Library Special Collections, ours included, would be empty indeed were it not for the vast gifts and pointed purchases bestowed on us by book collectors and library staff over generations.
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| The Miller Rare Book Room in the old Carnegie Library in the 1950s |
Whether I have met these academic antiquarians in person, or simply greet them through their handwriting and bookplates, it often feels as though I've been granted access to their private study, and pried into their personal passions. Finding 200-year-old gift inscriptions, pressed flowers, and locks of hair in books can feel painfully intimate. I've also seen things I wish I hadn't. And even though I'm also aware of how problematic the impressions of privilege and gravity these lettered "gated communities" evoke, allow me to say "thank you" to our bibliophilic predecessors.
Before you take me for a book adoring romantic, I should tender my opinion that in the most notorious of circumstances, unchecked enthusiasm for books can grow into a (Herman not Dewey) Melvillean obsession where a personal library becomes an end in itself, an uptown form of hoarding. I frequently find this sloppy insatiability profligate and daunting. A cargo van full of dusty, brittle paper is not a welcome sight.
Discreet collections though are another matter, and whether pleasing like a bouquet* or as traumatic as the bagged evidence from a crime scene, the active human component is at the forefront of their meaning. Whether following the tracks of a cultural trend, or a personal obsession,
discriminating book collectors bring selectivity and creativity to their devoted task. I would argue that interesting collections are a form of artifice that draw the reader's attention to something you might not have noticed had you looked at the titles in isolation. It's like how the concept of the "medieval" didn't gel until the nineteenth-century, and now we can't unthink it when we teach to our holdings and exhibits. A true c
ollection - through the process of being inclusive and exclusive - conscripts, filters, and arranges information as a synthetic ensemble with a message that ultimately harkens back to the collector, and the perspective and values of that collector. At its best, a collection makes you see something new that emerges alluringly out of what is really a locally delineated Pride parade of books and pamphlets. At its worst it's a narcissistic exercise in disinformation. Collections can never be totally complete, flawless, or neutral, though we mistake our libraries - and even moreso Google - as such constantly.
These are strange thoughts to be running through my mind on the eve of Juneteenth 2020, in Oberlin, Ohio, a town celebrated (and once reviled) for its progressive anti-slavery past. Before the Civil War the townsfolk used to mark August 1st (instead of July 4th) as the appropriate date to celebrate independence, since it was on August 1st that the British government emancipated its slaves in the West Indies beginning in 1834 and again in 1838. That same commemorative spirit is still alive within Oberlin's Juneteenth celebration, and perhaps this year more than most as we have all witnessed again the systemic and overt racism that continues to both ruin lives and excite protest in the United States and globally. There is indeed good reason to adopt Juneteenth as a second expression of the American insistence on individual freedom. Perhaps we should feel the same about the Nineteenth Amendment. So the timing of this post is no accident, as I reflect on the explicit and intentional nature with which the community of Oberlin went about building the
Anti-slavery Collection (America's oldest?) housed within the College's Library.
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| Original Call to the Community, "Oberlin Weekly News" Feb. 29, 1884 |
Within a cultural and academic nineteenth-century book collecting tradition that celebrates exquisite typography, craft bindings, and canonical subjects, the Anti-slavery Collection is an astonishingly plebeian and prescient achievement. It was not only our founding collection, it also remains quite unlike the bulk of our holdings. The Anti-slavery Collection is characterized by heavily downmarket mass-production pamphlet printing, newspapers, scrapbooks etc. with very little that suggests the usual expensive book finery. Few book connoisseurs in the mid-nineteenth-century would have looked at this cheap propaganda - as it was then designated without the pejorative connotation - more crooked chapbook than mottled calf, and deemed it either beautiful or library-worthy. The Anti-slavery Collection stands defiantly like a segregated "book barrio" alongside illuminated manuscripts, creamy paper folios, and rare Renaissance Aldines. Yet it is more vast, more historically important, better used, and as aggressively political as the best of the rest.
Like collections generally, the Anti-slavery books and pamphlets too were the product of generations of scholarly winnowing and whimsey, and are not intended to be a reflection of everyone and everything from the past. As I look, I see the signs of exclusion, and discernment along the shelves. I am acutely conscious of what's not present. Absent because it wasn't created in the first place, wasn't valued and preserved, or perhaps because our bibliographic records under-describe, or categorize it as something else. Recall, collections (like individual books) are voiced from a particular perspective, and there are not enough African American voices in this choir, despite the subject matter. With classes I frequently talk about how to search for what's not there, of how to "read" omissions like we read inclusion.
I also like to point to the power of naming, of arrangement and description to alter the meaning of holdings. Perhaps there are items in the collection that shouldn't be. A couple of years ago we were following the auction of an 1827 cookbook by an African American man named Robert Roberts, called
The House Servant's Directory. We didn't buy it, but I wondered at the time whether this should end up in the Anti-slavery Collection . . . or would this be reductive? Can the opposite problem also be true?
Case in point: a couple of years ago I read about an early nineteenth-century account of enslavement by a man named James Riley. It is called
Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce in the American edition,
and was published in 1817. According to Ohio State University history professor Robert Davis, the book was an
"immediate hit" that "outsold all the rest of these narratives combined." This appears at least plausible as I note how many editions this book went through in the nineteenth-century, although
conflicting scholarship by Donald Ratcliffe concluded these claims are likely overstated by booksellers eager to lure readers. Ratcliffe admits however that Riley was certainly known in popular culture, but: "It is likely that most people knew his account through his original letter in the press and through newspaper excerpts, anthologies, and the children's edition." However, back in 1934, another historian
Gerald McMurtry noted that "Riley's Narrative" was one of the books that most shaped the moral outlook of Abraham Lincoln. This is perhaps to be expected if: "This book is said to have made a striking and permanent impression on the minds of the early American youths who read it." This strikes me as very important claim in the years before
Uncle Tom's Cabin was published. While this can't be definitively proven, Lincoln did himself approve the comment on the influence of "Riley's Narrative"
on him for his official biography.
The Oberlin College Library copy of "Riley's Narrative" is the wide-margined 1817 British edition that was published to coincide with the release of the same book in the United States. Unfortunately this John Murray edition lacks the engravings that accompanied the US version. After reading the McMurtry claims I was very surprised that this book
was not part of our Anti-slavery Collection. Was it perhaps a late acquisition, arriving long after the collection was formed? Greasy fingerprints mark the paper edges and the bottoms of the boards have worn away due to shelf wear, all attesting to frequent use. I looked further at the text which shows significant wear in a missing spine, detached cover, and multiple clumsy page repairs in the interior. Some of these repairs may have been the result of the work of a mid-nineteenth-century Oberlin binder named J. Gillanders who left his small binder's ticket neatly in the top left corner of the front pastedown.
This text has clearly been a part of the Oberlin Library Collection since the institution's earliest days as a series of library book plates attest.
The most recent plate (red number 1) is seen only only from the blank back and has the accession number 1571 (not shown), marking it as one of the very first books accessioned and classed by librarian Azariah Smith Root in 1884 when this new accessioning system was instituted on the books that were already here at that time. It's one of the lowest accession numbers I've yet come across. Now stuck to the back of this label and visible only as bleed through is an earlier library plate (red number 2). Clearly Root placed a new label over top of the old. How much longer the book was in Oberlin is attested by another previous label (number 3) still intact with the library rules, and a now almost completely abraded early fragment (number 4), that would have recorded the book's location in terms of "Press" and "Shelf" indicating where it should live within the library when it was still small enough to consist of a few bookcases. These oldest labels in our books can be dated before 1850 by the use of the institutional name "Oberlin Collegiate Institute" but beyond that it's not possible to know precisely how long this book has been in Oberlin. Safe to say it's early.
The reason why this book was never a part of Anti-slavery, as you may have guessed, is that Captain James Riley was a white American from Connecticut (later Ohio) and he was captured and enslaved in North Africa, as were many who fell into the hands of Barbary Corsairs, Ottoman traders, Berbers or other indigenous Western Sahara desert peoples through accidents of shipwreck, or deliberate piracy. The phenomenon was well attested and severe enough to force the United States to act in two Barbary Wars that took place between 1801 and 1815. Ratcliffe notes an extensive sensationalist literature that took place around these accounts of enslavement, torture, death, and (in some cases) ransoming that Davis refers to as a "genre" comparable to the "captivity narratives" involving white settlers taken by Native Americans. An active
choice was made by library staff not to include "Riley's Narrative" within the boundaries of Anti-slavery for reasons that we can only guess at today. They may not have known of its influence on Lincoln, although we have also in our possession the Lincolniana collections of
two individuals, one of them a
major Lincoln biographer and Oberlin College graduate named William E. Barton.
I read into this apartheid of slavery narratives an implicit segregation of humanity by race such that enslavement stories by capable authors such as Solomon Northrup and Frederick Douglass belong as part of the American Anti-slavery Collection, but the tale of a (far less literate) enslaved white American does not because his tale is considered a "captivity narrative" and thus not the subject of slavery proper. This embargo is further complicated by the strong Anti-slavery appeal with which "Riley's Narrative" closes, as well as Capt. Riley's subsequent dedication to the anti-slavery cause (he was a supporter of colonization). So I was puzzled: surely Riley is not so different in kind - at least in terms of affective impact - as Harriet Beecher Stowe who is a represented very well in the Anti-slavery Collection.
The implication is that people of European descent can never properly be considered bonafide slaves, even though white slavery was not unusual, and a great many were not so fortunate as Capt. Riley to be ransomed (as
Davis points out in a 2004 book). Was "Riley's Narrative" not added to Anti-slavery through oversight? or was there an assumption of an inherent dignity and set of rights for whites that African Americans lacked? While there are significant differences between the American system of chattel slavery and other historic examples of slavery, I am still troubled by this distancing and the message it sends. What a missed opportunity, I thought, for anti-bellum white Americans, some of whom in the North may have never seen a slave, to have their emotions touched by empathy, and thereby connect to the humanity of all enslaved and exploited people. Or maybe that happened? Charles Sumner wrote an essay called "White Slavery in the Barbary States" that was first delivered as a talk in Boston in 1847. This is a scholarly recounting of the long history and significant literature relating to white slavery in North Africa, and makes explicit comparisons with the situation in the United States. It was included in Sumner's
Orations and Speeches published in 1850.
I moved "Riley's Narrative" and Sumner's book into Anti-slavery Collection on the basis of their potential impact on Abraham Lincoln, as well as the American Anti-slavery movement. Capt. Riley was himself a small part of the movement, if a less than model one. Charles Sumner, remembered most often these days as the politician beaten almost to death on the Senate floor in Washington while delivering an anti-slavery speech, was a significant person in the American Anti-slavery movement. I am aware that I can mess with our mental subject divisions through my arrangement, through the decisions about whether to move items within existing collections (or not). I know that by doing so, I place "Riley's Narrative" and
Orations and Speeches into relation with other books, and thereby subtly spin their meaning and value.
This is not an "All Lives Matter" reaction, and I am not currently seeking other white slave narratives out. I am very bothered to read that the Alt-right has picked up on Davis' 2004 book on white slavery and is abusing it to justify their own excusing or dismissing of the history of American slavery. There are no unproblematic solutions to Capt. Riley's book in particular, and I'm made uncomfortable by that. But problems can actually be useful in a safe academic setting, and - at the risk of being wrong - I always want to do the thing that starts a classroom conversation and forces students to consider their assumptions.
Collections building is a slow and fraught process. As a Special Collections curator, I am consciously aware that through my decisions about the gifts and purchases we choose to acquire, I am imposing my personality and those of current faculty onto a body of records that the future might innocently read as incidental scraps of "history." Not so; as I've argued, most of history didn't get a spot in the lifeboat. I have to make decisions, and I have a lot more discretion than an archivist in these matters. By deciding what records and stories are worth working on and keeping - and which to pass up - I am in fact curating the past, and predetermining which stories the future will have access to. We are both arbiters as well as custodians of the past, as much as any collector/donor.
Admittedly, collection designations can add to an item,
or mislead, and there is an artificiality about them. They can be viewed as the exclusive private clubs of the literary world, or prisons for authors, depending on your perspective. But I still consider them a necessary building block and shortcut to understanding our holdings. Short of extensive reclassing, exhaustive notes and pedantic subject analysis, collections provide a useful frame of reference for orphaned books that are either missing from the online catalog, woefully under analyzed, or otherwise extremely unlikely to be stumbled on and seen as potentially interesting. All the more reason to collaborate, to educate, to hire diverse staff, and ally with collectors. The collectors are a vital link because they will always be more nimble than libraries.
Apologies, I know this is a lot of text. This blog post is a "think piece." By design. I hope that the Internet is not dulling our ability to write (and read) prose in a sustained manner. I guess I'm testing that. Language and writing are the cognitive workbench of inspiration. But given how difficult I am personally finding this process . . . I probably shouldn't hope.
*There is a genre of mid-nineteenth-century anthologies collectively known as "Gift Books" that are frequently named in relation to flowers.
