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.
The exhibition Notre Dame Football Kills Prejudice: Citizenship and Faith in 1924 is now open and will run through the end of January 2025.
Curators Gregory Bond and Elizabeth Hogan will host exhibit open houses on select Friday afternoons before Notre Dame home football games, including on November 8 and November 15. The drop-in open houses will run from 3:00–4:30pm and will feature brief remarks by the curators at 3:15pm.
Tours of the exhibit may be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting Greg Bond at gbond2@nd.edu.
The current spotlight exhibits are Wollstonecraft: Revolution & Textual Evidence (September – December 2024) and A Fourteenth-Century Chanson de Geste Fragment (September – November 2024).
RBSC will be closed during the University of Notre Dame’s Thanksgiving Break, November 28 – 29.
The exhibition Notre Dame Football Kills Prejudice: Citizenship and Faith in 1924 is now open and will run through the end of January 2025.
Curators Gregory Bond and Elizabeth Hogan will host exhibit open houses on select Friday afternoons before Notre Dame home football games, including on October 11, November 8, and November 15. The drop-in open houses will run from 3:00–4:30pm and will feature brief remarks by the curators at 3:30pm in October and 3:15pm in November.
Tours of the exhibit may be arranged for classes and other groups by contacting Greg Bond at gbond2@nd.edu.
The October spotlight exhibits are Wollstonecraft: Revolution & Textual Evidence (September–December 2024) and A Fourteenth-Century Chanson de Geste Fragment (September–November 2024).
RBSC will be open regular hours (9:30am–4:30pm) during the University of Notre Dame’s Fall Break, October 19 – 27.
The books in Special Collections’s April-May spotlight exhibit represent a small selection of materials from the University of Notre Dame’s collection that reveal the influence of William Morris on the Arts & Crafts movement. From the printing and binding of Thomas J. Cobden-Sanderson to the illumination and calligraphy of Edward Johnston and Alberto Sangorski, Morris’s ideal of the “book beautiful” was taken up by dozens of other makers who sought in their own way to merge artistry and craftsmanship in the creation of beautiful books.
William Morris founded the Kelmscott Press in 1891 in response to the decorative excesses of the waning Victorian era and declining material and design standards in book publishing. He aimed to print books “which would have a definite claim to beauty, while at the same time they should be easy to read and should not dazzle the eye, or trouble the intellect of the reader by eccentricity of form in the letters.” 1 Perhaps for the first time in Europe since Gutenberg, Morris sought to design the whole book, selecting the paper, type, illustrations, typography, binding, and even the ink that were used in the production of books from the Kelmscott Press.
In making these decisions, Morris was informed by a set of exemplary medieval manuscripts and early printed works that he assembled as a personal reference library. On his historical influences in book design, Morris wrote “I have always been a great admirer of the calligraphy of the Middle Ages, & of the earlier printing which took its place. As to the fifteenth century books, I had noticed that they were always beautiful by force of the mere typography, even without the added ornament, with which many of them are so lavishly supplied.” 2 The University of Notre Dame is fortunate to have two medieval manuscripts (cod. Lat. c. 6 and cod. Lat. e. 4) owned by William Morris.
Lat. c. 6 binding (fore edge) and Morris bookplate.
Cod. Lat. c. 6 is a 13th century copy of Peter Riga’s Aurora. Its undecorated, utilitarian limp parchment binding is charming even in its worn state and exemplifies the authenticity that Morris was attracted to in scribal book production. This book features particularly pronounced “yapped” fore-edge folds on the parchment cover, which were intended to protect the page edges from wear. Yapped edges are commonly found in this style of binding, and Morris would go on to incorporate them in his binding designs for books from the Kelmscott Press.
Except for the Kelmscott Press edition of Chaucer’s works, most books from the press were issued in two possible binding configurations: limp vellum with colored silk ties or a hardcover binding with off-white linen covering the spine and blue paper covering the boards. The Earthly Paradise was one of the last publications by the Kelmscott Press, and this particular copy retains its William Morris-designed limp vellum binding with green silk ties. It was bound for the Kelmscott Press by J. & J. Leighton. The yapped fore-edge folds of this binding are reminiscent of the yapped edges on the Riga Aurora manuscript, though they are more diminutive. The use of green silk (custom dyed at the request of Morris and used for the fore-edge ties on this binding) appears frequently in British Arts & Crafts movement books. A similarly colored green silk was used to sew the copy of Men & Women by the Doves Press in the exhibit and is visible in the gutter fold.
Men & Women opening showing colophon and green silk in gutter.
After taking up bookbinding in 1883 at the suggestion of Jane Morris, William Morris’ wife, Thomas J. Cobden-Sanderson established a new aesthetic for gold tooling in bookbinding using repeating patterns of a custom-designed set of brass finishing tools and high quality leather. Cobden-Sanderson’s aesthetic was also disseminated through his teaching. His students, such as Douglas Cockerell and Katharine Adams, became leading binders in their own right. Like William Morris, Cobden-Sanderson was interested in the design of the whole book and believed that ideally each part of the book’s production–materials, typography, illustration, and binding–should function together harmoniously to communicate the ideas contained by the written word.
Though foremost a bookbinder, Cobden-Sanderson collaborated with Emery Walker—a renowned typographer who assisted Morris in the development of several Kelmscott typefaces—to establish the Dove Press in 1900 four years after the death of William Morris. Their Doves typeface was a more accurate, svelte interpretation of Nicolas Jenson’s roman types from the late 15th century than was Kelmscott’s squat Golden typeface used in The Earthly Paradise (and in Morris’s bookplate).
This Doves Press copy of Men & Women by Robert Browning was “flourished” in the margins by Edward Johnston. Johnston was a calligrapher who was inspired by Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts and helped revitalize illumination and lettering in the Arts & Crafts movement. Ironically, Johnston is perhaps best known today for creating the sans serif typeface used by the London Underground transportation system than for his floral calligraphy.
Sometime between 1901 and 1905, Edward Johnston taught calligraphy at the Central School in London to Francis Sangorski, an virtuosic bookbinder and younger brother of Alberto Sangorski. Though Alberto was initially a bookkeeper from Francis’s bindery, Sangorski & Sutcliffe, Alberto learned the rudiments of calligraphy, quill pen cutting, and gold illumination from Francis. In 1905 at the age of 43 (coincidentally the same age Thomas J. Cobden-Sanderson gave up lawyering for bookbinding) Alberto Sangorski established himself as a calligrapher.3
This illuminated manuscript of John Milton’s On the morning of Christ’s nativity: an Ode was created by Alberto Sangorski sometime between 1905 and 1910. Alborto Sangorski developed his own miniaturist painting style based on Medieval and Pre-Raphaelite artists, which can been seen in this manuscript and in the manuscript of Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s The Blessed Damozel also on display in the exhibit. Alberto’s work drifted from the historical modeling of other Arts & Crafts figures and embraced the Edwardian era’s exuberance in design and catered to the conspicuous consumption of the truly “Gilded Age.”
This Alberto Sangorski manuscript of Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s poem The Blessed Damozel was bound by his brother Francis’s bindery, Sangorski & Sutcliffe. Francis Sangorski began his bookbinding apprenticeship in 1901 under Douglas Cockerell, another leading figure in the Arts & Crafts movement who himself trained under Thomas J. Cobden-Sanderson at the Doves Bindery. This binding is typical of Sangorski & Sutcliffe’s higher-end design bindings, featuring elaborate gold tooling and decorative leather onlays of thinly skived crimson goatskin. Sangorski & Sutcliffe’s most expensive and celebrated binding of an 1884 imprint of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám sank on the RMS Titanic on April 14, 1912. Francis Sangorski drowned six weeks later while swimming in the English Channel. Like the Milton manuscript, this codex was likely created early in Alberto Sangorski’s career sometime between 1905 and 1910.
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.
There are no public events currently scheduled for August. Please check back for events being hosted in Rare Books and Special Collections during September.
The exhibition Making and Unmaking Emancipation in Cuba and the United States will open mid-August and run through the fall semester.
The August 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.
Due to OIT infrastructure work being done in the Hesburgh Library, Special Collections is closed today, Monday, December 19, 2022.
Rare Books and Special Collections is open Tuesday through Thursday this week (December 20-22, 2022). After that, we will be closed from Friday, December 23, 2022, through Monday, January 2, 2023, in participation with the campus-wide holiday break for all faculty, staff, and students. Special Collections will reopen on Tuesday, January 3, 2023.
This is the last blog post for 2022. Happy Holidays to you and yours from Notre Dame’s Rare Books and Special Collections!
A Prayer for Christmas Morning by Henry Van Dyke, donated by American poet Raymond E. F. Larsson (London & New York: Ernest Nister & E. P. Dutton, n.d.). Special Collections, Rare Books Small BV 45 .V32
In addition to his original works, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) is also known for his adaptations of ancient and medieval literature. The most famous of these is his translation of the Old English epic Beowulf, but he also adapted a lesser-known medieval poem, The Testament of Cresseid.
The Testament of Cresseid was composed by the 15th-century Scottish poet, Sir Robert Henryson. He was a part of a group of writers dubbed “The Scottish Chaucerians,” for their love of Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400), the author of The Canterbury Tales, a poem in Middle English. The Testament of Cresseid was Henryson’s direct response to Chaucer; in fact, it was meant to be a sequel to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, one of the first poems to use rhyme. This epic poem tells of the tragic love story of two Trojan youths during the Trojan War. Despite their love, Criseyde is given to the Greeks as a prisoner of war and takes another lover, the Greek warrior Diomedes. While Chaucer’s account ends here, Henryson adds a cruel fate for Criseyde: Diomedes abandons the beautiful Cresseid. The Trojan maiden cries out to the goddess of love, Venus, about her poor luck in love, but the goddess vengefully strikes her with leprosy and blindness. Cresseid goes to live among the beggars by the city gate, where the noble Troilus passes by; however, due to her blindness she cannot see him, and due to her deformity, he does not recognize her. Eventually when they do recognize each other, Cresseid regrets her treatment of Troilus and gives a mournful soliloquy then dies shortly afterwards.
Henryson’s poem was written in Middle Scots. This language, confusingly known as Inglis (English), is not the same as Middle English. Middle Scots was informed heavily by Irisch (i.e., Scots Gaelic not Irish) and maintains unique spellings such as substituting quh- for wh-, and ane for one, an, or a. For example:
Henryson’s Middle Scots (15th c.)
Ane doolie sessoun to ane cairfull dyte Suld correspond and be equivalent: Richt sa it was quhen I began to wryte This tragedie…
Heaney’s Modern English (21st c.)
A gloomy time, a poem full of hurt Should correspond and be equivalent. Just so it was when I began my work On this retelling…
Seamus Heaney cites three motives for his translation which distinguish it from others: the “advocacy for the work in question,” a “refreshment from a different speech and culture,” and “the pleasure of writing by proxy.” However, Heaney also admits in the preface that when he went to translate the poem, despite these grandiose motives, he found himself already stumped by the opening scenes. Both the complexity of Middle Scots and the phonetic power of Henryson’s verse were difficult to render into modern English, especially if Heaney wanted to retain the essence and feel of the original. However, the Middle Scots reminded Heaney of the Ulster-dialect of his family and as he continued his translation, he found himself “entirely at home” with Henryson’s poetry.
The Hesburgh Library owns the 2004 de luxe edition of The Testament of Cresseid signed by Heaney and illustrator Hugh O’Donoghue. Hugh O’Donoghue is an English artist known for exploring the universality of the human experience – a theme fitting for a poem so interested in love, loss, and fate. The deluxe edition does not include the Middle Scots text next to Heaney’s translation, unlike other editions. This situates Heaney as the sole access to the medieval past.
O’Donoghue’s paintings give the harsh poem an unexpectedly ethereal quality. The reader can revel in Cresseid’s legendary beauty, brought to life by O’Donoghue, and shudder at what she becomes in the end. By pairing O’Donoghue’s compelling art with Heaney’s translation, the edition fundamentally changes the experience of the poem. Altogether, the project expands beyond translation and continues a cycle of storytelling that transcends multiple languages, nationalities, and poetic traditions: Chaucer’s 14th-century English imagination of a mythic Mediterranean past, Henryson’s 15th-century Scottish response, and a 21st-century exploration of art, poetry, and memory by an Irish poet and English artist.
The Household Edition of Charles Dickens was a new, quarto-sized version of the novelist’s works published by Chapman and Hall starting in 1871, after the author’s death, answering “calls for a truly popular and affordable edition of Dickens that were being voiced even before Dickens’s death” (Louttit 2014, 323). Like the novels in their original run, the Household Editions were printed both serially (either weekly or monthly) and as whole volumes. The whole-volume printings were themselves subject to “two methods of volume release: the distinctive green cloth and gilt boards (which adorn many of the volumes in circulation today) at 4s., and a cheaper ‘stiff paper wrapper’ priced at 3s” (2014, 326).
The history of the Hesburgh Library’s recently-acquired volume is not clear, but if it was originally purchased in whole volume form, it is a curious one — it does not bear “distinctive green cloth and gilt boards,” and for good reason. It is a Sammelband, seamlessly binding the Household Dickens Great Expectations together with Oliver Twist. The other method of whole volume distribution, via “stiff paper wrapper,” means the book would have come with no cover, making it cheaper to purchase but also enabling the book owner to order custom book binding. In either case, whether obtained serially in parts or as whole volumes, the book was bound by custom order, as can be further confirmed by the stamp on the back cover, “Bound by W. Drewett, Printer, Binder, Stationer.” Why a person might join together two Dickens novels with no apparent contiguity (Oliver Twist was the first book in the Household Editions, Great Expectations in the middle, and the novels were originally published decades apart) would be a worthy subject of exploration.
Title page, with frontispiece: “The evidence destroyed”.
The first page of Chapter 1, headed with an illustration of Oliver asking for more, while the boys around the table lick their fingers, their spoons, or their empty bowls.
In more general terms, collecting witnesses of the Household Edition can help scholars make comparative analysis against the volumes printed during the author’s lifetime (such as the handsome, two-volume first edition of Our Mutual Friend which the library purchased in 2016). Indeed, the Household Edition is receiving renewed attention, particularly for its visual content. By the late twentieth century, it had become commonplace to read Dickens as inextricable from his original illustrators – George Cruikshank, Hablot Knight Browne, and Phiz – which is logical enough. Many period readers would have closely tied the novels to the caricature-like images of these artists.
But approbation was not universal. As Chris Louttit shows, many who wrote on Dickens in the late nineteenth century “preferred instead the more realistic and less emblematic productions of the generation of artists including Fred Barnard, Charles Green and James Mahoney” who adorned the Household Edition (Mahoney was illustrator of the Household Oliver Twist) (2019, 150). Indeed, one Victorian critic, Edwin Pugh, claimed the original illustrations “are as unlike the creations of the Master’s brain as a painted, stuffed wax effigy is unlike the warm, breathing body of a beautiful woman or man” (ibid). Much could be made about the reading of the text based on the visual commentary available to readers at a given period.
Title page and frontispiece of Great Expectations ‘with thirty illustrations by F. A. Fraser.
Sources consulted:
Louttit, Chris. 2014. “‘A Favour on the Million’: The Household Edition, the Cheap Reprint, and the Posthumous Illustration and Reception of Charles Dickens.” Book History 17 (1): 321-64. http://doi.org/10.1353/bh.2014.0013
The University of Notre Dame, Hesburgh Libraries, Special Collections, and the COVID situation
Due to the spread of highly contagious variants of the COVID-19 virus, masks are currently required throughout the Hesburgh Library for all students, faculty, staff, and visitors, regardless of vaccination status. This applies to all Rare Books & Special Collections spaces.
All visitors to campus are required to wear masks inside campus buildings at all times until further notice. Up-to-date information regarding campus policies is provided at covid.nd.edu.
Upcoming Events: January and early February
Please join us for the following event being hosted in Rare Books and Special Collections:
[The event scheduled for February 2 has been postponed, due to weather concerns.]
Wednesday, February 2, from 3:30 pm to 5:00 pm | Celebration: 100 Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses: An event celebrating the centenary of James Joyce’s Ulysses will be hosted in Special Collections, with a display of Ulysses-themed treasures from the vault of the Hesburgh Library and the reading of short excerpts from Ulysses in several languages.
Spring Semester Exhibits
The spring exhibit will feature Medieval Bibles and biblical texts and is in celebration of the 75th anniversary of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute. The exhibit, curated by David T. Gura, Ph.D., will open in January and run through the semester.
The spotlight exhibits for January and February will feature first editions of Joyce’s Ulysses and related items, in honor of the centenary of Ulysses publication.
Classes in Special Collections
Throughout the semester, curators teach sessions related to our holdings. If you’re interested in bringing your class or group to work with our curators and materials, please contact Special Collections.
