Dear readers: It has been a while since our last issue and we are excited to update you about our new spaces, collections, exhibits, and events. |
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SC&A's new learning lab in action. The room boasts movable furniture, a high powered document camera, and built-in speakers and cameras for optimal online and in-person interaction. |
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Special Collections & Archives' instruction program reached a milestone in Summer 2022 when the College approved the construction of a dedicated classroom space for teaching with the library's rare books, archives, and manuscript materials. The classroom opened in time for the 2022-2023 academic year, but backordered technology was just installed this summer. The room, appropriately dubbed the Learning Lab, is in very high demand. Special Collections Education and Engagement Librarian Marieke Van Der Steenhoven is hosting 55 class sessions this semester.
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Data Viz: Looking at Visual Knowledge Production |
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Our major Fall 2023 exhibition celebrates and explores the history of data visualization. Coinciding with the tenth anniversary of the College's Digital and Computational Studies program, the exhibit considers how historical and contemporary readers rely on graphs, charts, iconography, and other typographical devices to parse large quantities of information and make sense of the world around them. Objects from the exhibition are drawn from Special Collections' extensive rare book holdings and include a 1491 printing of Euclid's geometry, 18th century timelines, and contemporary network maps of library metadata.
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Bowdoin College Presidents: Scholarship |
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This summer Asian Studies and History major Amy Cai ’25 researched and curated an exhibition on the first floor of Hawthorne-Longfellow Library that looks at past Bowdoin College presidents and their scholarship. From essays written as undergraduates to fieldwork conducted as scholars, Amy’s exhibit offers a glimpse of the intellectual life of past Bowdoin presidents in celebration of the inauguration of Bowdoin’s 16th president, Safa R. Zaki, in October. |
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Up-Biblum God: The Algonquian Bible, Native Labor and Indigenous Futures
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Bowdoin holds both the first and second edition of the exceedingly rare Up-Biblum God, also known as Eliot's Bible or the Algonquian Bible, both of which are currently on view on the third floor of Hawthorne-Longfellow Library. Containing the complete Old and New Testaments translated from English into the Algonquian language, this Bible was the first printed in what would become the United States.
Please join us on October 11, 2023 at 4:30 p.m. in the Special Collections & Archives Learning Lab and online for a conversation with Kimberly Toney, Coordinating Curator of Native American and Indigenous Collections, Brown University Library, about the Algonquian Bible. Toney will consider the contributions of those who labored in translating and printing works in the Algonquian family of native languages, and discuss how current language reclamation projects illuminate the importance of these translations and of the English and Algonquian people who worked together to produce them. Toney's visit is cosponsored by the Baxter Bibliophilic Society of Maine.
The Up-Biblum God display and Toney's visits are preludes to a major Fall 2024 exhibition now under development that will consider how indigenous histories and futures are figured, described, and imagined in Bowdoin College's rare book collection. Traditional Western bibliographic description has long obscured the role of Indigenous creators and readers in the production and consumption of books and printed information in early American history. The exhibition will draw upon recent scholarship by Toney and others that seeks to uncover how Indigenous individuals and communities considered alphabetic literacy and printed books as both opportunities and threats during the constantly shifting geo-political and cultural context of early New England.
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They're Back! SC&A Trading Cards |
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Collectors everywhere can heave a big sigh of relief! After a three-year hiatus due to COVID, SC&A has issued its third set of trading cards. Like the previous sets, the cards feature short biographies of people whose papers and records feature prominently in our archival and manuscript collections. Pick up your set at Special Collections to learn more about America's first rock star (geology professor Parker Cleaveland), a witness to Gettysburg (Mary Eliza Hunt Carson), Thomas Edison's most trusted engineer (Charles Lorenzo Clarke, Bowdoin Class of 1875), and the first woman to receive an honorary degree at Bowdoin (author Sarah Orne Jewett). |
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Featured New Acquisitions |
Special Collections recently acquired a full run of The Little Review, an American avant-garde magazine edited by Margaret Anderson, later joined by her business and romantic partner Jane Heap, with Ezra Pound as European editor. During its run from 1914 to 1929, the magazine featured works by some of the most influential modern American, English, Irish, and French artists and writers, including Marcel Duchamp, who designed the Spring 1925 cover shown here. Other contributors include Emma Goldman, Amy Lowell, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, William Butler Yeats, Hart Crane, and Ben Hecht. Anderson and her team did not shy away from controversy and embraced Dadaism, Surrealism, feminism and anarchism; more than one issue of the magazine was censored, most notably the April 1920 issue, bringing to a halt the serialized publication of James Joyce's Ulysses due to charges of obscenity.
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Back Then and Now is an artist book project that explores the layered history of a farmhouse on the coast of Maine. The project is the third collaboration between book artist Rebecca Goodale and Bowdoin College Professor of Art Carrie Scanga. The book was inspired by their 2022 visit to Pettengill Farm, a study site stewarded by the Freeport Historical Society. The imagery in the book evokes the house's remaining wallpaper, rock and shell collection, and sgraffito, images scratched in the plaster walls. As part of our Bowdoin & The Book series, SC&A will host a discussion with the artists facilitated by poet Carl Little on September 28 at 2pm.
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Bowdoin College Library's Special Collections & Archives
207-725-3288
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