CATALOGING A HIDDEN TREASURE: THE JOHN CAGE BOOK COLLECTION

John Cage (1912–1992) was an experimental musician, composer, and writer. He was born John Milton Cage Jr. on September 5, 1912, in Los Angeles, California, to

John Milton Cage Sr., an inventor, and Lucretia Harvey, a part-time journalist for The Los Angeles Times. He attended Pomona College for two years, studied briefly at

the Paris Conservatory, then traveled through Europe and North Africa before returning to L.A. to study composition and pursue his interest in modern and avant-garde music. From 1938-1940 while serving as a dance accompanist, composer, and music teacher at the Cornish School in Seattle, he became known for the all-percussion sextet comprised of Cornish dancers, which he founded. He and his wife, Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff, whom he had met and mar-ried in L.A. in 1935 and later divorced in 1945, then moved to Chicago where he taught at the Chicago

School of Design and the University of Chicago, and to New York City in 1942 where he would settle and begin his partnership with choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham, with whom he lived until his death on August 12, 1992.

Cage first performed at Wesleyan in 1955, both shocking and fascinating Wesleyan students with his prepared piano music. He returned to Wesleyan to perform many times, was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in 1960, and was published by Wesleyan University Press. Because of his connection with Wesleyan, he donated part of his manuscript, correspondence, and book collections to the library starting in 1974. His papers were processed in 2007, and it was in 2017 that I was asked to begin the project of cataloging his books, funded in part by a grant from the Friends of the Wesleyan Library.

It is uncertain how John Cage personally arranged his books, but the collection held here at Wesleyan University is arranged by the Library of Congress Classification system. To browse the virtual shelves of the collection in OneSearch, the online catalog, type in “John Cage Book Collection,” select Wesleyan Books & Media, and further refine the search by selecting Special Collections & Archives under Library.

The items on the shelves range from oversize to the very small and are just as varied as his interests, inspirations, his works and his friends. His interests and inspirations include poetry of all forms, including Brazilian concrete poetry, sound poetry, and mesostic, his personal poetic form. He seemed to always be at the forefront and incorporated new technologies in his music-making, computer art, and video art.

Many of the items have been inscribed to John Cage by those who were his dear friends and sometime collaborators, those who wish they were, and many by those who deeply admired him as he had an influential effect on their own work. Some of those dear friends include Octavio Paz; poets Rosemarie and Keith Waldrop; video artist Nam June Paik; the brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, creators of Brazilian concrete poetry; Canadian poet Gerry Gilbert; and early Fluxus artists Jackson Mac Low, Dick Higgins, and Alison Knowles.

Cage himself was greatly admired and was influenced by Marcel Duchamp, the surrealist and conceptual artist, who became a close and dear friend. Pictured here from the Cage Book Collection is a catalog from the exhibit Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, which was held from January 12 to February 28, 1971, at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.

— MAGGIE M. LONG, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS CATALOGING LIBRARIAN —

Ù Suzy Taraba and Brendan McGlone '18 discuss his thesis research in the

Special Collections & Archives reading room. IMAGE COURTESY OF JENNIFER HADLEY.

CHECKIT

OUTSPRING 2018A PUBLICATION OF THE

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARIESSINCE 1998

Funding for Check It Out is provided by the

Friends of the Wesleyan Library.

EDITOR: Jennifer Hadley

Friends of the Wesleyan Library jthom@wesleyan.edu

(860) 685-3897

CONTRIBUTORS: Library staff and the Wesleyan community

friends of thew e s l e y a n

LIBRARY

The Friends are grateful for your generous donations, including recent gifts

made in memory of Ted Hoey, Jack Hoy, and Professor Robert A. Rosenbaum.

If you would like to contribute to the work of the Friends through membership or specific

donations towards our digitization, preservation and archival projects, research prize, or events, please email libfriends@wesleyan.edu or visit

www.wesleyan.edu/libr/friends.

NEW LIBRARY DIRECTOR ANNOUNCED

W elcome to Andrew W. White, who will become Wesleyan’s next Caleb

T. Winchester University Librarian on July 2, 2018!

Andrew comes from Bates College, where he was the director of Academic and Client Services and served as the interim vice president for Information and Library Services. He worked exten-sively on technology and facilities issues, integrating academic support services into the library and promoting aware-ness of library services. Prior to Bates, he was at Connecticut College, working closely with faculty to match teaching and research needs with technology. Andrew holds a BA in English from SUNY Buffalo and both an MA in English and an MLS from Indiana University. Andrew will share more about his background and his vision for the library in the next newsletter.

This manuscript, a late medieval collection of Latin sermons, caught my atten-tion for a number of reasons. First, it is in very good condition. A few pages are missing from the front, but the binding is intact and one can flip through its pages with ease. It also seemed to me to be thoroughly used. Every page contains writing, and it is full of marginal notes, lines, and scribbles all over the pages, in a variety of different hands and scripts from centuries of readers and writers. And while the handwriting was very difficult to read (handwriting has changed quite a bit in the last six centuries), I felt confident that I would be able to learn to read it. But what struck me most was that this manuscript had never been seriously studied before. A librarian in the last century had cataloged it, mentioning some of its physical attributes and hazarding a few guesses about its origins, but it had never been the subject of the kind of research that I believed it deserved. I was sure the manuscript had a rich history and contents that I would like to discover.

After a few meetings in the spring with Suzy and the manuscript, I began to work seriously on my project last summer. Thanks to the Squire Fund of the classics department and the Lankford Fund of the COL, I was able to travel to the north of England for a week of paleography training at the Keele University Latin and Paleography Summer School. There I gained the necessary skills, experience, and resources to read the text of the manuscript. I had images of a few of the manuscript pages, and for the rest of the summer I worked on my paleographical skills by reading the text. During the fall semester, I did an extensive study of the physical characteristics of the item, and read the first line of each of the sermons, spending an average of five to seven hours per week in SC&A. Over the winter recess, under the supervision of Digital Projects Librarian Francesca Livermore, the manuscript was sent to the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Massachusetts, for a complete digitization. The digitization was funded by the Lankford Fund, a gift from Dr. Joseph J. Fins ’82 to the Friends of the Wesleyan Library in memory of Ruth and Hank Fins, and the Wesleyan Library. With the digitized version, I was able to read the text of the manuscript outside of SC&A and thus did not have to spend as much time there with the physical manuscript. Instead, I spent my time writing and editing, as well as transcribing and translating two of the sermons in the manuscript. Additionally, with the help of Suzy and University Archivist Leith Johnson, I worked on archival materials, trying to discover how the manuscript got to Olin.

My thesis begins with an extensive account of the physical attributes of the item, without consideration of the contents. I describe, in detail, the cover and binding, as well as the details of the pages, including the dimensions, ruling, and pagination. I then describe the handwriting used in the text, paying partic-ular attention to abbreviation patterns. In each of these sections, I note patterns that occur as well as exceptions to those patterns. In the first chapter I also give a short history of the item, making use of evidence I found in Olin’s archives. The second chapter is focused on the contents of the text. The manuscript is a collection of sermons, and I begin with a discussion of the scholarship pertinent to my project. I then break down the organization and style of the sermons and categorize this collection. In the third and final chapter, I present my transcription and translation of two of the sermons before offering some critical thoughts on their structure and style. In a short conclusion, I synthesize the inferences I have drawn about the manuscript in each of the three chapters.

—BRENDAN MCGLONE ’18 —

THESIS —"MEETINGS WITH A REMARKABLE MANUSCRIPT"

Near the end of the first semester of my junior year, my College of Letters medieval colloquium, taught by Professors Torgerson and Leservot, held

class at Special Collections & Archives in the Davison Rare Book Room. Classes often visit the SC&A to see items pertinent to the coursework (I had been four times before), and we were there to see a number of medieval manuscripts and early printed books, ranging from liturgical books to early editions of Dante’s Commedia. Suzy Taraba, the director of SC&A, gave a short intro-duction to the room and the collection as well as to the specific items on display, before she took us around for a closer look at items of note. Knowing that most COL students write theses, and that this was a time when students choose their topics, she told us that she always looks for thesis writers to work on the collection and petitioned specifically for anyone who had any interest in rare books and/or medieval Latin. We were then encouraged to stay with the collection to have a closer look for ourselves and ask any questions we had. I noticed one manuscript in particular, which then became the subject of my thesis research. I met with Suzy a few times in the next semester to spend some more time looking at the manuscript and making a preliminary plan for my research.

(continued)

DUE TO CONSTRUCTION THIS SUMMER, the Special Collections & Archives reading room will be open by appointment only from May 29 through September 2, and the Davison Rare Book Room will be closed and inaccessible during this period. Researchers are still welcome! Please email sca@wesleyan.edu to make an appointment.

DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY VISITS ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY COLLECTIONS

O n March 1, 2018, Wesleyan’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences hosted Dr. Kirk

Johnson, Sant Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Amid his very busy schedule of meeting with students and faculty alike, and prior to his evening lecture where he discussed natural history in the age of humans, Dr. Johnson spent a couple of hours visiting the Archaeology and Anthropology Collections as well as Special Collections & Archives. In an effort to provide Dr. Johnson with a thorough and holistic understanding of Wesleyan’s many learning resources, University Archivist Leith Johnson and I coordinated a joint visit in which Dr. Johnson was able to look at cultural artifacts and objects alongside archival documents.

The objects chosen for Dr. Johnson’s tour spoke to the historical origins of collecting at Wesleyan, and the Wesleyan Museum of Natural History (1871–1957), which was once located in Judd Hall. We decided to focus the tour on objects and documents that illuminated a connection between Wesleyan and the Smithsonian: 19th-century museum practices often involved the exchange of collections between museums and both Wesleyan and the Smithsonian benefited from this type of acquisition of new materials. We also decided to include mate-rials that highlighted Dr. George Brown Goode, a Wesleyan graduate (Class of 1870), who was the first curator of the Wesleyan Museum and, eventually, a cura-tor and administrator at the Smithsonian National Museum. Artifacts and objects such as baskets, moccasins, and stone tools demonstrated the well-rounded inter-ests of Dr. Goode, an ichthyologist by training. On view from Special Collections & Archives were 19th-century items including a Wesleyan Museum scrapbook and letters Dr. Goode sent to Wesleyan professor William North Rice.

Dr. Johnson’s viewing of archaeology and anthropology materials, supple-mented and complemented by archival documents, emphasizes the ease with which Wesleyan’s many collections can be accessed and used in a comprehensive and interrelated manner.

— JESSIE COHEN, ARCHAEOLOGICAL COLLECTIONS MANAGER —

READING BY AMY BLOOM AT LIBRARY PRIZE AWARD CEREMONY

The Friends were honored to have Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and best-selling

author Amy Bloom read from her new novel, White Houses, at the annual meeting and awards ceremony for the Friends of the Wesleyan Library Undergraduate Research Prize. White Houses is Bloom’s first historical fiction, illuminating the relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, a prominent journalist, against the backdrop of American history.

The Friends Library Research Prize celebrates ex-cellence in library research and writing. The first place prize of $500 was awarded to Elinor Weissberg ’20 for her paper “Understanding the American Liber-ty League,” written for the course The 20th-Century United States (HIST240). She was nominated by Profes-sor of History Ronald Schatz. The second place prize of $250 was awarded to Kevin Liu ’20 for his paper “Mat-ter over Mind: Body in the Chinese Model of Depres-sion and the Effects of Acculturation,” written for the course The Health of Communities (SOC315) taught by Peggy Carey Best, director of service learning and visiting professor of sociology. Two students received honorable mentions: Azher Jaweed ’19 for “Dams: A Visual Analysis” (Prof. Erik Grimmer-Solem) and Ju-lia Perry ’19 for “An Analysis of Popular Hair Styling Techniques and Marketing Strategies in the United States, 1960–2000” (Prof. H.C. Robinson). If you are in-terested in sponsoring next year's prizes, please email libfriends@wesleyan.edu.

—JENNIFER HADLEY, FRIENDS OF THE WESLEYAN LIBRARY —

Ù 1872.231.5 Passamaquoddy Tribe curly-style woven ash basket; Eastport, Maine; collected in 1872 by Dr. George Brown Goode. COURTESY OF JESSIE COHEN.

THESIS — ": A SHIP OF FOOLS" Author's note about his thesis title: "When we use an allegory in a phrase with a colon, we evoke the relationship between expression and allegory.... The blank space preceding the colon suggests the multitudi-nous and unpredictable possibilities—in past, present, and future—for the employment of allegory."

My thesis began when I first visited Olin Library’s Special Collections & Archives early junior year.

Entering the Davison Rare Book Room, a beautifully curated 19th-century gentleman’s library tucked away in a corner of Olin, feels very much like entering the inner sanctum of a monastery—especially when one understands the rare and valuable materials it guards. There, I was introduced to Wesleyan’s copy of Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools; and as I contemplated my senior project late junior year, I realized that so many questions I had of history were able to be asked within the boundaries of this artifact. Thus, the book became the ground-ing and springboard for my project. The Narrenschiff, a collection of witty and erudite satirical caricatures, is one of the first secular European “bestsellers” following the invention of the printing press. Our copy is an authorized Latin translation by Brant’s favorite pupil, Jakob Locher, and was printed in 1497 in Brant’s native Strasbourg by the Catholic master printer Johann Grüninger. It is

INTRODUCING NATHAN MEALEY, WESLEYAN’S NEW ASSOCIATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIAN

On March 1, Nathan Mealey joined the library as the new associate university

librarian for technical and digital services. Nathan will be in charge of the departments in the library that deal with materials acqui-sitions, cataloging of physical and electronic materials, electronic resources, serials sub-scriptions, digital projects, and the library discovery system. In short, everything that goes on behind the scenes. Nathan’s posi-tion is part of a planned library reorgani-zation that was developed and approved in spring 2017.

Nathan joins the library from Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, where he worked for seven years as the manager of library technologies, helping to enhance the library’s technology infrastructure for its users. He played an integral part in the Orbis Cascade Alliance’s implementation of Alma and Primo, the same library system that the CTW Consortium (Connecticut College – Trinity College – Wesleyan University) implemented in the summer of 2017. His knowledge of that system will be of tremendous benefit as the CTW Consortium continues to refine its new system for public use as well as looking at improving workflows that support discoverability of library materials. Nathan has a BA in social thought and political economy from the University of Massachusetts, a master’s degree in comparative literature from Dartmouth College, and an MLIS from Simmons College.

Since arriving at Wesleyan, Nathan has been spending his time getting to know the Middletown area. “I’m very happy to join the Wesleyan Library and am looking forward to getting to know and work with everyone both in the library and on campus. In the short time that I’ve been here, the entire Wesleyan community has been extraordinarily welcoming, and it’s been great fun to learn more about the University and the exciting things taking place. Luckily, my family and I settled just a short walk from both campus and downtown, and have met some wonderful folks since we arrived, which has helped us land comfortably on our feet after moving here from Portland, Oregon. Plus, we’ve had ready access to Middletown’s eclectic food scene, which has been quite a treat. So far, NoRa’s cupcakes have been the highlight!”

Welcome, Nathan!

— DIANE KLARE, INTERIM UNIVERSITY LIBRARIAN, ASSOCIATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIAN

FOR RESEARCH AND ACCESS SERVICES —

WELCOMING CLAUDIA WOLF

Claudia Wolf started as a temp in the Olin Library office in September 2017 and was

hired permanently in February 2018. Her main responsibilities are budget, payroll, accounts payable, reports, carrels, and office requests. She brings a strong background in finance, attention to detail, time manage-ment, and listening skills to help the library office run smoothly. Prior to Olin, she worked at the Green Street Teaching and Learning Center for 12 years and has also worked for PIMMS and HOT (Higher Order Thinking) schools. Her favorite aspect of the library is interacting with individuals working at or vis-iting the library, and she especially appreciates the diversity and vibrance of her coworkers. In her free time, she enjoys weaving, knitting, crochet, jewelry making, beadwork, and music.

richly annotated, colored in, and, perhaps most fascinat-ingly, includes a handwritten list of French revolutionary figures in the first pages, presumably the product of a read-er’s desire to “update” Brant’s encyclopedia of fools to their present day.

In my thesis, I explore the kinds of questions our artifact evokes, and I do so with special attention to various theo-ries of history that play a role in developing stories we tell about objects of the past. My inquiries revolve around the theoretical conditions of making an object of a past that is far gone and unreachable into an object with presence for our contemporary con-sideration and meaning making. I discuss Brant’s book as an example of allegory, and I discuss allegory as a means of writing and viewing history. I tell the story of the book’s printing in Strasbourg, and I investigate the implications of certain his-toriographic choices with regards to source material and evidence. I contextualize the book’s entrance into Wesleyan’s collection from the acquired library of for-mer Wesleyan Professor of Greek James Cook van Benschoten, and I examine the kind of enchantment we give to otherwise mundane objects by archiving them in “special” collections like our own. Finally, I talk about various uses of books, such as interpretation, adaptation, manipulation, annotation, and coloring-in, and I reflect on the conceptual difficulties of pinning down particular readers to particular times through their respective uses of the book. In all, while my project is a call to readers and writers of history to be conscious of the philosophical sig-nificance of certain choices we make as historical beings, it is always grounded, one might even say anchored, by the artifact of the Ship of Fools in our collection.

—GABRIEL KACHUCK ’18 —

CONGRATULATIONS TO KATHLEEN CATALDI ON HER RETIREMENT!

K athleen Cataldi joined the Olin Reserves Department at Wesleyan

on March 5, 2008, as her second career after teaching high school students for 31 years.

During the 10 years of her service at Olin Reserves, Kathleen managed the department with the primary focus of fulfilling course material requirements for our students and faculty. In support of faculty’s teaching, she prepared over 200 courses and thousands of course readings linked on the E-reserves sys-tem every year. At the same time, she hired and trained 25–30 student workers to cover the Olin Reserves desk hours. Kathleen’s students admired her cheer-ful smile and high-voiced enthusiasm. She maintained a good relationship with them and provided many qualifying rec-ommendations for her current and grad-uated students on their work with Olin Reserves. Kathleen embodies the spirit of “once a teacher, always a teacher.”

Not only her students, but also many faculty members, praise Kathleen’s timely and efficient work ethic.

While working at Olin Library, Kathleen earned credits towards the equivalent of a second master’s degree from Wesleyan’s GLS program. She also served as chair of CLASS (Connecticut Library Association Support Staff) sec-tion. Please join me in extending our appreciation to Kathleen for her ded-icated service to faculty, students, and the library as access services coordinator, also known as reserves supervisor.

Congratulations on completing another milestone, and best wishes to Kathleen Cataldi on her retirement.

—EUNJOO LEE, HEAD OF ACCESS SERVICES —

Amy Bloom '75

Elinor Weissberg '20

Kevin Liu '20

COURTESY OF SAADIA NAEEM '20.