The LSU Libraries Special Collections recently acquired a small but important William C. C. Claiborne archive that contains very useful sources on the territorial post at Natchitoches, relations with the Creole French and Spanish and Native Americans in the Natchitoches area, and efforts to establish American rule and governmental structure in territorial Louisiana. The bulk of the eighteen item collection dates from 1805, but documents from 1805 to 1812 are included. It is comprised primarily of letters to Claiborne from and affidavits taken by Dr. John Sibley, Justice of the Peace at Natchitoches and U.S. Indian Agent.

Sibley’s letters are newsy and descriptive, and they provide both a sense of the danger and uncertainty on the ambiguous border between Spanish Texas and Louisiana and local attitudes toward the new American government, so recently established in New Orleans. For example, two affidavits forwarded by Sibley describe instances of “Spanish depredations” against citizens in which they took horses and goods. Additional affidavits record Natchitoches residents’ experiences living at and knowledge of the location of “ancient” French posts and Caddo settlements, apparently in an attempt to identify lands useful for further settlement. In a letter of 3 March 1805, Sibley relates efforts to equip the local Native Americans for farming and to win their allegiance over the Spanish, as well as the organization of the Caddo nation and fighting and alliances among its members– “the nearly thirty tribes in what I sepose to be Louisiana south of the Arkansas River.” Further, Sibley addresses topics from the need to regulate weights and measures to disputes about how to handle runaway slaves, how national politics are playing out locally, and the sense of those in the “Interior of the Territory” that they are being neglected in favor of New Orleans. He writes, “I hope they [the Legislature] will not give us reason to draw unfavorable inferences relative to their industry or capacity or reason. I think that they sepose the object of their creation was only to regulate New Orleans. We wish them to understand that we consider ourselves much neglected.”

In addition to the Sibley letters, the collection includes miscellaneous documents related to Claiborne’s family, a letter from Claiborne to his father recommending Gen. James Wilkinson (whom he describes as having served his country with fidelity), and two letters from Captain Edward Turner, Civil Commandant of the District of Natchitoches. Turner’s letters further illustrate the uneasy relations between the Creoles and the Americans. He reports the Creoles’ “wait and see” attitude about embracing the Americans, with them apparently hoping for the territory to be taken by the Spanish, and the role religion played in the mingling (or not) of the two populations. He writes, “They [Creoles] proposed to discountenance all persons settling within the district but true Romans, and they were to bind themselves to each other, to throw stumbling blocks in the way of any settler of different religious tenets- and to permit no person but a Roman Catholic to enter Church.”

This brief description gives only a hint of the rich sources in this collection. Though the documents are few in number, their writers were articulate, politically savvy, and, luckily for us, eager and able to convey a sense of the challenges of their duties and of the place in which they found themselves.

For additional information on this acquisition, contact Curator of Manuscripts Tara Laver, tzachar@lsu.edu.

Nancy Sharon Collins, a New Orleans stationer and graphic designer, recently donated a collection of several hundred engraved steel dies to LSU Special Collections. “Most of these are personal monograms, family crests and seals from local New Orleans private social clubs and organizations,” she writes. These dies were either produced or used by Dameron-Pierson Co., Ltd., of New Orleans, and although none of them are dated, many appear to date back at least as far as the Art Deco period of the 1920s and ’30s.

This collection will be the subject of a mini exhibit in February 2009. Stay tuned for more information.

And for additional images, visit Nancy’s blog at: http://www.typophile.com/blog/14410

Among the many new items recently added to LSU’s Rare Book Collection is a copy of Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African. Published in London in 1782, these letters were written by one of eighteenth-century England’s most well-known and admired men of African descent.

Ignatius Sancho was orphaned shortly after his birth in 1729 on a slave ship en route to the West Indies. At the age of two, he was sent to England and eventually became a butler in the service of the Duke of Montagu. The duke recongized the young man’s talent and saw to it that he received an education. There were few opportunities for educated Africans in England in those days, however. Sancho attempted a career on the stage, playing roles such as Othello, but he was unsuccessful. Thanks to an annuity from the late duke, he was finally able to set up shop as a grocer in London. By all accounts Sancho was an entertaining figure, hobnobbing with members of fashionable English society as well as the actor David Garrick and the novelist Laurence Sterne. In addition to being a “man of letters,” he also composed music and published a now-lost work on music theory.

Although slavery was outlawed in England in 1772, it continued to be permitted in the British colonies until the early 1800s. The abolition movement was on the rise, however, and men like Ignatius Sancho were held up as examples of Africans’ potential. The editor of his letters, a Miss Crewe, declared: “[My] motive for laying them before the public is the desire of showing that an untutored African may possess abilities equal to a European.” The book was popular, and Miss Crewe was pleased to find that the world was not “inattentive to the voice of obscure merit.”

– Michael Taylor, Assistant Curator of Books

Like Leonardo da Vinci, the German scholar Athanasius Kircher (ca. 1601-1680) was a true “Renaissance man.” Interested in both the arts and sciences, he wrote several dozen books on everything from medicine and geology to Egypt, cryptography, Noah’s Ark, and musical harmony. Kircher was especially interested in the history of languages, and just a year before his death, he published Turris Babel, a history of the Tower of Babel.

LSU Special Collections recently acquired a copy of this important work for the library’s Rare Book Collection.

According to the Bible, the people of Babylon attempted to build a huge tower that would reach all the way to heaven. After learning that they were constructing the tower for their own glory rather than His, however, God punished the Babylonians by making them all speak different languages. No longer able to communicate with each other, they stopped work on the tower, left Babylon, and went their separate ways. The tower not only became a symbol for human pride, but also helped explain the origin of languages.

In Turris Babel, Kircher suggested that rather than creating hundreds of languages at one stroke, God preserved Hebrew, which continued to be spoken by the descendants of Noah’s son Shem, and then created four new languages, which he assigned to the descendants of Noah’s other sons. These languages subsequently split apart even further over time, resulting in all the languages that are spoken today. Kircher singled out a few languages for special attention in the second half of his book. Considered the father of Egyptology, he was especially interested in Egyptian hieroglyphics, and he expands on one of his earlier works on this subject here.

Also of interest are several large engravings depicting the Tower of Babel, the hanging gardens of Babylon, the labyrinth of the Minotaur at Knossos, and other mythical sites. Visitors are welcome to use this book in the special collections reading room during the library’s regular hours.

– Michael Taylor, Assistant Curator of Books

In 1513, Gavin Douglas, a son of the fifth Earl of Angus, completed his translation of the Aeneid, Vergil’s epic account of the founding of Rome, into Scots, a dialect of English spoken in the area around Edinburgh and Glasgow. Written in heroic couplets, this work was the first metrical translation of a classical work to appear in English and was much acclaimed in its time. At the end of the poem, Douglas tacked on his translation of the so-called “Thirteenth Book” of the Aeneid, a continuation of Vergil’s poem written by Maffeo Vegio in the 15th century.

After circulating in manuscript for many years, Douglas’ poem was finally published in 1553 as The XIII Bukes of Eneados of the Famose Poete Vergill Translatet out of Latyne Verses into Scottish Metir. LSU Libraries’ Special Collections recently acquired a copy of this important work. Of particular interest in this copy are the numerous marginal notes in several early hands, as well as a page of handwritten notes pasted in at the end of the book which appear to pertain to word choices and spelling.

Another new acquisition is a rare 1548 edition of the philosopher and Protestant reformer John Calvin’s The Mynde of the Godly and Excellent Lerned Man M. Ihon Caluyne. First published in Geneva in 1543, this is Calvin’s scathing attack on French Protestants who avoided persecution by outwardly conforming to the Roman Catholic Church. It was the second of Calvin’s works to appear in English and is one of only nine surviving books to have been printed at Ipswich by John Oswen, whom King Edward VI had authorized to print religious texts, including works by reformers like Calvin.

With the 500th anniversary of Calvin’s birth coming up in 2009, Special Collections is pleased to announce its acquisition of this exceptionally rare book.

– Michael Taylor, Assistant Curator of Books

The LSU Libraries Special Collections is pleased to announce the completion of a 3.5 year, $196,140 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to microfilm Transcriptions of Louisiana Police Jury Records created by the Louisiana Historical Records Survey during the New Deal. In paper form, the collection totals 206 cubic feet and resulted in 581 35mm reels.

Police juries are the governing body of Louisiana’s parishes, and 60 of Louisiana’s 64 parishes are represented in the collection. Their meeting minutes and ordinances document local government responsibility; parish budgets and taxes, citizen participation in and expectations of government; settlement of the state’s rural areas and changes in land ownership; local ordinances governing slavery and local attitudes about it, as well as the changing status of African Americans after emancipation. The records reflect topics such as the development of education for blacks and whites, the battle to control yellow fever, livestock maintenance, transportation, and flood control and levee-building. The records also contain genealogical information, useful in identifying ancestors’ places of residence, death dates, and role in their communities.
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LSU Special Collections recently acquired two unusual bilingual texts. The first is a so-called “artist’s book” — a work of art that is bound like a book and in which text and image are merged. Designed by the French artist Bertrand Dorny, the book contains a short poem, Bilingue, written in French and English by the experimental writer Michel Butor. The poem and images describe a flight across the Atlantic during which travelers’ conversations blend together, “a spiral up the wand of Mercury” (the Roman god famous for flying from place to place in the blink of an eye). Although artists’ books (or livres d’artistes) are primarily a twentieth-century innovation, the form is often said to have originated with the English poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827). Artists’ books are typically produced in very small editions. Only ten copies of Bilingue, for example, were produced.

A related acquisition that also merges text, image, and mythology is Les Traits de l’Histoire Universelle (1761) by Jean-Louis Aubert, an eighteenth-century French dramatist, poet and essayist. The work contains selections from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in French and Latin and over 120 engravings illustrating the verses. An outstanding example of an early educational text illustrated for children, this book was also intended “for the instruction or amusement of persons of all ages and of all sexes.” The Grimm brothers, however, didn’t think the stories would be of much interest to adults; Voltaire, on the other hand, supposedly enjoyed them.

– Michael Taylor, Assistant Curator of Books

In the early 19th century, Midwestern farmers loaded their crops on flatboats at the end of every summer and floated them down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. The timber that was used to make these boats came from places like Minnesota and Wisconsin, and yet because the river’s current was so strong, it was impossible to take the boats back upriver after they had been unloaded. Instead, they were sold for scrap in New Orleans and were subsequently used to build many of the city’s houses.

Although the flatboat trade ended with the coming of the railroad, another product of the Wisconsin woods recently found its way to Louisiana. Between 1996 and 2006, Gaylord Schanilec and Ben Verhoeven (both of Midnight Paper Sales) collected 24 species of wood near Schanilec’s home fifty miles southwest of Eau Claire—ranging from maple and birch to ironwood and black walnut—and wrote a “biography of a forest.” But it’s not just a catalog of dry, scientific facts. “Gaylord and I have found that trees are fitting vehicles for human history,” Ben writes. “They have been not only witnesses, but also players in many pivotal events, both nationally and locally.” Bound in beautiful wooden boards and featuring, in the text, cross-sections or “portraits” of each of the 24 trees, the book is entitled Sylvae (from the Latin word for “forest”). LSU Special Collections recently purchased a copy of it for the E.A. McIlhenny Natural History Collection.

Almost 350 years ago, the English writer and horticulturalist John Evelyn wrote a similar book, Sylva, or A Discourse on Forest Trees (1664). The English may not have used flatboats to get their crops to market, but they did need trees for something else that was just as important—their navy. England’s famous “wooden walls” protected it from being overrun by foreign armies, and yet, as Evelyn complained, landowners “oftener find wayes to Fell down, and Destroy their Trees and Plantations, than either to repair or improve them.” A great nation, he pointed out, needed great forests. Although England ended up getting most of its timber from North America and Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries, Evelyn’s work was very popular and went through many editions. LSU now owns two copies—the second edition of 1670 and a later, annotated edition dated 1801.

– Michael Taylor, Assistant Curator of Books