September 18, 2006 - January 13, 2007

“Why I Love Books: The Artworks of Charles Hobson” is a traveling exhibition organized by the Bolinas Museum in San Francisco. The exhibition features a collection of Hobson’s beautifully executed limited edition art books covering subjects as varied as constellations, maritime adventure, and baseball.

LSU Libraries’ Special Collections counts many of Charles Hobsons’ books among its holdings. “We are thrilled to host this exhibition, and look forward to Charles Hobson’s visit to the LSU campus in October,” said Elaine Smyth, Curator of LSU Libraries’ Special Collections. Hobson will participate as a guest speaker at the Louisiana Book Festival in downtown Baton Rouge on October 28, 2006. Visit the web site www.louisianabookfestival.org for details.

Complementing the art book display is “Bruce Rogers, Man of Letters: Typography and Texts from the Bruce Rogers Collection,” an exhibition featuring books in the Rare Book Collection at Hill Memorial Library. Selected books showcase the elegant type styles and ornamentation that earned Rogers international renown for his book design.

For more information, visit these links: Exhibitions & Location/Hours

A database of folklife recordings made under the auspices of the Louisiana Folklife Program and housed at LSU Special Collections as part of the Program’s archives, is now available. Topics include foodways, traditional crafts, folktales, social life and customs, music, and others. Researchers will find a link to the database of over 1700 recordings in the inventory for the entire collection at http://www.lib.lsu.edu/special/findaid/folklife.htm.

Nineteenth-century planter, scientist, inventor, nurseryman, agricultural writer, and entrepreneur of Washington, Mississippi, Thomas Affleck is the subject of a small exhibition in the lecture hall at Hill Memorial Library through August 31, 2006. Items on display are digital reproductions from the Thomas Affleck Papers, housed in LSU Libraries Special Collections.

Affleck enjoyed a national reputation as an expert in horticulture and agriculture, and among his correspondents were Edmund Ruffin, James Dunwoody Brownson DeBow, and John Deere. He established one of the first commercial nurseries in the South and advocated scientific agriculture to his fellow plantation owners. He wrote extensively and is most noted for his Southern Rural Almanac and Plantation and Garden Calendar and the Plantation Journal and Account Book, which provided a standardized method for recordkeeping on plantations. He creatively leveraged his influence to his own financial advantage, capitalizing on every entrepreneurial opportunity that presented itself. The Thomas Affleck Papers provide researchers with a unique perspective on Southern agriculture and business in the 19th century.

On Monday, May 1, the LSU Libraries observed MayDay by providing staff with training in how to use a fire extinguisher. The training was in support of the Society of American Archivists’ effort to encourage archivists and other cultural heritage professionals take personal and professional responsibility for doing something simple – something that can be accomplished in one day but that can have a significant impact on an individual’s or a repository’s ability to respond to an emergency or disaster.

Patrick West, of LSU’s Office of Occupational and Environmental Safety, led the training exercise, which included hands-on experience with putting out a fire. Staff had a blast (!) and came away with a good feeling that they’d be more comfortable using a fire extinguisher should the need arise.

For more about MayDay, see the SAA website at http://www.archivists.org/mayday/index.asp.

The LSU Libraries’ Special Collections division has acquired a first edition of John Donne’s Poems. Donne’s poetry was largely unpublished during his lifetime, but hundreds of hand-written copies of his works were passed among his admiring readers. Numerous editions of his poems were published in the decades after his death, but his work fell out of fashion during the Restoration. Most readers and critics in the 18th and 19th centuries ignored his work or derided his poems for being (as Samuel Johnson opined) frigidly ingenious and metrically uncouth. The 20th century brought a reappraisal of Donne’s poetry, and today he is widely recognized as a literary giant of his period. His poems, which range from erotic to devotional, display a complexity of thought and beauty of expression that continue to engage and challenger readers.

The first published collection of Donne’s poems was probably based on one or more manuscripts owned by a close friend. It appeared in 1633, two years after his death. LSU’s newly acquired copy is bound in early paneled sheepskin. An early owner, John Winboult, has written his name several times and made a few neat jottings in the text.

The funds used for the acquisition were generated by the Hauer Rare Book Endowment, bequeathed by Dr. Mary Garrett Hauer and administered by the LSU Foundation.

Offices for the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History and the Civil War Book Review will be closed from Monday the 22nd of May through Wednesday the 24th. For reference questions regarding materials managed at these offices, please direct inquiries to the Special Collections webform or call (225) 578-6568.

On April 26, 1785, John James Audubon was born on the island of Hispaniola in what is now Haiti. You can offer best birthday wishes and enjoy a handful of his works — including two “elephant folio” prints from Birds of America, plus an original drawing and one print from the octavo edition — currently on display on the second floor of Hill Memorial Library.

The LSU Libraries has been awarded a $400,000 grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents for the project, “Louisiana Historical Newspapers: Preservation and Access.” Our partners in this project are the libraries at McNeese State University and Louisiana State University -Shreveport. Faye Phillips and Elaine Smyth are the Project Investigators.

In October 1941 the Louisiana Historical Records Survey of the United States Works Projects Administration (WPA) surveyed extant newspapers in Louisiana’s libraries, newspaper offices, museums, and courthouses and recommended that the newspapers be microfilmed for preservation purposes. This was the impetus for the LSU Library to begin its Louisiana newspaper microfilming program in 1945, when it started producing archival microfilm of all extant Louisiana newspapers. Today the LSU Libraries continues to create archival microfilm of current Louisiana newspapers, which in 2004 included 94 titles and totaled 69,870 feet of microfilm, thus providing a vital information resource for the study of Louisiana and its history. The funds requested in this proposal will provide the equipment necessary to 1) continue the indispensable archival microfilming work of the Louisiana Newspaper Project; 2) develop enhanced Internet access to Louisiana newspapers via the Louisiana Newspaper Access Program (LaNeAP); and 3) enhance significantly the ability of the LSU Libraries and its partners, McNeese and LSU-S, to provide on-demand, user-driven digital and physical access to existing microfilm of newspapers through the use of both digital and standard microfilm reading technology.

Exhibition Opening with Talk by the Director of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Thursday, April 20, marks the opening of the student-curated exhibition, “A Short History of Prints.” The exhibition is curated by students enrolled in Dr. Darius Spieth’s class on the “History of Prints” working in collaboration with Special Collections staff. It features a cross-section of outstanding examples of historical prints from the Renaissance to the present day, ranging from Albrecht Durer to Jim Dine.

Prior to the exhibition opening, Dr. James Cuno, Director of the Art Institute of Chicago, will present a lecture entitled “Whose Patrimony? Encyclopedic Museums in an Age of Resurgent Nationalism” from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. in room 103 of the Design Building. The lecture will be followed by a reception at Hill Memorial Library, where “A Short History of Prints” will be on view.

A distinguished scholar, Cuno is President and Eloise W. Martin Director of the Art Institute of Chicago. Previously, he served as Professor and Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London from 2002-2004, and as Professor and Director of the Harvard University Art Museums from 1991-2002. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, Cuno has written and lectured widely on topics ranging from French caricature of the 18th and 19th centuries to contemporary American art, as well as on the role of art museums in contemporary American cultural policy. Dr. Cuno recently edited and co-authored Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust (Princeton University Press, 2004).

The lecture at LSU will focus on Dr. Cuno’s concern with ethical issues involving the mission and governance of art museums at the turn of the twenty-first century. Hosted by the Art History program in the School of Art and the College of Art and Design, Dr. Cuno’s visit is part of the Edwin N. Weisl, Jr. Lectureship in Art History, supported by a grant from Robert Lehman Foundation in New York.

The lecture, reception and exhibition are all free and open to the public.

On April 26 and 27, William W. Freehling will deliver the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History in the Hill Memorial Library Lecture Hall on the LSU campus in Baton Rouge. Dr. Freehling’s lectures are entitled “Lincoln’s Room for Growth: A Great President’s Early Presidential Falterings.”

A dynamic lecturer and leading historian of the 19th-century South, Dr. Freehling has written several books on the sectional crisis and the Civil War, including The Road to Disunion and The South Versus the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War. Dr. Freehling’s books have received many awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Frank L. Owlsey Award, and the Jefferson Davis Prize.

Dr. Freehling will deliver three lectures in the Hill Lecture Hall:

Wednesday, April 26, 7:30 p.m., “Lincoln and Fort Pickens”
Thursday, April 27, 10:30 a.m., “Lincoln and Prewar Compromise”
Thursday, April 27, 2:00 p.m., “Lincoln’s Three Thirteenth Amendments”

The Fleming Lecture series was established in 1936 and is named in memory of Walter Lynwood Fleming, a former professor of history at LSU who distinguished himself as a scholar of the Reconstruction period. In the more than half century since their founding, the Fleming Lectures have helped revise many of the interpretations held by historians in the 1930s, including those of Professor Fleming, on the evils of the Reconstruction era. Not without irony, then, the lectures named in his memory have come to testify to the changing nature of the southern past and southern history. The Fleming lectures are free and the public is invited.