Robbins Library Notes

At left: “The Book Fool,” from Sebastian Brandt’s The Ship of Fools (1494).  This woodcut, along with many of the others in the book, is believed by many to have been executed by a young Albrecht Dürer.

Good morning, readers!

Bibliophilia seems to be a common ailment amongst academics and those devoted to the life of the mind.  For any bibliophile Harvard students reading this blog who are book and art collectors, you may be interested in entering the Philip Hofer Prize in Collecting Books and Art.

Here’s the description from the Houghton Library Web site:

The Philip Hofer prize is awarded each year to a student whose collection of books or works of art best exemplifies the traditions of breadth, coherence, and imagination represented by Philip Hofer, A.B. ‘21, L.H.D. ‘67, founder and first Curator of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts in the Houghton Library and Secretary of the Fogg Art Museum. The entries are judged on purpose, consistency, and quality; cost, rarity, and size are not criteria. The prize, which is to encourage student interest in collecting, was established by Melvin R. Seiden, A.B. ‘52, L.L.B. ‘55. The panel of judges reserves the right to make the award only to candidates whose collections are considered to be of exceptional quality. A first prize of $2,000 and second and third prizes of $1,000 and $500 will be offered in 2009-2010. Winners will also be invited to lend representative books or works of art to an exhibition at the library.

For further information, contact Hope Mayo, Philip Hofer Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts in Houghton Library, via e-mail.

A few things to note:

• Entry Rules – The complete entry rules for 2009-2010 can be found here.
• Deadline — The deadline for submissions is 18 February 2010.
• Who is eligible — The contest is open to all Harvard students, whether in the undergraduate program, graduate programs, or the professional schools.
• The Objective of the Prize –  The memo about the prize that I received states: “The objective of this prize is not reward wealthy students who collect fine art or rare books, but rather to encourage and acknowledge students who use their resources, however small, in a thoughtful and organized way to build collections expressive of their own interests.”

I also have a flyer here at my desk, which interested students may come and photocopy.

You may enjoy reading Nicholas Basbanes’ A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books, to whet your appetite.

Good luck!  And happy collecting!

At left: “The Book Fool,” from Sebastian Brandt’s The Ship of Fools (1494).  This woodcut, along with many of the others in the book, is believed by many to have been executed by a young Albrecht Dürer.

Good morning, readers!

Bibliophilia seems to be a common ailment amongst academics and those devoted to the life of the mind.  For any bibliophile Harvard students reading this blog who are book and art collectors, you may be interested in entering the Philip Hofer Prize in Collecting Books and Art.

Here’s the description from the Houghton Library Web site:

The Philip Hofer prize is awarded each year to a student whose collection of books or works of art best exemplifies the traditions of breadth, coherence, and imagination represented by Philip Hofer, A.B. ‘21, L.H.D. ‘67, founder and first Curator of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts in the Houghton Library and Secretary of the Fogg Art Museum. The entries are judged on purpose, consistency, and quality; cost, rarity, and size are not criteria. The prize, which is to encourage student interest in collecting, was established by Melvin R. Seiden, A.B. ‘52, L.L.B. ‘55. The panel of judges reserves the right to make the award only to candidates whose collections are considered to be of exceptional quality. A first prize of $2,000 and second and third prizes of $1,000 and $500 will be offered in 2008-2009. Winners will also be invited to lend representative books or works of art to an exhibition at the library.

For further information, contact Hope Mayo, Philip Hofer Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts in Houghton Library, via e-mail.

A few things to note:

• Entry Rules – The complete entry rules for 2008-2009 can be found here.
• Deadline — The deadline for submissions is 19 February 2009.
• Who is eligible — The contest is open to all Harvard students, whether in the undergraduate program, graduate programs, or the professional schools.
• The Objective of the Prize –  The memo about the prize that I received states: “The objective of this prize is not reward wealthy students who collect fine art or rare books, but rather to encourage and acknowledge students who use their resources, however small, in a thoughtful and organized way to build collections expressive of their own interests.”

I also have a flyer here at my desk, which interested students may come and photocopy.

You may enjoy reading Nicholas Basbanes’ A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books, to whet your appetite.

Good luck!  And happy collecting!

At right: portrait of Samuel Pepys, by John Hayls, 1666

Good morning, readers!

To ease yourself into the weekend, consider this article from the Telegraph (UK), listing what it claims are the 110 best books of all times. What do you think? What books would you include in your perfect library?

On a related note, the famous diarist, Samuel Pepys, believed that the perfect gentleman’s library should contain exactly 3000 books, no more, no less. You can visit Pepys’ library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, UK, and see the books arranged in their original, custom-built cases. As the site notes:

The Pepys Library (of 3,000 volumes) is a splendid enrichment of the College by one of its most notable sons. Samuel Pepys (1651) became Secretary to the Admiralty for many years, and President of the Royal Society.

His famous Library came to the College only after the death of his nephew, John Jackson, who made a significant contribution to its final order. These are arranged by size, from No. 1 (the smallest) to No. 3,000 (the largest), and housed in twelve stately late seventeenth-century oak bookcases. Their fine bindings, mostly done for Pepys, are of much interest. The library desk, perhaps Pepys’s own, is also an integral part of the arrangement. There is a studio-copy of the Kneller portrait of Pepys here.

…Among the Library’s treasures are some sixty medieval manuscripts, some important early printed books (including seven incunabula by Caxton, eight by Wynkyn de Worde, and seven by Pynson), and a naval collection (notably the ‘Anthony Roll’, illustrating the ships of the Royal Navy c. 1546, such as The Mary Rose, and Drake’s autographed nautical pocket almanack).

In addition, there are special collections of prints, ballads, music, maps, and calligraphy, all of them now the subject of comprehensive published catalogues. Pepys’s own diary covering the years 1660 to 1669 is preserved in six volumes, written in Shelton’s shorthand, which only looks superficially like Pitman’s. This too has recently been definitively edited by Robert Latham, C.B.E., F.B.A., Fellow and Pepys Librarian (1972-82).

You can read more about Pepys’ library in Nicholas Basbanes’ book, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books.

At left: “The Book Fool” attributed to Albrecht Dürer, from Das Narrenschiff, by Sebastian Brant (1494)

Those who know me well know my passion for books and reading, not unlike the donkey-eared gentleman at left. As such, the future of the book and reading are two topics of great concern and interest to me. Indeed, some of my readers might remember an earlier post of mine on e-books. In another post, I wrote about my view on the evolution of print and electronic format: the physical book will not disappear, but co-exist with e-books, as a separate entity and in a hybrid form.

So, it was with great interest that I read these two very interesting articles from a recent issue of the Washington Post last week — thanks to Bookforum.com for posting the links to these pieces!

Howard Gardner, in “The End of Literacy? Don’t Stop Reading,” offers his views on how he thinks reading will evolve. He begins:

What will happen to reading and writing in our time?

Could the doomsayers be right? Computers, they maintain, are destroying literacy. The signs — students’ declining reading scores, the drop in leisure reading to just minutes a week, the fact that half the adult population reads no books in a year — are all pointing to the day when a literate American culture becomes a distant memory. By contract, optimists foresee the Internet ushering in a new, vibrant participatory culture of words. Will they carry the day?

Maybe neither. Let me suggest a third possibility: Literacy — or an ensemble of literacies — will continue to thrive, but in forms and formats we can’t yet envision.

That’s what has always happened as writing and reading have evolved over the ages….

From the same issue of the Washington Post, Randy Salzman, in “Not Reading An Iota in America,” makes a rueful comparison. Americans, blessed with freedom and leisure to read, rarely do, but those in other countries who are deprived of freedom will put up with torture and the threat of death to read:

Call it the paradox of the book. Where we can read, where we should read, even in a place where reading might address the exact problem being battled and where there is little else to do but read, we don’t. But “over there,” where the simple pleasure of understanding life through literature is denied, people are willing to suffer — and at least one of these women [in Reading Lolita in Tehran] is jailed, raped and beaten — for the right to open Austen, Kafka, Nabokov, Tolstoy and Twain.

Salzman, contemplating the power of the book to change lives, wonders how many lives might be changed by simply leaving books about, and taking advantage of the freedom to read.

What do you think? Do you agree with Gardner or Salzman?

As for myself, I think that Gardner’s general idea, that reading will evolve in ways that we can’t foresee right now, is correct — books are here to stay, as is reading, though they will change, similar to the way that the codex replaced the scroll as the medium of writing, and the printed book the illuminated manuscript.

In regards to Salzman, the question of literally dying to read is a hard one to answer. We take books for granted, and the relative freedom with which we can read without interference from government, religious, and other authorities. Sometimes we forget just how powerful a book can be, and how it can change a person’s life for the better.

Definitely food for thought…

For any Harvard students reading this blog who are book collectors, you may be interested in entering the Philip Hofer Prize in Collecting. Here’s the description from the Houghton Library Web site:

The Philip Hofer prize is awarded each year to a student whose collection of books or works of art best exemplifies the traditions of breadth, coherence, and imagination represented by Philip Hofer, A.B. ‘21, L.H.D. ‘67, founder and first Curator of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts in the Houghton Library and Secretary of the Fogg Art Museum. The entries are judged on purpose, consistency, and quality; cost, rarity, and size are not criteria. The prize, which is to encourage student interest in collecting, was established by Melvin R. Seiden, A.B. ‘52, L.L.B. ‘55.

The panel of judges reserves the right to make the award only to candidates whose collections are considered to be of exceptional quality. A first prize of $2,000 and second and third prizes of $1,000 and $500 will be offered in 2007-2008. Winners will also be invited to lend representative books or works of art to an exhibition at the library.

For further information, contact Hope Mayo, Philip Hofer Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts in Houghton Library, via e-mail.

I also have a flyer here at my desk with information, which interested students may come and photocopy.