Category: Classes and Instruction

Gold, Ink, and Parchment: Yale’s Traveling Scriptorium Visits SCUA

Paper Conservator Marie-France Lemay discussing pigments.
Marie-France Lemay discussing pigments in the Traveling Scriptorium.

Yale University Library Paper Conservator Marie-France Lemay recently presented two workshops in Special Collection and University Archives’ Ken Kesey Classroom on the materials of medieval and early modern books. Lemay presented samples of materials and tools that would have been used by early bookmakers and illuminators from the Traveling Scriptorium, a teaching kit created by Yale’s Beineke Library conservators. These workshops were arranged by Dr. Vera Keller in conjunction with a JSMA lecture on the history of color in the Italian Baroque period.

Lemay provided students from Dr. Vera Keller’s “Global History of Color” and Dr. Nina Amstutz’s “Art and Science” courses with the opportunity to handle raw materials used in historical manuscript production and scribal practices, such as stretched parchment and laid paper used for writing substrates and the ingredients for black iron gall ink (gall nuts from oak trees, green vitriol/iron sulfate, and gum arabic). The workshop also included a mixing demonstration of traditional pigments and inks and discussion of the chemical differences of organic versus inorganic materials and the nature of man-made pigments such as verdigris, produced by exposing copper to acetic acid (vinegar).

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New Exhibit | Creative Commonplacing

Detail of commonplace book of children's book author and illustrator Elizabeth Orton Jones.
Detail of Edna St. Vincent Millay quote in commonplace book of children’s book author and illustrator Elizabeth Orton Jones. Elizabeth Orton Jones papers. Coll 200. Box 7. Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries, Eugene, Oregon.

A new exhibit is now on view during the Winter 2018 term in the Paulson Reading Room in Special Collections and University Archives titled Creative Commonplacing: The Facets of Book Love. 

Students of Professor Mai-Lin Cheng’s Fall 2017 course HC421, “Book Love: Or, Reading Commonplaces,” curated this exhibit of commonplace books, diaries, and scrapbooks. The exhibit also highlights other “book love” projects  undertaken by the students during the course, including the results of a bookbinding workshop with Collections Conservator Marilyn Mohr and a handwriting workshop with Manuscripts Librarian Linda Long.

The public is invited to an opening reception in SCUA on 1/18/18, 4-5 p.m.

An introduction to the exhibit from the guidebook written by the student curatorial team follows:

Our class during Fall 2017 was the first of hopefully many future classes on the topic of Book Love, exploring the origins of book writing and what it means to love books and share what we understand of the world. Commonplaces are both a reflection of an author and their greater community, with the practice beginning in the seventeenth century as a type of note-sharing. In this class, we explored what it means to be an author as opposed to a compiler, as the lines are often blurred in commonplace books, as readers created their own personal anthologies, with passages, images, and other artifacts important to them to create a commonplace book.

The commonplace book is an artifact of active reading. In it, the reader becomes writer. The interchangeability of these two modes of relating to texts is, of course, familiar in our contemporary era of cutting-and-pasting, tweeting and retweeting, liking and linking. Exploring the origins of this information-sharing, however, reveals a more exclusive and exclusionary history in authorship and the sharing of information, and through exploring the history of book-making students deepened their awareness of an elitist history of information control. In this class, students experiment with individual methods of expressing “book love” in creating their own print or digital commonplace books, and through reading the same texts each student created their own unique commonplace work.

 

“Native American Photographs: The Art of Edward Curtis”: Insight Seminar, May 3, 2014

cp08026vThe University of Oregon Libraries Special Collections and University Archives will offer an inside look at the photographic work of Edward Curtis in a half-day UO Insight Seminar entitled “Native American Photographs: The Art of Edward Curtis.” The seminar is scheduled for Saturday, May 3, 9:15 a.m – 1:00 p.m., Knight Library Browsing Room, 1501 Kincaid Street. The registration fee for the noncredit, ungraded public seminar is $45. The seminar will be taught by James Fox, Head of Special Collections and University Archives, and Jennifer O’Neal, University Historian and Archivist.  Learn more and register online at https://library.uoregon.edu/administration/insight.html.

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