This semester 42 students are enrolled in the History and Principles of Quakerism class taught by Professor Emma Lapsansky-Werner. The record number of curious scholars is a reflection of the growing interest in Quakerism on Haverford’s campus. Last week two library sessions were held with students to orient them to the resources in the Quaker Collection that will help them complete their assignments that include a group project on a Quaker novel, presentation of Pendle Hill Pamphlets and a challenging bibliographic essay on some aspect of Quakerism. Students and librarians will be very busy in the weeks ahead exploring the breadth and depth of our collection!

Swarthmore College ’s Externship Program is an opportunity for a current student to spend five days at the workplace of an alumnus/a in order to gain practical exposure to a career field.  Naomi Liang joined us in Special Collections this January:

From January 11 to January 15 I participated in an externship offered by David Conners, Digital Collections Librarian (Swarthmore alum ‘03), at Magill Library’s Special Collections.  The Swarthmore Extern Program entails five days of job shadowing to allow undergraduates to explore a particular field of interest.  My current prospective majors are philosophy, English literature, and sociology/anthropology.  Since knowledge accession, reading culture and, generally, the process of research have long been fascinations of mine, I was happy to be able to absorb librarian life during my five days at Magill.

I spent much of my time working with David on digital archiving – scanning and photographing photographs used for classes, scanning books, reformatting digital audio, and cataloging art.  I sat in on a meeting of TAG, the Tri-College Technology Advisory Group, where librarians worked out the final logistics of the neat-looking new service Tripod Mobile (a mobile-friendly version of the catalog for use on smart phones).  During this time I also shadowed Ann Upton, Special Collections librarian and Quaker Bibliographer, who, along with David, guided me around the rare book vault and allowed me to pull out random items out of curiosity (including a beautiful 1854 edition of Walden and Christopher Morley’s German literature notes from 1910).  Ann also showed me her process of deciding which rare books or Quaker books to add to the collection.  We also answered emailed reference questions regarding Quaker genealogies, and I spent a few hours working on the beginnings of a new project in Special Collections – the digitization of 19th century Quaker fiction illustrations for an exhibit on the popular depiction of Quakers.

Of course, my gathered gemstones of experience at Magill were not all from work.  During the coffee breaks and the all staff meeting I attended, “all staff” at Haverford consisting of only a little over 20 people, I was able to witness the collaborative and truly congenial atmosphere of a library workforce. I was amazed by and very grateful for the welcome I received by everyone, as well as for the stories I’ve heard from people in various stages of the library career – a current student, a recent graduate, and librarians who are well into their careers and love what they do, a number of whom began their life as college graduates with jobs completely unrelated to librarianship. I absolutely enjoyed my time at Haverford, and I am looking forward to my next visit to Magill’s Special Collections.

I began working in Special Collections in the summer of 2008 after my freshman year at Haverford.  I worked with Manuscripts Librarian and College Archivist Diana Franzusoff Peterson on two projects.  The first was a light conservation of the Hartshorne family papers.  The Hartshorne family is a prominent Quaker family in the Philadelphia area.  I also looked through the archives of the Haverford and Bi-Co News to look for connections between Haverford and China for an exhibit on Haverford’s relationship with China.

During the 2008-2009 academic year I worked with Quaker Bibliographer and Special Collections Librarian Ann Upton on a number of projects.  The first was an inventory of the William Jenks collection, a collection of early Quaker writings from around the time of the founding of the Society of Friends.  The second project was a re-housing and inventory of the Quaker Broadside collection.  This project has led to the on-going digitization of the collection.  Upon completion of the inventory, I displayed some of the work I had done on the collection and gave a presentation to the Haverford Corporation/Board of Managers describing the project.  I also regularly worked with Ann checking in Serials and keeping our Serials group collection up to date.

During the summer of 2009, I again worked with Diana Peterson to create a finding aid for the William Warder Cadbury and Catherine Jones Cadbury collection.  For most of the summer I dealt with the numerous unsorted photos in the collection.  Many of these photos were from their stay as Quaker missionaries in Canton, China at the Canton Christian College.  I sorted them into folders, performed some light conservation on them, and ultimately created a finding aid so they can be easily available to scholars.

This fall, I have continued working with Ann Upton on the Serial groups and now the Pamphlet groups collections.  In addition, I have been working on an inventory of the Quaker Rare Books Collection, a collection substantially larger than the Jenks Collection I worked with last year.

Outside of my work in Special Collections, I am a Philosophy major at Haverford and a Political Science minor at Bryn Mawr and am interested mostly in political philosophy.  I also run on the cross country and track teams here at Haverford.

We learned the happy news last week that we have been awarded a Save America’s Treasures grant from the National Park Services for the preservation and digitization of the papers of the Friendly Association. The papers are among our most heavily used collections, having been used by several published scholars, as well as Ph.D. candidates, Master’s degree thesis writers and undergraduate history majors from Haverford in recent years.

The “Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures” was established in 1756 by a group of eminent Quakers in Philadelphia following months of horrific violence between settlers and Native Americans on the Pennsylvania frontier. Self-consciously contrasting themselves with the British army, the militia, and the more militant representatives of the proprietary government, the leaders of the Friendly Association sought to establish peaceful relations with the Delaware Indians and other nearby tribes, and thereby prove the effectiveness of Quaker pacifism.

The Friendly Association was a private initiative, without the official sanction of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, but it quickly assumed a prominent role in many of the most important controversies of the day. Israel Pemberton and the other leaders of the Association sought to represent the interests of the Delaware in their ongoing dispute with the Pennsylvania government over the so-called “walking purchase.” They monitored and participated in a series of treaty negotiations in the late 1750s and early 1760s, and eventually their disputes with the proprietary government became one element in a broad Quaker campaign to establish royal government and rescind the colonial charter.

The Friendly Association papers contain hundreds of unique and detailed accounts of behind-the-scenes treaty negotiations; historical documents dating back to the early years of Pennsylvania related to Indian affairs; the correspondence of Pemberton and others relating to fund-raising and the exigencies of Pennsylvania politics; and missives from Indian leaders, transcribed or otherwise transmitted by an intricate network of Indian “go-betweens” who maintained almost constant contact with the Association.

Dating from 1745–1792, the papers were bound into five folio-sized, half-leather scrapbooks in the late 19th century. The documents suffer from embrittlement of their housing and support, iron gall ink corrosion and degradation of the documents themselves, and heavy use, greatly exacerbating the threat of continued damage from the preceding problems. Treatment will take place in our in-house conservation lab and will allow for removal of the documents from their embrittled scrapbook leaves and stabilization of the document inks and paper supports. Each document will also be scanned and the resulting digital images will be loaded into Triptych, our digital library system. The project will take two years to complete and will involve several staff members, preservation interns, and student assistants.

In 1678, an Englishman named Ambrose Rigge wrote a religious treatise entitled “A brief and serious Warning to such as are concerned in Comerce [sic] and Trading who go under the profession of Truth to keep within ye bounds thereof in Righteousness, Justice and Honestie towards all men.” One of the interesting facts about Rigge was that he became a Quaker, convinced by the founder of that faith, George Fox, and was one of the “publishers of truth,” an elegant phrase describing how early Friends got the word out. The original text, a part of which can be viewed below, is unique — no other repository claims to have anything written by Rigge in his own hand, though certainly the published versions are available, including quite a number in the Quaker Collection at Haverford.

At Haverford, we received this unique document on doing business in a righteous manner as part of the transfer of records from the Monthly Meeting of Friends of Philadelphia (Arch Street Meeting) in 2008, and it is now a part of those records, call number S2.17. Unfortunately, it is in fragile condition and missing a significant portion of text.  No problem. With access to Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, one can see the entire transcribed text electronically, or at Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges bound with other texts.  It is comforting to know that one can access this treatise whenever the need arises.

William Penn, Founder of Pennsylvania, 2006

Penn's Excellent Priviledge of Liberty & Property

Rare Books from the Haverford Collection and their most Modern Renditions

Haverford’s rare book collection is exceptional.  The rarity and beauty of  the books are assets that enhance enjoyment of the texts and exemplifies the best values of a liberal arts education.

A broad appreciation of literature today, however, includes graphic books. The literary experience is of a condensed account presented through intense illustration and is in striking contrast to that of the more traditional text-based book.

Experience and consider these differences for yourself. Each day during exam week, December 14-18, 2009,  a rare book and its graphic counterpart will be on display in Special Collections. Take a study break and be intrigued and challenged!

Antoinette Brown defended her post as Reverend of the Congregational Church in Wayne County NY in The Liberator on December 15, 1854. Brown was the first woman in the United States to be ordained a minister and was an associate of Susan B. Anthony and Julia Ward Howe.

The Liberator was an abolitionist periodical read by a broader spectrum of the reading public than subscribed to general interest journals and was more liberal in its perspective. The readership was sympathetic to Brown’s defense of “the position which Woman can now occupy in the clerical profession.”

Quaker, Margaret Fell, wrote on the right of women to preach two centuries earlier in 1667. Incongruously, Brown decries the Quakers for rejecting her as a “hireling minister.”

The Liberator is part of the Rare Newspaper Collection at Special Collections that contains over 250 titles from the US and Britain from the 18th through 20th centuries. The research value of these newspapers lies in the contemporary reports of what is now considered historical and their topical strengths of reform and anti-slavery activities.

Along with 23 other area institutions, Haverford is participating in the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries’ “Hidden Collections in the Philadelphia Area: A Consortial Processing and Cataloging Initiative,” a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by the Council of Library and Information Resources. Led by Project Director Holly Mengel, Project Archivist Courtney Smerz, and a great team of students from Drexel’s iSchool, we enthusiastically agreed to be one of the guinea pigs in helping to get the project off the ground.  For the last few weeks, Holly and graduate students Forrest Wright and Leslie O’Neill have been working through several of our “hidden collections” of high research value.  We’re pleased to see the progress they’ve made in such a short period of time and the team has been a great addition to the Special Collections crew.  We encourage our readers to follow the project blog, which includes posts about the work being done in our collection.

It should come as little surprised that the literary works of John Keats have been the subject of numerous attempts at forgery.  Major George de Luna Byron (ca. 1810-1882), who claimed to be the natural son of the Lord George Gordon Byron by a Spanish countess, was quite successful at penning and pawning off fake letters of Byron, Shelley and Keats in the mid-nineteenth century.  And H. Buxton Forman (1842-1917), the legitimate editor of several editions of published letters and writings of John Keats was later implicated in one of the great literary forgeries of the early twentieth century. Manuscript forgeries were once so frequent that Simon Gratz’s 1920 A Book About Autographs included among its thirteen chapters “Chapter IV: Concerning Spurious or False Autographs,” followed by “Chapter V: The Same Subject Continued,” and “Chapter VI: The Same Subject Continued.”

Returning to Haverford’s own Keats letter, our records show that it too was once the subject of a forgery investigation.  In January 1965, curator of the Quaker Collection, Edwin B. Bronner, was contacted by a recent college graduate from Florida who had been shown the very same letter by a bookseller in Miami.  Supposedly found within the pages of an 1833 edition of Hogarth’s Anecdotes, the bookseller was not interested in selling the letter, but was anxious to know of its authenticity.  Bronner sent the young man a photostat of our original and the Florida letter was sent to the laboratory of the Metropolitan Dade County Police Department for inspection.  Their reply: “This is a clumsy, artificially aged print, not handwriting. As a manuscript it is worth nothing. 13 Jan 1965.”  The young man who wrote to us also stated that the document had been covered on both sides with an adhesive plastic and then partially burned, causing a “peculiar polka dot area in the upper right-hand corner of the front sheet.”  A negative photostat of the Florida imposter still remains in our files (along with the authentic Keats letter) and notice of the incident was reported by Bronner in the April 1965 issue of The American Archivist.

Gest Fellow Catherine Baylin is a MA student in Middle East Studies at the American University in Cairo. Her research is on Quaker missionaries in the Middle East before World War II.

Catherine Baylin 2009 Gest Fellow

I first came to Haverford to research Quaker missionaries in Ramallah, Palestine and am delighted to be back to expand my research to include Quakers in Brumana, Lebanon. I am particularly interested in Quaker activity in the Middle East as a case study of Arab-American relations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I hope to challenge the common perception that American missions were unambiguously colonial during this time period and explore the ways in which local residents shaped mission activity.

The collections at Haverford provide unparalleled insight into the schools, Meetings, and medical missions that Quakers established in the late 19th century. The Jones papers contain hundreds of letters and records detailing the activities and finances of the Lebanon mission. The Quaker Collection also contain early writings of Theophilus Waldmeier, the founder of the Brumana mission, as well as the collection of Daniel and Emily Oliver, who opened an orphanage nearby. No study of the Quakers in Lebanon could be complete without examining this original source material. The Quaker Collection also contains numerous published sources which are proving central to my research, including biographies, yearbooks, and memoirs.

Having the time to comb these collections at this state of my academic career is incredibly rewarding, and I would like to thank the staff and the Gest Fellowship Committee for providing me with this opportunity.