 1913, was the classicist and papyrologist, Henry Bartlett Van Hoesen (1885-1965).

Nonetheless, the Middle Atlantic roots of many Princeton faculty and students, combined with the generosity of devoted alumni, resulted in the acquisition of original archival materials relating to the Garden State, even though the Library never focused on state and local history like the New Jersey Historical Society, New Jersey State Library, New Jersey State Archives, Rutgers University Library’s Department of Special Collections and University Archives, or other institutions. Princeton families, faculty, and alumni have been chiefly responsible for the New Jersey-related holdings of the Manuscripts Division and Seeley G. Mudd Library (including University Archives and Public Policy Papers). A keyword search of “New Jersey” in the Princeton University Library’s Finding Aids website quickly turns up 8,307 hits, of which 668 are collections that include the words “New Jersey” in the title or brief description; 376 are in the Manuscripts Division, and 292 are at Mudd Library, in Public Policy Papers and University Archives.

The Manuscripts Division holds several substantial collections of miscellaneous New Jersey documents dating from the 17th to 19th centuries, including William Nelson’s own manuscript collection. Among the earliest documents is a Lenape deed of 1674 pertaining to Tinton Falls, near the Morris family manor, signed with the mark of three Taponemese chiefs. Papers of early landowners and their legal representatives include James Alexander (ca. 1661-1756), the New York lawyer whose many clients included John Peter Zenger in the landmark freedom-of-the-press case (1733-34), and the East Jersey Proprietors in connection with the East Jersey Land Riots and Elizabethtown Bill in Chancery (1745). Also held are selected papers of prominent Princetonians and their families, including early graduates, such as Richard Stockton “The Signer,” Class of 1748, and a future U.S. President, James Madison, Class of 1771; and three early Princeton University presidents (John Witherspoon, Ashbel Green, and Samuel Stanhope Smith).

Among the best holdings for the Revolutionary Era are the Louis-Alexandre Berthier Collection of maps (with accompanying journals), documenting the historic march of Rochambeau’s army from Rhode Island to Virginia in 1781, passing through New Jersey and showing the encampment at Princeton (August 31-September 1) and the Collège (that is, Nassau Hall), the gift of Harry C. Black, Class of 1909; and the letters written by Charles Thomson, Secretary of the Confederation Congress, to his wife Hannah, in Philadelphia, while the Congress was convened at Nassau Hall, June-October 1783. Selected papers are held of various New Jerseyans in public life (Elias Boudinot and William Churchill Houston, delegates to the Continental Congress; U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr, Jr.; N.J. governors William Paterson and Garret D. Wall. Particularly rich are the papers of U.S. Senator and N.J. Governor Samuel Southard (1787-1842), who served as a member of the N.J. Supreme Court, Attorney General, and Governor, as well as U.S. Senator from 1832 to 1842 and leader of the Whig Party. His papers are a rich source of New Jersey and American political history and are as much used as other holdings of the Manuscripts Division, including the papers of the American jurist and U.S. Secretary of State Edward Livingston, Class of 1781; diplomat Richard Rush, Class of 1797; papers of the political journalist Francis Preston Lee and other members of the Blair-Lee family of Virginia; and Delafield family of New York. The Manuscripts Division holds some papers of Civil War generals Philip Kearney and George B. McClellan, as well as those of many officers and soldiers. Among early Princeton faculty, represented are scientists Arnold Guyot and Joseph Henry. There are also papers of a few faculty of the Princeton Theological Seminary (Samuel Miller and Charles Hodges). Also worth mentioning are the papers of the archeologist Charles Conrad Abbott (1843-1919), a pioneer in the study of Native Americans in the Delaware Valley.

For information about New Jerseyana holdings, go to the Finding Aids website at http://findingaids.princeton.edu/ or contact Public Services at rbsc@princeton.edu

Lenape marks and seals on 1674 deed

Princeton University is pleased to announce that the Papers of Toni Morrison, celebrated American author and Nobel Laureate, have found their permanent home in the Princeton University Library. President Christopher L. Eisgruber made the announcement on Friday, October 17, in Princeton’s Richardson Auditorium, during the conference Coming Back: Reconnecting Princeton’s Black Alumni. “Toni Morrison’s place among the giants of American literature is firmly entrenched, and I am overjoyed that we are adding her papers to the Princeton University Library’s collections,” said Princeton President Eisgruber. “This extraordinary resource will provide scholars and students with unprecedented insights into Professor Morrison’s remarkable life and her magnificent, influential literary works. We at Princeton are fortunate that Professor Morrison brought her brilliant talents as a writer and teacher to our campus 25 years ago, and we are deeply honored to house her papers and to help preserve her inspiring legacy.”

To mark this important announcement, the Library is mounting an exhibit of selected manuscripts, corrected proofs, and first editions of Toni Morrison’s novels, which will be on view in Firestone Library’s Eighteenth-Century Window, near the lobby, on October 18–19 (Saturday-Sunday), 9:00 AM–5:00 PM; then October 20–November 24 during regular exhibition hours: 9:00–5:00 (Monday-Friday) and 12:00–5:00 (Saturday-Sunday). Morrison’s papers will be among the most important collections in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, which has extensive holdings of modern literary and publishing archives. In the next year, priority will be given to the arrangement, description, cataloging, preservation, and selective digitization of the papers, in order to make them available for research consultation.

Among Toni Morrison’s many literary awards and honors over the past five decades are the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon (1977), and Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for Beloved (1988), which the New York Times described as “the best work of American fiction of the last 25 years.” Morrison gave the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities (1996), established by the National Endowment for the Humanities. International honors include Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1993) and Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur (2010). When she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (1993), the jury noted that the author, “in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” On 29 May 2012, President Barak Obama presented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian award.

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in 1931 and acquired her love of books, reading, and storytelling in her native city of Lorain, Ohio. She was educated at Howard University (B.A., 1953) and Cornell University (M.A. in American Literature, 1955). Morrison held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University from 1989 until her retirement in 2006. “Here at Princeton,” she noted in an interview in the Paris Review (1993), “they really do value undergraduates, which is nice because a lot of universities value only the graduate school or the professional research schools. I love Princeton’s notion. I would have loved that for my own children.” At Princeton, Morrison created and developed the Princeton Atelier (1994), bringing together undergraduates in inter¬disciplinary collaborations with acclaimed creative artists and performers, such as Gabriel García Márquez, Yo Yo Ma, Peter Sellars, and the American Ballet Theatre. Before joining the Princeton faculty, Morrison held the Albert Schweitzer Chair at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Previously, she was a senior editor at Random House, editing works of such authors as Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, Gayl Jones, and Muhammad Ali. Morrison also taught at Howard University, Yale University, Bard College, Rutgers University, and other schools.

The Papers of Toni Morrison contain approximately 180 linear feet of research materials that document the author’s life, work, and writing methods. The papers have been gathered from many locations over time, beginning with manuscripts and other original materials that the Library’s Preservation Office recovered and conserved after the tragic fire in 1993 at the author’s home in Rockland County, New York. Most important are manuscripts, drafts, proofs, and related files pertaining to Morrison’s novels on the African American experience: The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1997), Love (2003), A Mercy (2008), and Home (2012). The working materials provide additional evidence of the author’s approach to the physical act of writing.

Also included are similar materials for the author’s play Dreaming Emmett, children’s books, short fiction, song lyrics, an opera libretto, lectures, and non-fiction writing, as well as extensive literary and professional correspondence, fan mail, diaries and appointment books, photographs, audiobooks, videotapes, juvenilia, memorabilia, course materials, annotated student papers, academic office files, and press clippings. Complementing the papers are printed editions of Morrison’s published works and translations into more than twenty languages. Additional manuscripts and papers will be added over time, beginning with the manuscript of Morrison’s forthcoming novel.

For more information about the Papers of Toni Morrison, which will not be available until cataloging and selective digitization are done, please email Don C. Skemer, Curator of Manuscripts, at dcskemer@princeton.edu For questions about the author, please email her Administrative Assistant, Rene Boatman, at boatman@princeton.edu

Toni Morris. Photograph
by Timothy Greenfield-Saunders

Toni Morrison’s early draft
of The Bluest Eye

Among the latest additions to “Treasures of the Manuscripts Division” in the Princeton University Digital Library is Garrett Ethiopic Manuscript No. 42: The Book of Enoch (Mäṣḥafä Henok), which is part of the Robert Garrett Collection of Ethiopic Manuscripts, 1600s-1900s (C0744.03), the gift of Robert Garrett (1875-1961), Class of 1897. Click for access. The Ethiopic Book of Enoch (or 1 Enoch) is a complete translation into Ge’ez, the sacred and liturgical Afro-Asiatic language of Ethiopian Christians, of an ancient Jewish religious text, which claims to have been written by Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church regards the pseudepigraphic text as canonical. The present manuscript was one of those used in R. H. Charles, ed., The Book of Enoch, Translated from Professor Dillmann’s Ethiopic Text… (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893). For conservation reasons, the manuscript was recently rebound by Mick LeTourneaux (Princeton University Library, Preservation Office) in an Ethiopic-style binding, replacing a nineteenth-century European binding that bears the ownership stamp of H. C. Reichardt, probably identifiable as Henry Christian Reichardt (d. 1897), a missionary for the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews. Robert Garrett (1875-1961), Princeton Class of 1897, acquired the Enoch manuscript shortly after Reichardt’s death. Also online is the Library’s finest Ethiopic illuminated manuscripts, Garrett Ethiopic MS. 2 (Homilies of the Archangel Michael), digitized in 2016. Click for access.

The Princeton University Library is fortunate to have one of the largest collections of Ethiopic manuscripts outside Ethiopia, including nearly 180 codices and more than 500 magic scrolls, as they are called. Garrett was the principal collector. He acquired the bulk of his Ethiopic manuscripts from the eminent German philologist Enno Littmann, who (with Garrett’s financial backing) led a Princeton expedition to Tigray in 1905. The following year, Littmann led a German expedition to Aksum. In the 70 years since the Garrett donation, Ethiopic manuscript holdings have continued to grow by gift and purchase. In recent years, Bruce C. Willsie, Princeton Class of 1986, has been the principal donor of Ethiopic manuscripts, especially magic scrolls. Nearly all of the Ethiopian manuscripts at Princeton are in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections; plus one each in the Scheide Library and Cotsen Library, and an additional one in the Princeton University Art Museum.

Since King Ezana of Aksum embraced Christianity in the 4th century, Ethiopia’s history has been intertwined with that of its Church, and manuscripts have played a vital role in this history, along with other forms of artistic expression, such as processional and hand crosses, folding and pendant icons, and church murals. Despite a host of foreign influences over some 1,600 years, the style of religious art remains distinctively Ethiopian, with a Christian iconography to match. Manuscript production and illumination can be traced through the medieval centuries. Yet extant manuscripts, especially in North America, date predominantly from the 18th and 19th centuries. Text manuscripts include Gospel Books (such as Garrett Ethiopic MS 1, 2nd half of the 17th century), Psalters, homilies, liturgy, chant, saints’ lives and miracles, theology, law, and compilations of texts related to divination and popular magic. Nearly all of the manuscripts are in Ge’ez. Manuscripts are written in carbon-black ink on parchment, then bound with unsupported link-stitch in an archaized style reminiscent of early Coptic Christian or Byzantine manuscripts, looking much older than they are. There are also several manuscripts illuminated in the Second (or late) Gondar style, which emerged in the old imperial capital of Gondar in northern Ethiopia from the 1720s and 1730s.

Far less elegant, but no less interesting as expressions of Ethiopian spirituality and traditional beliefs, are the magic scrolls. These are textual amulets, copied on parchment by unordained clerics called debtera using written exemplars. Magic scrolls are concatenations of prayers, incantations, charms, invocations of divine names and helpful saints, and other brief apotropaic texts, written on narrow strips of parchment in roll format. These words and images offered protection against disease, death in childbirth, demonic possession, and malevolent spirits. The name of the person for whom they were prepared is often indicated. Contributing to their protective and healing power were painted images of guardian angels with drawn swords, magic squares and eight-pointed stars, the net of Solomon to capture demons, and other figurative illustrations and designs. Magic scrolls were generally rolled up and kept in small leather suspension capsules, so that they could be worn protectively around the neck and over the heart.

Over the past ten years, the Manuscripts Division has been able to catalog its Ethiopic manuscripts as a result of generous financial support from the David A. Gardner Class of 1969 Magic Project. The bulk of cataloging has been prepared by Professor David L. Appleyard, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London; and a portion by Kesis Melaku Terefe, with assistance of Professor Wendy Belcher, in Princeton’s Department of Comparative Literature. There is now a 450-page online catalog. Potential researchers should contact Public Services staff of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, at rbsc@princeton.edu

The Book of Enoch
Manuscript, mid-19th century

The art historian Professor Kathryn A. Smith (New York University) had praised the recently published Manuscripta Illuminata: Approaches to Understanding Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts, edited by Colum Hourihane (Princeton: Index of Christian Art and the Department of Art and Archaeology, in association with Penn State University Press, 2014). She does so in a book review, “Let There Be Light: Essays Promoting Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts,” in The Art Newspaper (October 2014), no. 261, a London-based monthly. Manuscripta Illuminata is the sixteenth volume in the Index of Christian Art’s Occasional Papers. The volume’s thirteen articles began as papers given at a well-attended October 2013 conference, which was organized by the Index of Christian Art in conjunction with the publication of Don C. Skemer, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Princeton University Library (Princeton: Department of Art and Archaeology and the Princeton University Library, in association with Princeton University Press, 2013). In the past year, more than a hundred American and European research libraries have purchased the two-volume catalogue in the past year, which is available from Princeton University Press. Professor Smith describes Manuscripta Illuminata as “an engaging addition to the scholarship on the illuminated book and its place in medieval and early modern artistic, religious and intellectual history….Among the rewards of Manuscripta Illuminata is the opportunity it affords to learn more about Princeton’s rich holdings of western European material.” The book review reproduces a miniature of the Entry into Jerusalem, from a thirteenth-century English Psalter (Garrett MS. 35, fol 5v) in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. “Generously illustrated in (nearly) full colour,” Smith concludes, “Manuscripta Illuminata attests to the vitality of manuscript study and its centrality to cultural history.”

The Princeton University Digital Library has digitized three illustrated Japanese scrolls dating from the seventeenth century (C0744.08, Garrett Japanese Manuscripts, no. 1). The set of scrolls contain an anonymous story about the Sagami River, with 18 magnificent illustrations. The scrolls appear to have been produced in Kyoto in the 1660s, most likely commissioned by a warlord of the Daimyo class. The calligrapher was probably Asakura Jūken (fl. ca. 1660-80), of Kyoto. Japanese block-printed books served as models for the paintings. The narrative begins with the building of a bridge across the Sagami River, in the prefectures of Kanagawa and Yamanashi on Honshu, the main island of Japan. The scrolls include scenes from the Heike period of the 12th-century, featuring Yoshitsune, Yoritomo, Kajiwara, and the Battle of Ichinotani (1184). Each roll is made up of a series of paper sheets, 3-feet wide. On the back of the scrolls one can see the 17th-century Japanese silk covering at the beginning and gold decoration of the paper over the length of the scroll. The scrolls are in a contemporary black-lacquer box and are individually wound around spindles with lathe-turned ivory ends. Professor Ishikawa Tōru, Keio University, examined the scrolls and provided additional information about their production.

The scrolls are now online in the Princeton University Digital Library, as part of “Treasures of the Manuscripts Division”: http://pudl.princeton.edu/objects/3484zj30s The scrolls benefit from software designed for increased speed and zoom capacity for displaying large tiled images and creating a “slippy” deep-zoom experience in web browsers. Access to the original is restricted for conservation reasons. The scrolls came to the Princeton University Library in 1942 as part of the collection of Robert Garrett (1875-1961), Class of 1897. He probably acquired the Japanese scrolls from a British antiquarian dealer in the 1920s, who provided a detailed description, now accompanying the digitized scrolls in the Princeton University Digital Library. Garrett had only one other Japanese manuscript, a near-contemporary Sanjūrokkasen album of ca. 1660 in a concertina binding. This ca. 1660 album contains 36 portraits of Japanese poets, each accompanied by one of their poems: C0744.08 (Garrett Japanese Manuscripts, no. 2).

After graduating from Princeton in 1897, Garrett returned home to Baltimore, became a Princeton trustee in 1905, and embarked on a half century of manuscript collecting. The high point of his extraordinary collecting life was the 1920s, followed by years of less activity during and after the Great Depression. Garrett acquired many manuscripts at the major auction houses, from leading European and American antiquarian dealers, and by private purchase. Garrett’s goal was to acquire representative examples of every known script and language in order to illustrate five millennia of the history of writing. Robert Garrett began collecting in the 1890s, guided to some extent by the scope of Joseph Balthazar Silvestre, Universal Paleography; or, Facsimiles of Writing of All Nations and Periods, Accompanied by an Historical and Descriptive Text and Introduction by Champollion-Figeac and Aimé Champollion; translated from the French, and edited, with corrections and notes by Frederic Maddan (London: H. G. Bohn, 1849), 2 vols. Garrett would recall a half century later, “I was really off on my manuscript journey, determined to find examples of as many of the scripts illustrated in that publication as possible. I was not able to do the job systematically nor completely but by the time my efforts ended I had something like thirty-five different scripts, and naturally many more than that number of languages.”

For more information about the Garrett Collection and “Treasures of the Manuscripts Division,” contact Don C. Skemer, Curator of Manuscripts, at dcskemer@princeton.edu

The Manuscripts Division is pleased to announce that the Félix Candela Papers (C1455) are now available for use by researchers in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Félix Candela (1910–97) was an internationally renowned architect, structural engineer, and master builder. He is best known for his innovative designs using reinforced thin-shell concrete to create the highly efficient hyperbolic paraboloid shapes utilized in his construction of many well-known churches, factories, stadiums, and other buildings, primarily in and around Mexico City in the mid-20th century. The Candela Papers are a recent transfer from Princeton’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, School of Engineering, where they had been housed since their acquisition in 2006 and 2007 by Professor Maria E. Moreyra Garlock and Professor David P. Billington, who are the authors of Félix Candela: Engineer, Builder, Structural Artist, Princeton University Art Museum Monographs (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Art Museum, 2008). The finding aid is available online.

Candela had to leave Spain because of the Spanish Civil War and adopted Mexican citizenship in 1941. An award-winning athlete in his youth and successful student of architecture at La Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (1927–35), Candela abandoned plans to continue his studies in Germany in 1936 to join the Republican struggle against the Nationalist forces of General Francisco Franco (1892–1975). During the Spanish Civil War, he gained practical construction experience as the Spanish Republic’s Captain of Engineers and led projects to renovate old buildings for military use. His work, however, led to his eventual capture and imprisonment in an internment camp in Perpignan, France, until the end of the war in 1939, when he was one of a few hundred prisoners sent by ship to Mexico.

Candela’s practice flourished in Mexico in the 1950s and 1960s, where he and his siblings, Antonio and Julia, founded Cubiertas Ala S.A., a company dedicated to the construction of reinforced concrete shell and laminar structures. Candela’s 1950 design for the Pabellón de Rayos Cósmicos on the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México campus was the first to employ his novel hyperbolic parabaloid shell structure, and remains one of his best-known works, remarkable for its incredible thinness of 5/8 inch, allowing for the measurement and study of cosmic radiation. A number of photographs of the laboratory, along with photographs of many of Candela’s other structures under construction and in completion, are present within Princeton’s holdings, including images and drawings of L’Iglesia de la Medalla Milagrosa (1953), La Capilla Lomas de Cuernavaca (1958), Los Manantiales Restaurant at Xochimilco (1958), the Bacardí Rum Factory in Cuautitlán (1960), and the Sports Palace for the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City.

The papers include a large quantity of photographic materials in several different media, including black-and-white and color photographs, slides, and negatives that document Candela’s professional projects. In addition, there are architectural drawings and designs, notes and typescripts of lectures and published articles, a group of professional and personal correspondence, itineraries and documents regarding professional travels and conferences, daily appointment books, student notebooks and artwork, awards, personal documents, and reference files and clippings on various topics in architecture and structural design, as well as on Candela’s own work. The Candela Papers complement other engineering collections held by the Manuscripts Division, including the Anton Tedesko Collection (C1456), John A. Roebling’s Sons Company Records (C1483), Arthur M. Greene Collection (C0434), Lewis B. Stilwell Papers (C0584), and soon to be accompanied by Anton Tedesko’s own papers (C1478), recently transferred from the School of Engineering.

For information about using the papers, contact rbsc@princeton.edu. Photographic materials and architectural drawings are housed onsite, while writings, correspondence, personal materials, and reference files are stored 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.

The Manuscripts Division has recently acquired a significant collection of the correspondence of Gamaliel Bailey (1807–59), a leading American abolitionist, who helped found the Republican Party and played a dominant role in shaping the direction of the abolitionist movement, particularly its influence and visibility within the national political arena. He was able to accomplish this largely through his role as the editor of prominent antislavery newspapers, including James G. Birney’s Philanthropist and the Washington, D.C.-based National Era. The Gamaliel Bailey Correspondence, 1839-1868, consists primarily of letters between Bailey and his close friends and associates, statesman Salmon P. Chase (1808–73) and U.S. Supreme Court Justice John McLean (1785–1861). Other friends and business associates, including John McLean’s wife, Sarah B. McLean, are represented to a lesser extent. Among other things, the letters document the abolitionist movement, particularly within the state of Ohio, and the business of the newspapers Bailey edited as well as antislavery journalism more broadly. The finding aid is available at http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/2j62s6240

Editing the National Era from the paper’s founding in 1847 until his death, Bailey combined antislavery articles with popular literature, and used the paper to promote his philosophy of using politics as a way to end slavery in the United States. Several years into its publication, Bailey in a letter dated October 24, 1855, to Salmon P. Chase, discusses how the Era’s success was ironically resulting in the paper’s demise: “I am now on the eve of reviewing the [subscription] list of the Era. The Know Nothings have done me all the damage they could, and will not trouble me much this year. The indications are that I should hold on to what I have, perhaps increase some: but I cannot expect much. The Era has been a signal success, but times have changed. So many local papers have adopted its policy in relation to slavery, that it is no longer regarded such a necessity as it once was…I see clearly that there is no other paper which understands so thoroughly the philosophy of our movement, and points out so definitely what is to be done…but the thinkers alone appreciate this—while the crowd sees no difference except that the Era is $1.50 and the others, $1 a year. But I am content to look forward to the time when the Era shall not be needed.”

In 1851–52, Bailey published Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era in serial form. In a letter dated June 28, 1857, Bailey provides some details regarding the story’s publication: “In the beginning of the year 1851, I remitted to Mrs. H.B. Stowe $100., and requested her to write just when, how, what, and much as, she might see proper. This was my mode of dealing with my contributors. I heard nothing from her for several months, when she wrote me that she was proposing to publish in the Era a story, to be entitled, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or the Man That was a Thing. She soon sent me two chapters, with the title modified, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lonely. Neither of us supposed it would be long, but it grew upon her– it was a work of real imagination and my subscribers became greatly excited about it…”

The letters also document the political maneuvering of the Liberty, Free Soil, and subsequently, the Republican Parties at the state and national levels; and the political careers and presidential aspirations of both Chase and McLean. Bailey’s correspondence reveals that he was not committed to any one candidate or even to any one party—”I never was a party man or politician,” he said in a letter dated June 28, 1857. He was dedicated solely to the antislavery cause. In several letters to Chase, Bailey discusses whether Chase or William H. Seward—a dominant figure in the Republican Party in its formative years—was the more viable Republican candidate for the Presidency. Although he notes that he favors his friend over Seward, in a letter dated October 24, 1855, Bailey explains that he would back the more popular Seward if it resulted in the advancement of the antislavery cause: “Personally, I care nothing for Mr. Seward’s elevation, and can have no interest in it—but were he the candidate selected honestly by the Party of the People, or Republicans, as they choose to be called, I would support him earnestly, for the sake of the principle. Personally, I care for the political elevation to the Presidency of no man but yourself but I would not split the movement on my attachment to you…I should work simply from devotion to the cause itself. I do not now believe that we can carry the election of 1856—but we can throw it into Congress. This would startle the nation, and secure us the vantage ground for 1860.”

Gamaliel Bailey Correspondence, 1839-1868, is a noteworthy addition to Princeton’s vast collection of Americana manuscripts. For information about using this collection, contact rbsc@princeton.edu

Ohio Antislavery Society Financial Appeal Circular sent to Salmon P. Chase
from Gamaliel Bailey, Corresponding Secretary, August 31, 1839.

The Princeton University Library is hosting the Papyrological Institute (July 7-August 8), an intensive five-week summer course for graduate students in Classics, History, and other disciplines. This is the ninth in a series of such institutes held under the aegis of the American Sociey of Papyrologists, with the objective of providing participants with “sufficient instruction and practical experience to enable them to make productive use of texts on papyrus in their research and to become active scholars in the field of papyrology.” The focus this year are Greek documentary papyri from Byzantine Egypt, dating from the fourth to seventh centuries. The principal instructors are the distinguished papyrologists Jean-Luc Fournet, Professor at l’École Practique des Hautes Études, Paris; and Nikolaos Gonis, Reader in Papyrology, University College, London. Professor AnneMarie Luijendijk, Department of Religion, was the Princeton organizer. The Institute was made possible by funding from several Princeton sources, including the David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Fund, Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity, and the departments of Classics, History, and Religion. External support came from the Onassis Foundation and the American Society of Papyrologists.

Like the faculty, the eleven graduate students are very international. There are 11 graduate students in Barcelona; Chicago; Manchester; Notre Dame, Indiana; Oslo; Ottawa; Paris; Princeton; State College, PA.; Toronto; and Vienna. Classes have been meeting daily in the newly renovated Hellenic Studies study room on A-Floor, Firestone Library. Most days are divided between lectures and transcription exercises focused on unpublished papyri in the collections of the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Most of these unpublished papyri were either donated by paid for by Robert Garrett, Class of 1897, one of Princeton’s premier collectors. Guest lecturers in the Institute include Professor Roger S. Bagnall, Leon Levy Director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University; Professor Raffaela Cribiore, New York University; Professor James Keenan, Loyola University, Chicago; and Gesa Schenke, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. Don C. Skemer, Curator of Manuscripts, gave a paper, “Magic Writ: Textual Amulets from Papyrus to Printing.”

After the Institute concludes, Professors Fournet and Gonis plan to edit additional Princeton papyri. These combined with two dozen or so student-edited papyri will form the basis of a published volume of Princeton papyri, complementing the three volumes in print: Alan C. Johnson and Henry B. Van Hoesen, eds., Papyri in the Princeton University Collections (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1931); Edmund H. Kase, Jr., ed., Papyri in the Princeton University Collections (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1936); and Allen C. Johnson and Sidney P. Goodrich, eds., Papyri in the Princeton University Collections (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1942). The Library’s Digital Studio is contributing new photography to facilitate the work of the Papyrological Institute and eventual publication of a new volume.

There are approximately 1,250 papyri in the Manuscripts Division, chiefly acquired from around 1900 to 1930, as well as a 3 leaves of a Greek mathematical treatise in the Cotsen Children’s Library and 21 leaves of the Book of Ezekiel in the Scheide Library. Papyri are in all the languages and scripts of Egypt, from the Pharaonic, Ptolemaic, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic periods. Most numerous are Greek literary, sub-literary, Christian, and documentary papyri. For an inventory of Princeton papyri and 30 digital images, go to the “Princeton University Library Papyrus Home Page” at http://www.princeton.edu/papyrus/ In the next year, the Manuscripts Division hopes to put digital images of more than 200 published papyri online in the Princeton University Digital Library (PUDL). For more information, contact Don C. Skemer, Curator of Manuscripts, at dcskemer@princeton.edu

Nikolaos Gonis (left) and graduate students working on Princeton papyri.

Pharaonic Roll no. 8, a 6th century BCE Egyptian Book of the Dead and one of the oldest books in the Princeton University Library, has just been re-released as part of “Treasures of the Manuscripts Division,” in the PUDL (Princeton University Digital Library), here. It was originally digitized in the late 1990s as part of the APIS (Advanced Papyrological Information System) Consortium Project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Pharaonic Roll no. 8 is actually comprised of two complete rolls of the Saite recension of the Book of the Dead, including chapters 67–165. The rolls measure 28.5 cm (height) x 1160.0 cm (total length). Written in Hieratic script, a simplified version of Hieroglyphics, the text contain contains hymns, prayers, spells, magical formulae, and images to guide and protect the deceased through the netherworld. Among the accompanying vignettes in black ink are the Weighing of the Heart and the Elysian Fields. The rolls are made of linen cloth, far less common than papyrus for funerary texts placed in the coffins with the mummy. The Saite recension is the standardized version of this ancient Egyptian funerary text and remained in use, with some changes, from the 26th Dynasty or Saite Period (ca. 685–525 BCE) through the Ptolemaic Period (323–30 BCE).

This Book of the Dead includes the name of the owner, Hekaemsaf (or Heka-m-saf), whose mother was Tinetmehenet; and of its royal scribe Ankh-hetep, son of Nefer-en-Shepet. Hekaemsaf was an Egyptian naval officer who served as Chief of the Royal Ships under Pharaoh Amasis II [or Ahmose II] (570–526 BCE), 26th Dynasty. The Chief of Royal Ships was then also responsible administratively for the taxation of goods transported on the River Nile. In 1904, the intact tomb of Hekaesaf was discovered at Saqqara, the necropolis of the ancient capital of Memphis, located about 30 kilometers southeast of Cairo. A total of 401 blue-green faience shabti (ushabti, shawabti) funerary figures or statuettes of Hekaesaf were excavated from his tomb, some of which are preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other leading museums with Egyptology collections. The beaten-gold mask and embroidered covering for Hekaemsaf’s mummy is preserved in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. On 8 August 1928, the British coin and antiquities dealer Spink & Son, Ltd. (King Street, St. James, London) offered this Book of the Dead for sale to Robert Garrett (1875–1961), Princeton Class of 1897. He was then staying at Bisham Abbey, a historic English manor house in Berkshire. The next day, Garrett agreed to purchase the Book of the Dead for £700, which was payable in monthly installments. At the time of purchase, the two linen rolls had already been mounted on ten cardboard strips, as they have remained to the present. Pharaonic Roll no 8 was part of Garrett’s 1942 donation of his manuscript collection to the Princeton University Library. Garrett was the donor of nearly all the Pharaonic rolls in the Manuscripts Division. They are in the Robert Garrett Collection (C0744), but housed with the Princeton Papyri Collections. For descriptions of other Pharaonic rolls, as well as the rest of Princeton’s collections of papyri, go to the Princeton University Library Papyrus Home Page, at www.princeton.edu/papyrus/

Re-release of the images in the PUDL takes advantage of the increased speed and zoom capacity of Loris, an image server that implements the IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) Image API, developed at the Princeton University Library by Jon P. Stroop, Digital Initiatives Programmer/Analyst; and OpenSeadragon, an open-source JavaScript library for displaying large tiled images and creating a “slippy” deep-zoom experience in web browsers. OpenSeadragon was originally developed in Princeton by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Princeton Class of 1998.

For more information, contact Don C. Skemer, Curator of Manuscripts: dcskemer@princeton.edu