Collection highlights, news about acquisitions, events and exhibits, and behind-the-scenes looks at the work and services of Rare Books & Special Collections (RBSC) at Notre Dame.
We join the Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution, and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in celebrating National Hispanic Heritage Month.
This year we share two issues of the comic book, El Gato Negro (The Black Cat), created by American artist Richard Dominguez. The popular series debuted in 1993 and narrates the adventures the Hispanic superhero, El Gato Negro, a vigilante crime fighter in Southwest Texas. Special Collections holds single copies of issues 3 and 4.
Packed with action and defined by dynamic imagery, this graphic title fits solidly within the comic book genre. It also takes on current events, issues in Mexican, Mexican American, and American history, and popular culture in a whole variety of ways.
Francisco Guerrero, the man behind the El Gato Negro mask, is a social worker in Southwest Texas whose friend, Mario, a border patrol officer, was murdered by drug traffickers. Guerrero takes on the El Gato Negro identity at night to fight against drug-related violence, even while being targeted by local law enforcement. His name combines the first name of Francisco Madero, a hero of the Mexican Revolution, with “guerrero,” or “warrior.” Across its 4 issues, the comic book series references Hispanic soldiers who fought in the Korean War, the Zapatista movement in Mexico, and lucha libre (Mexican professional wrestling). As such, this title speaks to parts of the Mexican American experience in late twentieth-century America in fun and fascinating ways.
Hesburgh Libraries has recently acquired the first edition of Ambrose Corbie’s Certamen Triplex (Antuerpiae, 1645), a rare and important contemporary account of the martyrdoms of Thomas Holland (1600-1642), Ralph Corbie (1598-1644) and Henry Morse (1595-1645), who were Jesuit priests executed during the English Civil War while conducting missionary activities in England. The author (1604-1649) was the brother of Ralph Corbie and himself a Jesuit priest.
Holland, Corbie and Morse were captured and executed between 1642 and 1645 by parliamentarians after the English Civil War erupted. Holland was born in Lancashire and after studying at the Jesuit college at St. Omer and the English College, Valladolid, he joined the English mission in London, where he was apprehended in 1642.
Corbie was born, as the Certamen Triplex tells us, “in the vicinity” of Dublin (p. 43) after his parents fled county Durham in the northeast of England in the wake of being persecuted for recusancy. After studying at various Catholic institutions on the continent, he joined the English mission and was based in his ancestral home of county Durham where he was caught in July 1644.
The best known of the three martyrs was Morse, the “priest of the plague”, who ministered to the sick—both Protestant and and Catholic—during the plague epidemic of 1636. His courage, as many of the Protestant clergy fled the city, caught the attention of Charles I’s Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria. After Morse was arrested in 1637, Henrietta Maria interceded on his behalf and saved him from execution. Following a few years as chaplain to the English troops in Flanders, he returned to England in 1643. Morse was subsequently captured and, with his royal protector having fled to France in 1644, was executed in February of 1645 at Tyburn on the original charge from eight years earlier.
“The martyrs of the 1640s found themselves embroiled in the struggles between Charles I and Parliament. Earlier, in the 1630s, Charles’s reluctance to prosecute priests on charges of treason and his pro-Spanish foreign policy deepened suspicions that he was not fully committed to the Reformation and angered those who felt England should aid continental Protestants in their struggles against Catholic powers. The fear that Charles was betraying the Protestant cause at home and abroad directly affected the fate of Catholic priests. As conflict between king and Parliament flared, Parliament demanded that Elizabethan treason legislation be put into effect and proclaimed that all priests were to leave the country by 7 April 1641 on pain of death. The Irish Catholic rebellion further invigorated prosecution of the Elizabethan statutes.”
We have identified only eight other North American library holdings of this edition.
Captain Francis O’Neill’s collection 1001 Gems: The Dance Music of Ireland (1907) is so important to the world of Irish traditional music that it’s sometimes called the Bible or simply, ‘The Book’. Starting as a pandemic project, the Irish composer and musicologist Seán Doherty analyzed all 1001 tunes in this influential collection. In this lecture and performance, Seán will discuss the music along with O’Neill’s biography and will play tunes linked to key moments in Chief O’Neill’s life.
Captain O’Neill donated his personal library to the University of Notre Dame, where it is held at the Hesburgh Library. Dr. Doherty’s research visit is supported by the Keough-Naughton Library Research Award in Irish Studies.
The exhibition Making and Unmaking Emancipation in Cuba and the United States is now open and will run through the fall semester.
Curator-led tours, open to the public, will be held noon–1:00pm on the following upcoming Fridays: October 13 and 27 [tour on 10/27 cancelled], and November 17.
Tours of the exhibit may also be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting Rachel Bohlmann at (574) 631-1575 or Rachel.Bohlmann.2@nd.edu.
The October spotlight exhibits are Football and Community at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (August – December 2023) and Path to Sainthood: Brother Columba O’Neill (October – November 2023).
RBSC will be open regular hours (9:30am – 4:30pm) during the University of Notre Dame’s Fall Break, October 16 – 20.
This exhibition explores the fraught, circuitous and unfinished course of emancipation over the nineteenth century in Cuba and the United States. People — enslaved individuals and outside observers, survivors and resistors, and activists and conspirators — made and unmade emancipation, a process that remains unfinished and unrealized.
Materials from Rare Books and Special Collections’ Latin American and U.S. collections are paired together to reflect on the history of enslavement and freedom beyond national borders. The show features books, manuscripts, maps, and prints, illustrating the array of formats held in RBSC and how they each shed light on historical experience.
Making and Unmaking Emancipation in Cuba and the United States is curated by Rachel Bohlmann, Curator of North Americana and American History Librarian and Erika Hosselkus, Curator of Latin American Studies and Iberian Studies, and Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Resources and Services.
Curator-led tours will be offered at noon on September 22, October 13 and 27 [tour on 10/27 cancelled], and November 17, 2023. They are free and no reservations are required. Exhibition tours may also be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting Rachel Bohlmann at (574) 631-1575 or rbohlman@nd.edu.
Please mark your calendars and join us on Thursday, November 30th at 4:30 pm in 102 Hesburgh Library for a panel program that delves more deeply into questions about enslavement and emancipation raised in the exhibition. The program also speaks to the challenges and opportunities in connecting broad audiences to new scholarly findings in the study of transatlantic slavery. A curators’ tour will precede the program; a reception will follow.
Hesburgh Libraries has recently acquired extremely rare editions of the two doctoral theses by Francesco Maria Sforza Pallavicino, an important seventeenth-century Catholic theologian and philosopher. These works, De Universa Philosophia (Romae, 1625) and De Universa Theologia (Romae, 1628), were issued only in these imprints.
Francesco Maria Sforza Pallavicino. De universa philosophia a marchions Sfortia Pallavicino publice asserta in Collegio romano Soc. Jesu libri tres ad Vrbanum VIII. P.M. Corbelletti, 1625.
Sforza Pallavicino (1607-1667) cuts an interesting and versatile figure in the church history of this period. He was an ardent supporter of Galileo and the “new science”, while also well known for his two-volume history of the Council of Trent, Istoria del Concilio di Trento (1656-57), a scathing rebuttal to Paolo Sarpi’s pro-Protestant Istoria del Concilio Tridentino. Over his father’s objections, Sforza Pallavicino entered the Society of Jesus in 1637 and became a staunch opponent of Jansenism and defender of the Jesuit theological tradition. He was made a Cardinal by Pope Alexander VII in 1657.
Francesco Maria Sforza Pallavicino. De universa theologia, a marchione Sfortia Pallavicino post theologicam lauream publice asserta in collegio romano Societatis Jesu, libri IX … Ex typ. F. Corbelletti, 1628.
The author’s philosophy dissertation is a wide-ranging text covering readings from Aristotle, Augustine, Avicenna, and Aquinas to Scotus, Suarez, and Xenophon; De Universa Theologia is similarly broad in scope, specifically treating the following nine subjects: “De Deo Uno, et Trino”; “De Angelis”; “De Actibus Humanis”; “De Gratia”; “De Fide, Spe, et Charitate”; “De Virtutibus Moralibus”; “De Incarnatione”; “De Primis Tribus Sacramentis”, and “De Quatuor Postremis Sacramentis”.
We have found only two North American library holdings for each of these titles.
A pair of finely crafted, meticulously detailed, and distinctively shaped books—a baseball-glove shaped book and a baseball-shaped book—are among the Joyce Sports Research Collections newest acquisitions. The two unusually-shaped publications are both early-twentieth-century souvenir programs of the Union Printers National Baseball League Tournament from 1908 and 1911, respectively. Sponsored each year by the International Typographical Union (ITU), the tournament brought together teams representing the ITU from different cities for several days of sports, camaraderie, and brotherhood. Labor Day seems a fitting time to explore the history of these unique books and to remember the Union Printers National Baseball League Tournament.
The first Union Printers National Baseball League Tournament took place in New York City in September of 1908. To mark the festive occasion, the Allied Printing Trades Council of New York lovingly designed and published the First Printers’ National Baseball Tournament Souvenir Program in the shape of a realistic looking catcher’s mitt. The New York printers seemed to relish the opportunity to show off their craft for their visiting colleagues with this elaborate and creatively shaped program.
The 1908 catcher’s mitt souvenir program describes the origins of the Union Printers National Baseball League Tournament. As early as 1883, union printers in New York City had organized the New York Morning Newspaper Baseball League with teams representing different New York and Brooklyn newspapers. In 1906 and 1907, the squad from the New York American and Journal won the championship, and, after the regular season, team manager Harry B. Wood arranged several games against ITU teams representing the Boston Globe and the Pittsburgh Dispatch. The 1908 souvenir program reported that during their road trip to Pittsburgh, “the light of geniality and the warmth of hospitality from the sun of fraternity and good fellowship was ever on the job.”
Photograph of the New York American and Boston Globe Baseball Teams, taken at American League Park, Boston, September 11, 1907.
Following the successful inter-city matches, Wood hatched his grand plan for an ITU national baseball tournament. He formed an organizing committee, helped draft a constitution, and invited union printers from Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Washington, DC, to come to New York for the event. Each invited city received an informational prospectus that included a framed six-color formal invitation designed by New York artist Harry Goodwin that recipients later described as “a work of art.” The 1908 catcher’s mitt souvenir program, which Goodwin also took the lead in designing, featured a black-and-white reproduction of the elaborate invitation.
A black-and-white reproduction of the formal invitation New York Union Printers sent to their colleagues around the country to organize the First Printers’ National Baseball Tournament.
All eight cities accepted the offer to compete in the tournament that was held in the stadium of the New York Yankees. Boston beat Pittsburgh 5-1 in the 1908 finals to win the inaugural title. For their victory, Boston received the traveling International Typographical Union Championship Trophy that had been donated to the ITU by Cincinnati Reds Owner August Hermann. The first tournament proved to be a rousing success, and it soon became a highly anticipated ITU annual event.
After Chicago (1909) and Washington, DC (1910), St. Louis was the host city for the fourth annual tournament in 1911. Like their counterparts in New York, the Allied Printing Trades Council of St. Louis and the local union printers league, known as the “St. Louis Typo Athletic Association,” spared little expense in designing and printing a lavish baseball-shaped Souvenir Program for the Union Printers National Baseball League Fourth Annual Tournament. The color cover featured pennants for all participating cities, which had expanded to include Denver and Indianapolis, and an image of the Hermann ITU Championship Trophy.
Teams in the Union Printers National Baseball League Tournament were composed of all-star squads representing ITU leagues in each participating city. The New York league, for instance, explained in the 1911 program that the association’s Board of Director’s chose the tournament roster from the pool of eligible athletes: “every player has an equal chance to become a member of the team representing New York in the National Tournament even [if] his team finishes last in the league. This rule causes a good player on a poor team to be satisfied and keeps up interest in the organization.”
Pages from the 1911 Union Printers National Baseball League Tournament featuring the Indianapolis team wearing warm-up sweaters with the ITU (International Typographical Union) logo. The outsides of the round pages are decorated with baseball scenes.
The 1911 souvenir program also emphasized that the participants were both serious athletes and serious union men: “this league differs materially from the great majority [by] the fact that all players must be printers and members of the International Typographical Union, or registered apprentices who have served two and one half years at the trade. From this it will be seen that it is not such an easy matter to get together a representative baseball team to compete in these tournaments.”
International Typographical Union President James M. Lynch also gave his endorsement in the 1911 program, praising the “healthy outdoor recreation” and the “advertising value” of the baseball tournament. He also reminded readers about the ITU’s organizing efforts, which “endeavored to impart dignity to the craft by assisting in the maintenance of just and equitable rights of the individual craftsman and cementing the bonds of friendship and brotherhood that should exist between all men, and especially those of a distinctive craft.”
Most importantly, though, as the 1908 catcher’s mitt souvenir program had proclaimed a few years earlier, the Union Printers Baseball League National Tournament had the “purpose of promoting good fellowship and pure amateur sport.” Happy Labor Day!
RBSC is closed Monday, September 4th, for Labor Day.
Please join us for the following public events and exhibits being hosted in Rare Books and Special Collections:
Friday, September 1 at 2:00-4:00pm | Spotlight Exhibit Tour and Open House, Football and Community at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, with curator Greg Bond.
Brief remarks by the curator about the exhibit will begin at 2:15pm, but visitors will be able to see the exhibit and browse the additional historical material on display for the open house at any time between 2:00pm and 4:00pm.
Tuesday, September 19 at 4:00pm | Centering African American Writing in American Literature – American Studies Professor Korey Garibaldi will draw on his new book, Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America(Princeton, 2023), and on recent library acquisitions to discuss how, during the middle of the twentieth century, modern American literature and its production were interracial. He will explore multiple aspects of American literary creation, including how African American content has been embodied in dust jacket and cover designs, illustrations, the style of type and bindings, and the overall production quality.
The exhibition Making and Unmaking Emancipation in Cuba and the United States is now open and will run through the fall semester.
Curator-led tours, open to the public, will be held noon–1:00pm on the following Fridays: September 1, 15 and 22; October 13 and 27 [tour on 10/27 cancelled], and November 17.
Tours of the exhibit may also be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting Rachel Bohlmann at (574) 631-1575 or Rachel.Bohlmann.2@nd.edu.
The September spotlight exhibits are Football and Community at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (August – December 2023) and Centering African American Writing in American Literature (August – September 2023).
RBSC will be closed Monday, September 4th, for Labor Day.
Rare Books and Special Collections welcomes students, faculty, staff, researchers, and visitors back to campus for Fall ’23! We want to let you know about a variety of things to watch for in the coming semester.
Dublin Walking Tour
This week thousands of supporters of Notre Dame’s football team will travel to Ireland for the Aer Lingus Classic. The Hesburgh Libraries has developed a multimedia walk in Dublin’s city center that connects stories of our library collection with the streets and buildings along the way.
Fall 2023 Exhibition: Making and Unmaking Emancipation in Cuba and the United States
This exhibition explores the fraught, circuitous and unfinished course of emancipation over the nineteenth century in Cuba and the United States. People—enslaved individuals and outside observers, survivors and resistors, and activists and conspirators—made and unmade emancipation, a process that remains unfinished and unrealized.
Curator-led tours are open to the public, noon – 1 pm on the following Fridays: September 1, 15 and 22; October 13 and 27 [tour on 100/27 cancelled], and November 17. Tours of the exhibit may be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting Rachel Bohlmann at (574) 631-1575 or Rachel.Bohlmann.2@nd.edu.
Stop in regularly to see our Collections Spotlights
Fall Spotlight: Football and Community at Historically Black Colleges and Universities
This exhibit features a selection of sources from the Joyce Sports Research Collection that document and preserve the history of football at Historically Black College and Universities (HBCUs). During the era of Jim Crow segregation, the vast majority of African American college students and student athletes attended HBCUs.
Many of the yearly gridiron contests between rival institutions developed into highly anticipated annual events that combined football with larger celebrations of African American achievement and excellence. The programs, media guides, ephemera, guidebooks, and other printed material on display document the athletic accomplishments, the celebrations, the spectacle, and the community-building that accompany football at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
August-September Spotlight: Centering African American Writing in American Literature
Author photos and bios from the back cover of Haywood Patterson and Earl Conrad’s Scottsboro Boy (1950).
Decades before Alex Haley’s Roots swept to number one on the New York Times Best Seller List in 1976, writing and editing produced by African Americans was central to twentieth-century American publishing. Literary production was interracial. View examples of mid-century books by African Americans whose designs—from dust jackets to illustrations to bindings and paper quality—conveyed their centrality in publishing and American literature.
These and other exhibits within the Hesburgh Libraries are generously supported by the McBrien Special Collections Endowment.
All exhibits are free and open to the public during business hours.
Special Collections’ Classes & Workshops
Throughout the semester, curators will teach sessions related to our holdings to undergraduate and graduate students from Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s College, and Holy Cross College. Curators may also be available to show special collections to visiting classes, from preschool through adults. If you would like to arrange a group visit and class with a curator, please contact Special Collections.
Events
These programs are free and open to the public.
Friday, September 1 at noon-1:00pm |First of the curator-led tours of the Fall 2023 Exhibition, Making and Unmaking Emancipation in Cuba and the United States. Additional tours will be held September 15 and 22; October 13 and 27, and November 17.
Friday, September 1 at 2:00-4:00pm | Spotlight Exhibit Tour and Open House, Football and Community at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, with curator Greg Bond.
Tuesday, September 19 at 4:00pm | Centering African American Writing in American Literature – American Studies Professor Korey Garibaldi will draw on his new book, Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America(Princeton, 2023), and on recent library acquisitions to discuss how, during the middle of the twentieth century, modern American literature and its production were interracial. He will explore multiple aspects of American literary creation, including how African American content has been embodied in dust jacket and cover designs, illustrations, the style of type and bindings, and the overall production quality.
Learn more about Special Collections and other Library Events.
Thursday, October 5th at 5:00pm | The Fall 2023 Italian Research Seminar and Lectures will begin with a lecture by Daniela La Penna (University of Reading, UK), “The Archival Turn and Network approach: Examining evolving translation practices and discourses in the British publishing firm complex, 1950s-1980s.”
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.An early Italian vernacular response to Martin Luther’s teachings.Scrapbook of the Corona Rolling Devils.A political cartoon Andrew Zermeño.Some of the recent acquisitions highlighted on the blog in the past year.
This month, thousands of supporters of Notre Dame’s football team will travel to Ireland for the Aer Lingus Classic, to be played against the Naval Academy in Aviva Stadium in Dublin on August 26th.
The Hesburgh Libraries, home of one of the great Irish studies collections, has found a way to enhance visitors’ experience of Dublin while also telling them about connections with our library. We have developed a short and interesting walk in Dublin’s city center that connects stories of our library collection with the streets and buildings along the way. We hope the discussion of special books and manuscripts within a geographical context will make for a memorable experience.
The tour may be followed using an online app that combines a spoken narrative, mapped directions, and additional links to library books and manuscripts.
Statue of Henry Grattan and books from Henry Grattan’s personal library, as seen in the Dublin Tour app.
On Thursday, August 24th, the program will be introduced in Trinity College, Dublin, and will feature musicians from Trinity’s Traditional Music Society along with the librarians who will set the scene for the ‘Hesburgh Libraries Walk.’
Anyone may download the walk app to their phone, allowing them to follow the walk. The walking tour is guided by a map, an audio narrative, and visual details. For those taking the walk immediately following the presentation, Hesburgh Library personnel will provide wi-fi along the route.
Details:
A Hesburgh Libraries Walk in Dublin City Center Maharry Theatre, Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin Thursday, August 24th, 10:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
To follow the self-guided walking tour, use the QR code here and follow the instructions.
Hesburgh Libraries has recently acquired a rare edition of a biography of Jesuit missionary Gaspar Berse (1515-1553), Nicolas Trigault’s Vita Gasparis Barzaei Belgae e Societate Iesu B. Xaverii in India socij (Coloniae, 1611). Trigault (1577-1628) was himself a Jesuit missionary to China, arriving in Nanjing in 1611; this edition was published just prior to his departure. He eventually traveled to Hangzhou where he worked until his death in 1628.
Berse was a companion of St. Francis Xavier and went with him to Goa, India in 1548. When Xavier left Goa to travel further east, he left Berse to lead the new Jesuit mission. A prior edition of this work was published in 1610 in Antwerp.
We have found only seven other North American holdings of this edition.
