Spring 2018 No. 10

Spring 2018 Issue 10

Test Drive Newberry staff pilot a new approach to organizing an immense collection of road maps and travel ephemera

Scaffolding Up to Greater Accessibility As we prepare to publish the Spring 2018 issue of The Newberry Magazine, the library is entering the home stretch of a six-month renovation of its first f loor. Every day, thanks to the excellent work of our architects and construction team, we can see the different spaces transform before our very eyes. Progress is gradual, of course, but notable, and we are pleased to share with you a few snapshots illustrating how our vision for the Newberry’s new first f loor is becoming a reality.

Soon, when construction is over—and a hard hat isn’t required to enter these parts of our main level—we will be able to invite you to experience the Newberry’s more welcoming, more engaging first f loor. In July, we will begin to unveil the new spaces, starting with our welcome center and culminating in the opening of Pictures from an Exposition: Visualizing the 1893 World’s Fair in our redesigned thematic galleries in September.

As if the transformation of our first f loor weren’t enough, we have been pursuing a variety of other activities designed to expand and enhance our users’ access to the Newberry’s collections. In the following pages you will read about an archival experiment to organize a cross-section of the library’s extensive holdings in road maps and travel ephemera. The pilot project will result in a blueprint for processing the remainder of the collection, a feat that may one day give scholars the tools for discovering 230,000 individual items.

The scale of this endeavor is matched by that of another. Over 46,000 handwritten pages, digitally reproduced by the Newberry’s Department of Digital Initiatives and Services, are now available on Transcribing Modern Manuscripts, a site that invites people to transcribe letters and diaries documenting American life in the 19th and 20th centuries. Those who transcribe these primary sources often tell us how fulfilling it is to engage directly with the past and contribute to the collective effort to understand our shared history.

We couldn’t do all this, while remaining free and open to the public, without the generous support of our donors, many of whom have contributed to the Newberry’s current comprehensive fundraising campaign, First and Foremost. The campaign will fund not only the renovation of our first f loor but the advancement of our mission through myriad initiatives that, like the road map processing project and Transcribing Modern Manuscripts, promote access and engagement among our growing community of learning. We bring you stories of the people whose gifts to the First and Foremost campaign are already having an impact on the library.

MAGAZINE STAFF EDITOR Alex Teller ASSOCIATE EDITOR Jamie Waters DESIGNER Andrea Villasenor PHOTOGRAPHY Catherine Gass The Newberry Magazine is published semiannually by the Newberry’s Office of Communications and Marketing. Articles in the magazine cover major archiving projects, digital initiatives, and exhibitions; the scholarship of fellows and Newberry staff; and signature items and hidden gems of the collection. Every other issue contains the annual report for the most recently concluded fiscal year. A subscription to The Newberry Magazine is a benefit of membership in the Newberry Associates. To become a member, contact Luke Herman at hermanl@newberry.org.

Unless otherwise credited, all images are derived from items in the Newberry collection or from events held at the Newberry, and have been provided by the Newberry’s Digital Imaging Services Office.

Cover image: From a map of U.S. highways and national parks, issued by Sinclair Oil (ca. 1930s).

We hope you enjoy this issue of The Newberry Magazine and, as always, we thank you for your support. /newberrylibrary

David Spadafora, President and Librarian

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Contents FEATURES

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Test Drive 5 Alex Teller Newberry staff pilot a new approach to organizing the library’s immense collection of road maps and travel ephemera. It could eventually scale up to make 230,000 individual items newly accessible.

History, Crowdsourced Matthew Clarke Transcribing Modern Manuscripts, the Newberry’s latest crowdsourced transcription website, asks the public for help deciphering over 46,000 pages of handwritten letters and diaries.

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By Design 15 Jamie Waters From typographers to bookbinders, a range of artists and designers glean inspiration from the Newberry’s history of printing collections as they develop new creative projects.

Branches of Knowledge 19 Alex Teller Newberry fellow Katie Sagal researches how 18th-century English women leveraged their participation in the field of botany to expand their roles in scientific and literary communities.

Renovation Update Grab your hard hat for a peek inside the Newberry’s first-floor construction areas.

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DEPARTMENTS 23

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TAKE NOTE

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NOW ON NEWBERRY.ORG

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RETROSPECT: Recent Events

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PROSPECT: Upcoming Events

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SPECIAL FEATURE First and Foremost 26 The Newberry’s current comprehensive fundraising campaign is already having an impact on our ability to promote access and engagement.

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TA K E N O T E New Open Access Policy User engagement with Newberry digital collections entered a new era this past February, when we debuted an open access policy for digital images. Under the new policy, images derived from collection items are now available to anyone for any lawful purpose—whether commercial or non-commercial—without licensing of permission fees owed to the library. Applying to anything from the pictures readers snap on their cell phones to the 1.7 million high-resolution Newberry images currently online, the revised policy is intended to encourage users to interact more freely with collection items as they produce new scholarly and creative work. The results, so far, are quite encouraging: from February (when our open access guidelines were first implemented) to March, page views across the library’s digital collections increased 184%!

Staff Publications Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis

Interactive and Sculptural Printmaking in the Renaissance

By Liesl Olson, Director of Chicago Studies Yale University Press, 2017

By Suzanne Karr Schmidt, George Amos Poole III Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts Brill, 2018

Liesl Olson traces Chicago’s cultural development from the 1893 World’s Fair through mid-century modernism, illuminating how Chicago writers revolutionized literary forms during the first half of the 20th century. From Harriet Monroe, Carl Sandburg, and Ernest Hemingway to Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks, Chicago Renaissance bridges the gap between two distinct and equally vital Chicago-based artistic “renaissance” moments: the primarily white renaissance of the early teens, and the creative ferment of Bronzeville.

Olson interweaves stories of the famous and iconoclastic with accounts of lesser known yet inf luential figures in Chicago, many of whom were women. These Chicago editors, bookstore owners, tastemakers, and ordinary citizens nurtured and made possible Chicago’s unique culture of artistic experimentation.

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Think they didn’t have popup books in the Renaissance?

Think again! This new publication analyzes extremely rare prints and books with moving parts from the 15th to the early 17th centuries.

Want to learn about anatomy, unmask the pope as the devil, or peek at hidden erotica?

There were f lap prints for that. Want to tell time, find the date of Easter, or encode secrets? There were paper sundials, rotating angel calendars, and cryptographic spinning dials for that. Whether scientific, political, or even devotional, interactive prints were frequently published, and many examples can be seen at the Newberry today.

Martha Briggs to Retire This June, Martha Briggs, the Newberry’s Lloyd Lewis Curator of Modern Manuscripts, will retire after 28 years at the library. Martha is the Newberry’s resident authority on our own institutional history in addition to much else. She managed projects to process several of the Newberry’s largest and most heavily used collections, including the Pullman Company Records. Since her appointment as Curator of Modern Manuscripts in 2005, Martha has further developed our archival collections with the addition of the personal papers of writers and journalists, records of midwestern dance companies, and posters and other ephemera documenting a variety of political protests in Chicago. In addition to building our collection and making it accessible to researchers, Martha has curated or cocurated a number of important exhibitions in recent years, including Photographing Freetowns, Stagestruck City, and Realizing the Newberry Idea, 1887-2012.

Martha (top row, second from right) appears with other Newberry staff in this photo from 1991.

Martha curated the exhibition Realizing the Newberry Idea in 2012.

Martha and Catherine Grandgeorge, Processing Archivist, work on selecting images for the Photographing Freetowns exhibition.

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N O W O N N E W B E R R Y. O R G

Shelf Life

Source Material The Scroll Must Go On Last summer, a 14-foot scroll entered the Newberry collection after arriving as a donation to our annual Book Fair. The scroll, which bears a watercolor painting of a circus parade inching through an idyllic New England town, piqued the curiosity of Newberry curators. Who painted this charming watercolor? When? For what purpose?

With a little sleuthing based on recognizable buildings and circus performers (such as the elephant Tippo Sahib), we’re beginning to answer these questions.

Courtesy of the Ringling Museum

Read more at www.newberry.org/ source-material

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Produced by the Newberry, “Shelf Life” is a podcast series about the humanities—and the humans behind them. Each episode features a new conversation with librarians, curators, and researchers about anything from the history of fake news to the secret lives of famous American authors.

America’s Erstwhile Coral Obsession

During the antebellum period, Americans went crazy for coral, using it in jewelry and medicine, referencing it in art and literature, and adopting it as a metaphor for understanding the complexity and interconnectedness of the natural world. In a recent episode of our “Shelf Life” podcast, Fellowships Manager Keelin Burke speaks with Michele Navakas, a research fellow at the Newberry this past winter, about America’s erstwhile fascination with coral and coral reefs. Along the way, Michele shares a discovery she made in our collection: a song by Sarah Josepha Hale (best known today for writing “Mary Had a Little Lamb”) that holds coral up as a lens through which to view both nature and human society.

Listen at www.newberry.org/shelf-life

Test Drive

By Alex Teller

Newberry staff pilot a new approach to organizing the library’s immense collection of road maps and travel ephemera. It could eventually scale up to make 230,000 individual items newly accessible.

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merican road maps of the 20th century didn’t merely ref lect the rise of the automobile, the spread of the highway system, and our cultural fascination with driving as an act of self-determination; they actually fueled and facilitated all these things. Both a tool for navigation and a rallying cry for adventure, early road maps depicted drivers as the heirs of Buffalo Bill and the Burlington railroad, blazing trails across the country with the same intrepid spirit that had guided explorers and homesteaders in generations past.

Given the rough, embryonic state of the country’s driving roads at the beginning of the century, an adventurous spirit was basically a prerequisite for getting behind the wheel. It was this type of person, the motor clubs issuing road maps at the time believed, who would eventually normalize driving for everyone else.

Soon, a self-perpetuating cycle had set in: as maps authenticated routes as passable pathways, more drivers hit the road, which increased the demand for improving and expanding road networks, which necessitated more maps, which inspired more Americans to take up driving, and so on. The feedback loop only intensified as the tourism industry grew apace, cars became more affordable, and other commercial interests (like oil companies) got in the game of producing road maps.

There’s perhaps no better place for studying how the automobile revolutionized American mobility than the Newberry. The library’s collection of road maps and travel ephemera, totaling 250,000 individual items, is one of the largest troves of such material in the world. (Travel ephemera are the tickets,

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receipts, glossy brochures, and other disposable things tourists save as mementoes from their journeys. Today, they offer a window into how places have been marketed and remembered over time.)

The archives of Rand McNally, H.M. Gousha, and General Drafting, the three biggest road map publishers of the 20th century, make up the foundation of the Newberry’s automobile collection. Over the past 30 years, map catalogers have individually cataloged and analyzed 20,000 road maps and travel brochures, providing item-level access to a tremendous amount of material. But at that rate, it would take the Newberry another 345 years to catalog the collection’s remaining 230,000 items!

This past fall, Newberry curators and archivists piloted a new approach to organizing the collection and making it more available to readers. Supported by a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, library staff are applying archival methods to an unprocessed swathe of the collection, grouping similar types of items into folders according to region, state, county, or place rather than giving each piece of ephemera its own catalog record. The project was launched in the hopes that the archival approach, if successfully implemented for a small sample size, might scale up to encompass the entire road map and travel ephemera collection.

Based on the early results, it appears that this model can scale quite nicely—and, indeed, already has. The original goal for the 10-month project was to process 44 linear feet of travel ephemera from Illinois and other midwestern states. Processing Assistant Emily Richardson did this in just two months. She’s since gone on to organize thousands of other items from the rest of the United States, North America, and a variety of other countries.

In addition to being a more efficient use of staff time, the archival methodology is a boon to researchers, not only because it makes an enormous amount of material available more quickly than ever, but because it produces a system of access ref lecting how users naturally engage with the subject. Instead of searching for the various road maps and travel ephemera bit by bit in the Newberry’s catalog—a painstaking process in which countless

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Processing Assistant Emily Richardson at work in the “Road Map and Travel Ephemera Processing Zone.”

items would inevitably go undiscovered—researchers may call up geo-specific folders, making connections among things they hadn’t been aware of, much less thought to look for individually.

Once the maps and brochures touting the same place have been sorted and housed together in the Newberry’s archives, one can easily isolate a particular variable—a tourist attraction, for example—and analyze how that attraction appeared in an array of promotional pieces over time. How is a destination’s image constructed through such mediums? How do its evolving promotional identities reflect the values and mores of different eras? How do they illustrate the ways in which automobile travel altered the relationship between people and landscapes? How do they condition one’s experience of a place? How might a road map or brochure be shaped by the interests of the company, organization, or government body that produced it?

Take, as an example, Yellowstone National Park, arguably the original mass tourist attraction in the United States. No two Yellowstone brochures are exactly the same. But there are two in particular that, considered together, provide an especially striking illustration of how one place can be imagined and represented in such different ways. One is a guide, issued by the National Park Service (NPS) in 1935, for motorists navigating the roads in Yellowstone. The other is an extensive brochure issued by the Burlington-Northern Pacific Railroad in 1952.

n the early 20th century, Yellowstone’s leadership made a commitment to retrofitting the existing roads (which originally had been created for horse-drawn carriages) to make them suitable for driving. The first car entered the park in 1915. In the years that followed, the National Park Service devoted significant resources to road maintenance and improvement so as to keep up with the quality of roads in the rest of the country.

The NPS embraced driving roads, but not without some anxiety about how they might compromise the unspoiled natural splendor associated with the national parks. If the whole point of the parks system was for Americans to enjoy nature in its purest form, then building roads for automobiles—if not done correctly—could potentially undermine the entire enterprise. Engineers thus labored to minimize the impact of roads and bridges in the parks, blending them into the landscape in accordance with the NPS’s strict specifications for masonry guardrails, wooden guardrails, and stone paving.

Tastefully integrating these roads into the natural scenery was one thing; trusting the average American motorist to use them responsibly was another. The stewards of “America’s best idea” were skeptical on this count. At the heart of the national parks system lay a tension between conservation and human activity—a tension that the automobile only exacerbated, and that still exists today.

In the days before cars, government officials (in concert with railroad companies) could at least control the f low of people in and out of parks via regularly scheduled shuttles that transported travelers to and from the railroad terminals they’d alighted from. But cars literally put vacationers behind the wheel, according them an unprecedented degree of control over how they experienced a national park.

The National Park Service’s discomfort with this proposition surfaces again and again in its 1935 guide for Yellowstone motorists. A paternalistic tone runs throughout, urging readers to slow down and heed the guide’s instructions, or risk failing to fully appreciate their surroundings.

The brochure begins with an ominous warning: “Read and use this guide constantly. Unless you do follow its advice and directions, you will not see and enjoy this great park.” Building on this sentiment later on, the guide exclaims, in bold all-caps, “DON’T RUSH THROUGH THE PARK—ENJOY IT LEISURELY.” These words do a remarkable job conjuring the image of a park ranger glowering disapprovingly at you.

The National Park Service embraced driving roads, but not without some anxiety about how they might compromise the unspoiled natural splendor associated with the national parks.

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Even as the NPS lectures motorists about how best to navigate Yellowstone, it accepts their automobile-based autonomy—sometimes doing both in the same section: We insist that you see these great spectacles [hiking trails in the Yellowstone Grand Canyon], but for the rest, you must choose for yourself. … From the canyon, take the road north over Dunraven Pass or the summit of Mount Washburn. This is a wonderfully scenic road, wide and safe. Do not miss it. Take our advice, not the words of some other motorist who may not have had your capacity to appreciate and enjoy a magnificent view of mountains and forests.

[Emphasis added.]

appear only as one of the sights to take in from a BurlingtonNorthern Pacific train or bus tour. The brochure portrays them less as a means of transportation than as a feat of American ingenuity and determination. Accordingly, roads are the subject not of handwringing (as in the NPS guide) but of admiration.

Referring to Cody Road, an 80-mile highway between Cody, Wyoming and Yellowstone Lake, the ad copy says, “It required 40 years of blasting away at mountainsides, cutting and grading through virgin forest and trackless wilderness for man to complete this amazing road.”

In the text that follows, the specter of automotive autonomy looms, but it’s negated again and again by the presumed supremacy of what the railroad offers instead.

Why bother yourself with fueling up, deciding between

Alternating between finger-wagging and f lattery, the National Park Service seems to want to micromanage tourism in Yellowstone. At best, the NPS is deeply conf licted about the roads available inside the park; at worst, they’re openly hostile to the people who will be driving on them.

Yellowstone’s byways hardly factor into our second brochure, and for good reason: it was commissioned by a railroad company. In this 1952 promotional piece, roads

In a 1935 guide for motorists in Yellowstone, the National Park Service expresses its ambivalence about visitors’ increased mobility, alternately encouraging and discouraging them to explore the park on their own, at their own pace. A typical line from the brochure reads, “DON’T RUSH THROUGH THE PARK— ENJOY IT LEISURELY.”

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A 1952 guide to Yellowstone, issued by the Burlington Railroad, differs in both tone and substance from the National Park Service brochure on the opposite page.

Throughout the text, the specter of automotive autonomy looms, but it’s negated again and again by the presumed supremacy of what the railroad offers instead: the freedom from having to navigate Yellowstone yourself.

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Eventually, road maps, collectively, would help create what Curator of Maps Jim Akerman calls a “national motorized space.” different routes, and keeping your eyes on the road, when the Burlington-Northern Pacific can do all that for you? The brochure doesn’t come right out and say this; it strongly implies it in the cheerful postwar ad-copy-ese beaming off the page: “The easiest and best way to see the park is by comfortable Yellowstone buses. Experienced drivers add zest to the tour by timely anecdotes and explanation of phenomena.”

Unlike the National Park Service guide for motorists, the railroad brochure downplays the importance of enjoying Yellowstone at a leisurely pace. In fact, it practically rushes visitors out of the park, promoting what are called “Yellowstone Extension Tours.” “While you are in the wonderful Yellowstone country,” the brochure advises, “we urge you to stay extra days, if possible, to see more of Montana and Wyoming, to explore the inspiring mountains and valleys surrounding the park.” This extra travel, of course, would create more business for the railroad company.

The differences between these two artifacts of American tourism are also ref lected in the maps of Yellowstone included inside them. The focal points of both maps are the Grand Loop Road, the attractions accessible just off of it, and the main arteries feeding into and out of the central thoroughfare (which actually looks a lot like a heart). But they diverge from one another in important ways.

True to its desire that visitors maximize their Yellowstone experience, the NPS guide points them to an extensive network of hiking trails branching off from the Grand Loop Road. These trails are completely absent from the railroad brochure, whose users, confined to a fixed path around the park, would have had no use for such extraneous activities.

On the NPS map, the organizing principle is the automobile road; on the railroad map, it is the park tour.

The first, packed with information, was designed for tourists whose decision to drive had freed them to choose from a variety of possible twists and turns inside Yellowstone. The second, minimalist by comparison, was designed for tourists whose decision not to drive had freed them from having to make those choices.

Eventually, road maps, collectively, would help create what Jim Akerman, the Newberry’s curator of maps, calls a “national motorized space.” Presenting an image of the country bound together by roads and highways from coast to coast, road maps extended the notion of Manifest Destiny into the 20th century, while giving drivers the navigational tools to traverse the United States like never before.

In fact, the rise of the automobile and the American romance with the road were historically contingent phenomena, and they were accompanied by a range of sentiment, from optimism to indifference to anxiety. The Newberry’s road maps and travel ephemera allow researchers to get under the hood and inspect the different social, cultural, and economic forces surrounding the automobile in American life. And the collection is becoming more and more navigable for researchers.

Curator of Maps Jim Akerman, along with Newberry archivists, is overseeing the library’s road map and travel ephemera processing project. According to Akerman, 20th-century road maps, collectively, helped create a “national motorized space.”

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History, Crowdsourced

By Matthew Clarke

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n August 8, 1856, John Roberts Everett wrote hastily to his father to report on escalating tensions between proslavery Missourians and anti-slavery Free Staters in Osawatomie, Kansas, where he and his family had recently relocated.

We heard from a traveller the other night that a proslavery camp at Hickory Point (Palmyra or Prairie City) eleven miles this side of Lawrence, had been driven out, with the loss of their horses and arms.

Elsewhere, he recounted, Wisconsin German “Turner”…was attacked by 8 or 10 marauders who demanded his horse and arms.

He demurred and they fired on him….The man recovered, found his coat full of bullet holes but himself uninjured.

By September 2, sporadic conf lict had devolved into the full-scale confrontation that would become known as the

Battle of Osawatomie. Everett wrote his father: The Missourians made their appearance a little after daylight last Saturday morning [and] numbered about 320. To oppose this force there were only about 30 Free State men in the contest. The enemy had 2 cannons. Our men only their rif les and shot guns.…[T]he disparity was too great. Our brave men were compelled to retreat across the river….

Some crossed at a narrow ford. Some swam. Others made their horses swim them across. The bullets f lew about them like hail stones.

To complete their rout, the Missourians burned the town of Osawatomie to the ground. “If the voice of Kansas could be heard in the North, it would be an agonized shriek for help,” Everett concluded, addressing his letter from the “Ashes of Osawatomie.”

John Roberts Everett’s letters provide a first-hand account of “Bleeding Kansas,” the violent preamble to the U.S. Civil War in which pro- and anti-slavery sides fought for the soul of Kansas Territory. After the Battle of Osawatomie, during which proslavery forces routed Everett and his fellow anti-slavery settlers, Everett addressed a letter to his father from the “Ashes of Osawatomie.”

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s a turning point in “Bleeding Kansas,” the small-scale civil war that presaged the national conf lict to come, the Battle of Osawatomie is of widespread historical interest—especially insofar as it helped make the reputation of John Brown, leader of the Free Staters in the clash. Everett’s letters allow us to witness the events of Bleeding Kansas as they unfolded—day by day, skirmish by skirmish—from a wholly unique perspective.

Yet while the letters have been available in the Newberry’s reading rooms ever since our archivists processed the Everett Family Papers in 2009, until recently only researchers able to visit the library in person had access to them. Now, a new crowdsourced transcription site, Transcribing Modern Manuscripts, has made Everett’s Osawatomie dispatches—as well as more than 40,000 other pages from letters and diaries in the Newberry’s collection—available online for public transcription. Designed by the Newberry’s Department of Digital Initiatives and Services, the site relies on the help of students, scholars, and members of the public to create digitally searchable transcriptions of letters, diaries, and other manuscript material, thus broadening access to and increasing engagement with the Newberry’s manuscript collections.

Like the Everett correspondence, the site’s other letters and diaries provide new windows onto many of the momentous national events and movements of 19th-century America.

Thousands of Civil War letters shed light on the Battle of Vicksburg, Union Army camp culture, plantation life, and even

slave attitudes. The letters of Cynthia Everett (sister of John Roberts) recount their author’s experience teaching freedmen in Reconstruction-era Virginia and South Carolina. An assortment of journals, notes, and letters narrate in terrifying detail the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, while other diaries recount the 1893 World’s Fair, a nurse’s journey to Cuba during the SpanishAmerican War, and a novelist’s storm-tossed ocean voyage.

Though much of the material is local, some letters and diaries are more cosmopolitan in character. For example, the diary of Julia Newberry—daughter of Newberry founder Walter L. Newberry—contains the ref lections of a young woman navigating mid-19th-century Parisian society, while the writings of Lucy Calhoun (wife of William J. Calhoun, ambassador to China under President Taft) document life in late-Qing-dynasty Beijing, where Calhoun resided in an ancient temple and witnessed (among other things) the wedding of China’s last emperor.

The bulk of the material on Transcribing Modern Manuscripts is drawn from the 19th century, but users can also transcribe the Revolutionary War provision records of Connecticut-based merchant Chauncey Whittelsey or messages sent by Clarence Darrow to his confidante John T. Jacobs. Most recently, the site has also made available for transcription a large collection of manuscript material related to Willa Cather.

Access to manuscripts associated with Cather, Darrow, and other big names will serve as enticement enough for many users.

Julia Newberry (the daughter of the Newberry Library’s founder, Walter L. Newberry) was in Europe when the Great Chicago Fire swept through her hometown in October of 1871. Julia’s diary, which takes the reader on a brisk tour of her active mind, pauses to take stock of the catastrophic event: “I am perfectly bewildered with the rush of events, I dont [sic] know what to write or what to think. Half of Chicago is in ashes it is too awful to believe, to [sic] dreadful to think about.”

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Three months after the launch of the site, users had succeeded in transcribing an astonishing 7,000 pages.

The Newberry’s Transcribing Modern Manuscripts site contains handwritten correspondence from several famous Americans, including Clarence Darrow (above).

Yet just as exciting is the site’s potential to unearth the stories of hundreds of ordinary people—teachers, preachers, soldiers, farmers, steamboat captains, doctors, shop-owners, and pioneers— who made up the tapestry of 19th-century American society.

Three months after the launch of the site, users had succeeded in transcribing an astonishing 7,000 pages of the material. Still, tens of thousands of letter and diary pages remain un-transcribed, and the Newberry hopes that patrons, students, scholars, and members of the public will lend their support to this massive project. Thankfully, participating is extraordinarily simple.

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rowdsourced transcription sites enable volunteers to digitally transcribe handwritten text in order to transform it into machine-readable text. Unlike printed pages, which can be scanned and transcribed by processes like Optical Character Recognition (OCR), the handwritten page still poses problems for automated transcription. (Handwritten text recognition technologies do exist, but they’re in their infancy.) The transcription of handwritten documents thus requires human intervention, and sites like Transcribing Modern Manuscripts make this possible on a large scale.

In the case of Transcribing Modern Manuscripts, the procedure is straightforward. After entering the site, users choose between letter and diary manuscripts. They are then directed to a subpage displaying images of their chosen manuscript’s pages,

where they can select any image they want, manipulate it to better discern its text (by zooming in and out, for example), and type their transcription into a text box below. If users need to quit a page before it’s finished, they can save their work and return to the page later, or leave the transcription for somebody else to complete. Users can also create personal accounts, allowing them to track their own progress and survey the revision history of any manuscript on the site.

In a sense, crowdsourced transcription sites like Transcribing Modern Manuscripts democratize a process that has long been seen as the exclusive purview of scholars. This has led to occasional objection.

Some worry that crowdsourcing will lower the quality of transcriptions. After all, most members of the public haven’t received training to transcribe occasionally inscrutable 19thcentury handwriting, and the resulting transcriptions can include errors. Others claim that crowdsourced transcription sites exploit the goodwill of volunteers and students, who offer up their time without compensation.

Yet the goal of transcription sites like Transcribing Modern Manuscripts is not to generate scholarly editions—or even Gutenberg Project-style online editions. Instead, these sites aim to help make manuscripts remotely searchable by scholars and other interested parties, who can follow leads located through searches by conducting more meticulous reviews of particular manuscripts. And far from being exploitative, crowdsourced The Newberry Magazine

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By bringing to light thousands of long-buried stories, our transcription volunteers have succeeded in recovering the voices of numerous men and women who helped shape this country’s history. transcription sites give users the opportunity to interact digitally with rare manuscripts while contributing to our collective understanding of the historical record.

Broadening accessibility and enriching scholarship are just two of the benefits that sites like Transcribing Modern Manuscripts offer. Crowdsourcing transcription projects also help institutions like the Newberry realize their goal of engaging the public in historical inquiry. Last June, when the Newberry unveiled one of its new transcription sites, Transcribing Faith, which allowed users to transcribe a selection of manuscripts dealing with magic and witchcraft, the project drew national media attention and excited emails from transcribers located all over the world. Over the next month, the website received almost 200,000 views—almost as many as the Newberry’s previously most popular digital resource received annually.

Like Transcribing Faith, Transcribing Modern Manuscripts has drawn a diverse range of users, from history buffs and recent retirees to college professors, high school teachers, and graduate students like Taylor Kelley, who studies Library and Information Science at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

Like many users, Kelley first encountered Transcribing Modern Manuscripts through social media (in her case, Instagram). Initially attracted to the site because it provided “a great opportunity to get some hands-on experience in transcribing from archives,” she found herself drawn to the collection of the John Roberts Everett letters. “Pretty much everything about the Battle of Osawatomie letters excited me,” Kelley explains. “I loved the little details, like how his handwriting appeared shakier than in all his other letters, and his use of language was really incredible. The sentence that stood out for me was, ‘If the voice of Kansas could be heard in the North, it would be an agonized shriek for help.’ Reading a sentence like that in its primary source, not quoted in a book, felt like an amazing discovery.”

In addition to engaging the public, crowdsourced transcription sites boast a range of pedagogical applications. By integrating transcription sites into courses, for example, teachers at various levels can introduce students to historical methods using original documents.

According to Susan Johnson, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a current long-term 14

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fellow at the Newberry, “[I]ncorporating Transcribing Modern Manuscripts into a historical methods class for undergraduates would give them a chance to do what historians do when they encounter a handwritten primary source—puzzling through line after line of a letter or a diary, making sense of past lives— from the most quotidian of concerns to the weightiest of contexts.”

Perhaps for this reason, high school and college teachers around the country have shown interest in incorporating Transcribing Modern Manuscripts into syllabi. By expanding accessibility, supporting scholarship, engaging the public, and contributing to pedagogy, Transcribing Modern Manuscripts enables the Newberry to better achieve a key component of its mission: to promote the effective use of its collections by “fostering research, teaching, life-long learning, and civic engagement.”

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o far, the effort has paid off. Thousands of transcriptions created by students, teachers, and others are already available for public perusal, accessible (and downloadable) via a link embedded on the homepage of Transcribing Modern Manuscripts.

Soon, these transcriptions will become part of the searchable metadata attached to individual page images in the Newberry’s ever-growing digital collections. The resulting archive will be a boon to researchers, who will have access to a trove of newly unearthed perspectives on many of the great national events of 19th-century America.

Transcribers can take pride in the aid they lend scholars—as well as pleasure in their encounters with rarely read texts. But the value of their work transcends the present. By bringing to light thousands of long-buried stories, our transcription volunteers have succeeded in recovering the voices of numerous men and women who helped shape this country’s history. As part of the public digital archive, these voices will now shape interpretations of the history they helped make. Thanks to Kelley and her fellow volunteers, Everett’s “voice of Kansas”— as well as the myriad other voices enclosed in the Newberry’s manuscript pages—will now be heard loud and clear.

Matthew Clarke is Digital Initiatives and Metadata Assistant at the Newberry.

By

Design Historic typographic materials inspire and inform the work of contemporary designers

By Jamie Waters

J

ennifer Farrell collects all sorts of metal type, both vintage and modern fabrications, to use in artwork she prints at Starshaped Press, the independent letterpress shop that she owns in the Ravenswood neighborhood of Chicago.

She is also currently the Arthur and Lila Weinberg Fellow at the Newberry. Her research in the Newberry’s collection serves dual purposes: to study the historical use of the sets of 19th-century metal type that she collects, and to incorporate Chicago history into her current work. Her project, which she calls a “type specimen memoir,” draws from her own life, the history of type, and the history of Chicago.

Traditionally, type specimens were promotional tools. Type foundries would show off their catalog of type in a specimen book—often including every piece they had—to sell those type sets to printers for use in publishing everything from playhouse broadsides to books. These specimen books might use vivid color, bold phrases, and elaborate ornamentation to exemplify what was possible with the sets.

Farrell’s memoir plays with this idea. But instead of aiming for sales, she’s stretching her own expertise. Making an artistic as much as a commercial statement, she could eschew the impulse to do a complete catalog of her collection and pursue a more creative representation of her type collection and her skills. She’s using the range of her inventory to illustrate her experiences in the city. The result is a Chicago story, her story, told through printed images made up of individual pieces of letterpress type. A reader, or, more accurately, a viewer of her memoir, can dive into her compositions and discover details from Chicago history and architecture alongside nuggets of typographical history amid the overarching pictorial narrative of Farrell’s life.

In her studio, Jennifer Farrell, artist and owner of Starshaped Press, explains the design elements of one of her prints to Tanner Woodford, founder and executive director of the Chicago Design Museum.

Farrell demonstrates letterpress printing for a Newberry Facebook Live video on March 20.

Often when people imagine the work that goes on in a research library, they picture a scholar poring over a manuscript as they work on a book, dissertation, or article. But designers and artists like Farrell also come to the Newberry to consult the design collections—typography samples, incunables (books printed in the earliest years of the printing press), calligraphy books, advertising posters—for inspiration or to frame their own work within the historical discourse.

Farrell says, “When you’re designing now, and you’re referencing the past, you can’t help but encapsulate the 100 years that came between you and what you’re researching here.”

For this fellowship project, she’s used collection materials on type design and historic type specimens to examine through a series of prints the way she portrays stories about the city of Chicago and her life.

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In her piece called “Persevere,” Farrell applied her Newberry research on word ornaments to create an elaborately decorated meditation on persistent typefaces. The text muses on the theme of perseverance and is printed with typefaces that have remained in use in spite of being maligned by many designers.

Newberry collection materials were helpful to her work because they showed the ways her sets of vintage type were originally intended to be used. This was especially useful for word ornaments—decorative pieces of type that aren’t letters or punctuation. Ornament includes a range of shapes, curves, lines, swirls, f lorets, etc. that are used modularly to create patterns, frames, or stylistic f lourishes in letterpress works. These individual pieces in isolation do not necessarily have obvious connections to the rest of the pieces in their sets, so Farrell looked at them in context in the Newberry reading rooms.

“It’s hard to know what these pieces were actually intended to do,” she says, “until you see them in a specimen book and learn how they all get pieced together.” She found books that used the type sets that she had in her studio and saw how the foundry had demonstrated how those pieces could be used— lines connected to curves to frames to arches to f loral patterns.

Armed with this information on their original design and intended use, she could use those pieces in her modern work while staying true to the historicity of the pieces. In one small piece, she typeset ornaments around the words, “Word Up, Yo”—a delightfully irreverent use of type that still respects the intended use and history of the pieces. Thus she finds ways to take those

historic pieces and make something new out of them. Farrell sets the pieces with hundreds of years of history behind her, while also printing them in ways relevant to the modern era.

Farrell’s work and the history behind it are both part of the legacy of Chicago as a center of art and design. In 2018, the Newberry and dozens of other Chicago institutions are participating in an initiative called Art Design Chicago to celebrate the city’s contributions to the fields of art and design.

Inspired by Chicago’s status as a center for design production and artistic endeavor, the project highlights Chicago’s historical impact, as well as the ways it is shaping the future of art and design, through city-wide exhibitions, public programming, scholarly seminars, digital resources, and publications.

Sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art alongside presenting partner The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, Art Design Chicago gives the Newberry a new platform to highlight the ways designers and artists already use the library’s collections and to help make those collections more accessible. The initiative raises the public profile of the Newberry’s existing collections and work, and it supports an exhibition on the design of the 1893 World’s Fair (opening this fall) and a series of public programs and a scholarly seminar.

“ It’s hard to know what these pieces were actually intended to do until you see them in a specimen book and learn how they all get pieced together.”

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Jill Gage, Custodian of the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing, oversees the Newberry’s collections related to book design and the typographic arts.

“It includes thousands of specimens of typographic and calligraphic materials, along with the working files of typographers, designers, and printers. From incunables to contemporary artists’ books, the collection reveals a rich history of both book design and the people who have shaped and pushed the boundaries of printing,” says Gage.

One such example is a Chicago design story found in the production files of type designer Oswald Bruce Cooper.

His sketches for his typefaces from the 1920s are a case study in Chicago’s design history. The working files are full of handwritten notes critiquing design sketches, drafts for metal typeface forms, and early typographic samples. Researchers can see how the requirements for designing metal type and hand drafting shaped Cooper’s creative process and the very shape of the letters. These files tell the story of the development of a type that, according to one test page, “is a bear for putting viscera into things, for hopping right off a newspaper page.”

Readers can see the type evolve from this idea for an attentiongrabbing advertising typeface, to sketches with critical notes changing the curvature of an “a,” to a manufactured metal type that becomes a specimen book, until it eventually becomes a font installed on nearly every computer: Cooper Black.

Today, this font is also one of the signature fonts of the Art Design Chicago initiative. Program attendees will see Cooper Black reproduced in print and digital materials across the city

in 2018, hinting at the history the initiative seeks to illuminate.

Appropriately enough, Art Design Chicago’s brand identity itself is rooted in archival research at the Newberry.

The lead designer for Art Design Chicago, James Goggin, is well-known among arts and humanities institutions: he has done design projects for organizations including the University of Chicago Department of Art History, Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and now Art Design Chicago. His reputation has been earned because of his attention to detail and research.

When he was based in Chicago, Goggin visited the Newberry to consult the Wing Collection with the intention of tapping into Chicago’s design legacy.

The personal papers of type designer Oswald Bruce Cooper reveal the evolution of Cooper’s signature typefaces, in this case Cooper Old Style.

James Goggin reviews typographic materials that informed his design for the Art Design Chicago brand identity.

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The type specimens for Cubist Bold served as a typographic font of inspiration for the Art Design Chicago aesthetic.

The design process for the Art Design Chicago logo shows how Goggin bridges modern sensibilities with a look rooted in historical Chicago typefaces and stencil work.

“Just in the same way that the overall initiative is telling a story about the history of Chicago art and design, I felt very strongly that the identity should also play that role. It should have a back story, and it should have references built into it that people might ask about and gradually discover.”

He achieved this aim by using typographical specimens he found in the Newberry collection to inspire the logo design as well as the fonts—like Cooper Black—that would be used in publications.

For the Art Design Chicago logo, Cubist Bold samples, produced by Barnhart Brothers & Spindler in Chicago (the same company that produced Cooper’s designs), provided a basis for a new typographical design for Art Design Chicago.

Goggin also turned to the idea of stencils to communicate what he calls the “urgency and pragmatism” of Chicago style.

The aesthetic of stencils—an item produced in Chicago as well as a tool of production—elicits a sense of product design and manufacturing. The final outcome was a modernist typographic brand image that could be used, stencil-like, in many contexts while still pointing to Chicago’s history of design production in typography, manufacturing, and practical communication.

Using typefaces and manufacturing styles that originated in Chicago, Goggin conveyed a specific sense of place in the logo instead of a more generic design. The typefaces distinguished Chicago from other cultural centers.

“The direction I was looking for was something really heavy, geometric, but with enough idiosyncrasies and oddness, to make it feel Chicago as opposed to perhaps New York and some of the smoother art deco geometric forms you might

find from type at the time,” said Goggin. By working with the collection that demonstrates Chicago-centered design work, Goggin was able to create a brand identity for the initiative that would evoke a truly Chicago sensibility.

Goggin and Farrell are among many designers who come to the Newberry to inform their work. The designer J.P. Ramirez, before visiting the Newberry, remarked that many other Chicago designers had repeatedly told him, “You have to go to the Newberry.” He finally made it into the reading rooms for a project designing signature monograms and a calligraphy style for which he consulted Newberry examples of monogram designs and calligraphic specimens.

Importantly, these collections must be used to make sure that historical discourse continues to happen. Farrell knows this well. She says of her own assemblage of type, “I want to avoid collecting for the sake of collecting; to me it’s a dead collection if you’re not using it or learning from it.” Historical materials can, and should, be used to inform the present and create new work. Farrell and other artists incorporate those materials, like the Newberry archives, into their new creations.

The Newberry makes these collections available to the public to find new ways to make meaning, preserving and sharing materials that can inspire future work to continue the legacy that Chicago has cultivated over the years. The design history in Chicago is rich, and institutions like the Newberry, initiatives like Art Design Chicago, and the people who use those resources every day ensure that legacy’s continued relevance.

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Jamie Waters is Communications Coordinator at the Newberry.

Branches of Knowledge

By Alex Teller Katie Sagal, Monticello College Foundation and Audrey Lumsden-Kouvel Fellow at the Newberry, is researching the ways in which women writers navigated the fraught field of botany in 18th-century England. As an extension of the domestic sphere, botany was considered an acceptable way for women to cultivate feminine virtues, as long as they didn’t strain themselves much intellectually or contemplate plant sexual reproduction.

These activities were considered outside the bounds of decorous femininity. Women botanists developed strategies for enlarging their roles within the field, often through such unconventional genres as periodicals, novels, painting, and poetry. In examining these modes of botanical engagement, Sagal is expanding contemporary understandings of what science looked like in the 18th century.

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Latin completely in order to understand a botanical text; you just needed to know a simplified version of Latin based on memorizing certain terms. I’m especially interested in how this made botany more accessible to women.

NM: More accessible because learning Latin wouldn’t have been a regular part of a woman’s education back then?

Katie Sagal, a research fellow at the Newberry, is studying the ways in which women writers navigated the fraught field of botany in 18th-century England.

NEWBERRY MAGAZINE: What kinds of scientific opportunities were available to women in the 18th century? Was science a monolithically male sphere, or were there certain branches that were more accessible to women at the time?

KATIE SAGAL: It depends on what time period you’re referring to. My project starts with the mid-18th century and continues slightly past the beginning of the 19th century.

Things change for women in science over the course of this time span. I focus on botany and natural philosophy (or natural history), which were the fields that were most accessible to women and that women were encouraged to pursue. Botany became an especially welcoming subject after the publication of Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum, which is what popularized the binomial nomenclature for classification.

NM: “Binomial” being the genus-species combination?

KS: Yes. Though we no longer use many Linnaean terms, the principle of referring to living things by two terms— rather than the incredibly long descriptions coming out of the 16th and 17th centuries—helped make botany accessible to lay people. With this innovation, you didn’t need to know 20

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KS: Typically, no, it would not have been, though there were exceptions. Botanical Latin was considered appropriate for women because it didn’t require the same intellectual rigor.

(Women were supposed to avoid intellectual rigor—their physiology was believed to be unable to handle it.) But at the same time, botany was a pretty fraught field for women.

Linnaeus helped popularize the idea that plants have genders, or gendered pieces. Part of the problem, then, is that the botanical textbooks of the time are about plant sex, a very inappropriate subject for women. And so you see a proliferation of texts that have been edited to rid them of anything that could be considered risqué or sexy. These weird deviations of Linnaeus attempted to present botany to women while censoring out certain details so that it’s not as “racy.” Botany thus became a hotly contested issue, even among female authors who championed it as an appropriate subject of study for women.

Maria Jacson and Priscilla Wakefield, two textbook authors, are very interesting case studies. Jacson insisted that women read Linnaeus and other male writers, while Wakefield discouraged them from reading such sources.

NM: So women were finding different ways of negotiating their own participation in science?

KS: Women needed to find ways to create space for themselves in a conversation that didn’t want them, essentially. Science was not monolithically male as you mentioned earlier but was still predominantly male. The people who published in academic journals and who were members of scientific societies and who received professorships at Cambridge and Oxford—those were all men. Women could participate in science, but in what we’d call a non-specialized amateur way. Part of my project entails reconsidering whether or not such participation should even be called “amateur.” We’re dealing with a very elitist scientific culture that excluded all but a few people, making pretty much everyone an “amateur.” If we’re thinking about the ways in which scientific knowledge gets produced and circulated in the 18th century, there were a lot of really important female voices circulating at the same time as male voices—they just had to find different ways to share their ideas. Women had to negotiate

“ Women had to negotiate a distinct tension between propriety and intellect. While preserving an appropriately ‘feminine’ demeanor, they were pushing on the boundaries by proving how much they knew about science.” a distinct tension between propriety and intellect. While preserving an appropriately “feminine” demeanor, they were pushing on the boundaries of what women could do by proving how much they knew about science.

trying to present as masculine (there were women in the 18th century who did that). These women were trying to maintain a stereotypical femininity even as they crossed boundaries by pursuing scientific inquiry.

NM: Experimental Women, the working title of your project, seems like a double entendre: women experimenting with science and also with gender. Is that a fair reading?

NM: What are the results of that boundary-crossing, both for the field of science and for women at the time?

KS: It depends on what you mean by “experimenting with gender.” Women were experimenting with all kinds of interplays between propriety and accessibility and gender presentation inasmuch as they were consciously avoiding crossing that “non-feminine” line. I wouldn’t say they were experimenting with gender in the contemporary sense, of

KS: Women participated in science in such a way as to create new opportunities for fellow women as readers and writers of scientific knowledge. These writers weren’t just producing valuable scientific work; they were creating a counter-discourse, or counter-public, for women and younger audiences. Although it was important for them to be in dialogue with male scientists and natural philosophers, they also created space for female intellectual activity and scientific production within this male-dominated world. What was at stake was women being able to produce and circulate knowledge, effectively pushing back on the notion that they should stay within a limited sphere of intellectual activity and imitate knowledge but not actually create any new knowledge themselves.

NM: It sounds like the dominant discourse at the time was urging women to study botany, but only to the extent that it could help them cultivate certain feminine sensibilities, and women took that opening and expanded what they could do.

KS: I would agree with that, although there were women who were more radical than the figures I’m focusing on. For example, Mary Wollstonecraft, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,

A spread from The Botanical Magazine, or The Flower-Garden Displayed, today known as Curtis’s Botanical Magazine.

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contended that women should study botany because it would help them understand their own sexuality. Not exactly a stance that would have been endorsed at the time as an appropriately feminine attitude.

NM: What have you found in the Newberry’s collection that has helped you with your research?

KS: There are a number of writings

by Priscilla Wakefield, who I mentioned earlier. There are hardly any contemporary editions of her work, so it’s really important to have access to these 18th-century publications, partly because the marginalia inside them can be so interesting. Sometimes, for example, you’ll find f lowers pressed into a book as evidence of people actually The Female Spectator was a periodical published by Eliza Haywood between 1744 and 1746. The publication using botanical texts for botanizing helped spread botanical knowledge among different audiences in the 18th century. purposes.

The Newberry has an original copy of The Female Spectator, NM: Poetry and literature were popular vehicles women

by Eliza Haywood, which is the focus of one of my other used to talk about botany? chapters on periodicals and scientific pedagogy for women.

There does exist a modern edition of this but the original in the KS: Yes. Something I’m trying to do with my research is Newberry’s collection is a beautiful copy, and it’s wonderful to integrate the technical writings about botany with writings look at the authentic source text! that popularized botany through other genres, like periodicals, I’ve also been working my way through a lot of conduct novels, and poetry. literature, most of which was written by men but some of which was written by women. Rousseau’s Letters on the NM: This is another example of women working within Elements of Botany is an example of a fairly conservative attitude constraints and acceptable genres in order to push the regarding women and science. For Rousseau, studying botany boundaries of their scientific involvement? was about cultivating a very particular type of femininity that Wollstonecraft would later totally oppose. Many texts KS: Exactly. Botanical textbooks were considered acceptable like Rousseau’s were about maintaining the metaphorical for women to publish because of their status as authorities connection between women and f lowers in a way that avoided on how to educate children by the end of the 18th century. the sexual association and played up the effete nature of f lowers.

Likewise with periodicals: there was a thriving periodical NM: Like the trope of the delicate f lower.

KS: Delicate, pretty—Wollstonecraft would say useless f lower.

There’s also a fantastic book of botanical poetry by Frances Arabella Rowden that was part of a trend in the late 18th century of women writing what read like nature poetry but with explanatory footnotes filled with botanical information.

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culture that women contributed to left and right. Visual arts and poetry: those were acceptable genres for women as well.

Listen to our podcast episode featuring Katie Sagal at www.newberry.org/shelf-life

Renovation Update Since January, our renovation team (including Ann Beha Architects, Bulley & Andrews, and AVA Consultants) has been making steady progress, reconfiguring nearly 25,000 square feet as we transform our first floor into a more open, welcoming, and engaging environment. As of this writing, we’re more than two-thirds of the way through the six-month project. Soon, we plan to unveil the new first floor, beginning with our first-ever welcome center in early July and culminating in the opening of redesigned exhibition galleries in September.

In the meantime, we invite you to grab your metaphorical hard hat and join us for a photographic

tour of the construction areas.

Vaulting into New Program Spaces The Newberry’s first book vault was installed in 1926, and it served us well for the next six decades. In the early 1980s, the collection items stored in the vault were relocated to a separate stacks building, and the vault was reassigned to other storage purposes. This winter, sadly, we had to bid it adieu in order to make way for new program and event spaces on the west end of the first f loor.

However, we’ve kept the vault door (all 1,500+ pounds of it!), and we plan to display it on the first f loor as a piece of Newberry history and a salute to the vault’s many years of service.

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Case in Point Peeking into what will become our new permanent exhibition gallery, you’ll see a series of cantilevers that will soon support a 46-foot-long case for displaying maps, manuscripts, books, and other highlights from our collection.

Accessible Entrance Our new ADA-accessible entrance will be available just to the east of the library main entrance. The accessible entrance, located amid much-improved exterior landscaping, will take visitors right up to the new welcome center.

Floored The mosaic tiling in our lobby has been a trademark of the Newberry’s first f loor since we opened the building in 1893. Bourbon Tile & Marble are engaged in the intricate process of restoring worn sections of the f loor, matching new tile pieces (or tesserae) to the originals and blending them into the distinctive mosaic patterning.

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Super Graphics As you explore our new first f loor, you’ll come across a few decorative graphics based on images from our collection. Considering we started with literally millions of options, we have to pat ourselves on the back for seeing the selection process through to completion. Library staff nominated items for consideration, and we narrowed down the field by testing the ways in which the imagery interacted with the physical spaces.

These environmental graphics were made possible through a generous gift by Rosemary J. Schnell.

Vestibule: Detail of a map from a manuscript atlas created by Joan Martines in 1583.

Bookshop: An illustration from Nova Reperta (ca. 1600), a collection of engraved illustrations showing notable inventions or discoveries of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, including the magnet and compass, eyeglasses, and the printing press (shown here).

North Entry: “Twentieth Century Transportation,” map published by Charles Felthousen around 1910.

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Looking Towards the Future For 130 years, the Newberry has pursued its mission to connect people with a world-class collection, knowledgeable staff, and engaging programs that foster a vibrant community of learning. Today we are presented with exciting opportunities to serve even more users with increasing effectiveness and creativity. To do so, we have undertaken a $30-million comprehensive campaign, First and Foremost, in order both to secure the enhancement of our facilities in service to our community and to ensure the financial sustainability of the Newberry for the 21st century.

On the following pages we present just a few stories of the donors to First and Foremost and the impact of their gifts.

First and Foremost rests on the following four pillars: RENOVATION FOR INNOVATION Redesigning our first f loor to create spaces that will be more welcoming and effective in meeting the needs of visitors and staff.

OUR PEOPLE AND THEIR EFFECTIVENESS Supporting the work of our staff members by endowing key senior positions, improving staff salaries, and providing effective and ample professional development opportunities for employees at all levels.

OUR COLLECTION AND ITS USE Increasing funds for collection acquisitions, cataloging, and processing, as well as digitization work, so that our collection can grow and be increasingly accessible both in-person and online.

PROGRAMMING FOR ENGAGEMENT

First

&

Fore most

Adding funding to support successful existing public and scholarly programs while launching new ventures that will appeal to current and expanded audiences.

THE CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE We extend our sincere thanks to the leadership of our Board of Trustees Campaign Steering Committee: Victoria Herget, Co-Chair David Hilliard, Co-Chair Peter Willmott, Co-Chair Roger Baskes Mark Hausberg Robert Holland David McNeel Cynthia Mitchell

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SPOTLIGHT ON DONORS

A New Place to Hang Your Hat Nancy Raymond Corral Welcomes You to the Newberry

“T

his is why I love the Newberry. The people here are so welcoming and interesting, and there is always something new to learn.”

These words were spoken by Nancy Raymond Corral after a recent meeting of the Society of Collectors. She had just heard Jim Akerman, Curator of Maps and Director of the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography, speak about the Newberry’s extensive collection of road maps, automobile guidebooks, road atlases, and related travel ephemera.

“I didn’t know anything about the subject,” Nancy mused.

“But now I have something new to explore.”

This sense of discovery and community is what has drawn Nancy to the Newberry for the past two decades. Born and raised near Salem, Massachusetts, Nancy lived in Ohio and West Virginia before moving to the suburbs of Chicago where she raised three children, served as the President of the Homewood Welcome Wagon, and sat on the board of the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra. With her children grown and raising families of their own, Nancy moved to Chicago in 2000, settling just blocks from the Newberry.

“I feel so fortunate that I was able to move to Chicago. I love living near the Newberry and being a part of the Newberry Library family.” Her first exposure to the Newberry came through her involvement in the Associates Book Group, a monthly book club meeting of Annual Fund donors. “Everyone in the group brings their own experiences and beliefs to the books we read. It’s so rewarding to hear other people’s perspectives and to read things I may not have chosen on my own. It’s fun, and one gets to know one’s neighbor.”

Nancy (second from the left) is joined by her friends from the Newberry Book Group.

Indeed, the Book Group serves as a microcosm for the Newberry at large—a place where scholars and readers from all over the world converge to share ideas and discoveries centered on the Newberry’s vast collection. And when the first f loor renovation is complete, those visitors will have a new place to hang their proverbial hats, thanks to Nancy.

Nancy recently made a gift to the First and Foremost campaign in support of the first-f loor renovation and, in appreciation of her generosity, the new coat room will be named for her. The coat room will replace the Newberry’s locker room, which has long been in need of an upgrade. Naming the space in honor of Nancy is a fitting tribute for someone who routinely uses the words “home,” “neighbor,” and “family” to describe the Newberry. The room in which readers and guests will soon settle in for a visit to the reading rooms will be named for a woman whose welcoming and generous spirit has made her a favorite among Newberry staff.

“Nancy is an exemplary Newberry donor,” says Katy Orenchuk, Vice President for Development. “She cares deeply about the library and its mission and is excited to continue learning through our collection and programs. She is infinitely generous with her time and her philanthropic support, and she is always a delightful addition to Newberry gatherings.”

It’s true that Nancy is a quintessential Newberrian, and she recognizes this in herself. “I admire the long line of people that have brought the Newberry this far and am happy to be a help for the future.” What’s more, she sees herself as an advocate for the Newberry. “We will, all of us that love the Newberry, do all we can to make it prosper.”

That is a message that all Newberry visitors should take to heart as they hang their coats in a room named for Nancy Raymond Corral.

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SPOTLIGHT ON DONORS

ITW—Generations of Support I

n 1912, the year the Newberry Library celebrated its 25th anniversary, Chicago financier Byron L. Smith placed an ad in The Economist looking to provide capital to a “high class business (manufacturing preferred) in or near Chicago.” A small group of tool inventors came forward, and Illinois Tool Works Inc. was born. For the last 40 years, ITW has been a generous supporter of the Newberry Library, fostering a partnership that not only celebrates the rich histories both organizations have in Chicago, but also the close ties between the Newberry and the founding family of ITW. Today, Byron’s great-great-grandson, David B. Smith, Jr., and David’s uncle, Harold B. Smith, Jr., both sit on the Board of Trustees of the Newberry, with Harold having previously served as Chair of the Board from 1982 to 1988. The relationship between the Smith family and the Newberry has allowed the library to benefit from the generosity of ITW, a company that has long provided vital Annual Fund support as well as contributions to special projects and pivotal fundraising campaigns.

“The Newberry is an important institution in Chicago,” stated Rosemary Matzl, Vice President of Community Affairs at ITW. “We are happy to support its growth and ongoing success.”

ITW is playing a key role in this ongoing success through its support of the Newberry’s First and Foremost campaign. The company has made a gift to the first-f loor renovation project, which will result in a new high-tech seminar classroom, the first of its kind at the Newberry. The classroom will have precision climate control, which will allow for the viewing of rare and fragile items from the Newberry’s collection; state-of-the-art video conferencing capabilities so users can connect with speakers and collection materials around the world; and a series of cameras for video and documentation that will also provide magnification technology to allow for closer examination of collection items.

“The new classroom will allow us to teach in innovative new ways,” says D. Bradford Hunt, Vice President for Research and Academic Programs. “For example, we will be able to have a faculty member from anywhere around the world make a presentation through video, one that can include a collection item right in the room. We can also live-stream the event to the world, and the two teleconferencing cameras mean that meaningful interaction between speakers and presenters can take place.”

In Chicago, ITW focuses its philanthropic energy in the areas of education, arts, and culture. ITW’s support of a seminar classroom is in perfect alignment with its giving priorities, as the classroom will be used by hundreds of members of the Newberry 28

Spring 2018

ITW Chairman and CEO Scott Santi with students from ITW David Speer Academy on a field trip.

SPOTLIGHT ON DONORS community who wish to engage meaningfully with the Newberry’s vast holdings. Students will visit to view collection items, learn from the library’s expert staff, and conduct their own research. Pop-up exhibitions of materials will enhance programs for both scholars and the public. Professional development programs for teachers, graduate student courses, and Newberry adult education seminars will be transformed as participants are presented with new ways to connect with the Newberry and deepen their learning.

“The Newberry is going through a transformation,” Matzl noted. “It is a library that has great access and tools and opportunities for the community. We’re really excited to support that.”

The relationship between the Newberry and ITW extends beyond the classroom to a partnership with the ITW David Speer Academy, a public four-year charter high school located in Chicago’s Belmont Cragin neighborhood. Named after ITW’s former Chairman, David B. Speer, the STEM-focused school is committed to the success of its first graduating class of 2018. This past year, the Newberry hosted a Speer Academy student as part

of the inaugural Senior Internship, which enabled students to gain real-world professional skills. The internship not only exposed a high school student to the wide variety of work being done at the library, but also highlighted the commitment to education ITW and the Newberry share.

In 2012, ITW proudly celebrated its 100-year anniversary.

That same year the Newberry commemorated its quasquicentennial. The company, like the Newberry, shows no signs of slowing down and continues to evolve and innovate. As a global company with community involvement deeply rooted in its history and values, ITW continues to have a lasting positive impact on the communities where its employees live, work, and do business.

The Newberry is honored to have ITW as a funder and partner in the successful completion of the historic first-f loor renovation, and pleased to have the leadership and advocacy of the Smith family on the Board of Trustees. The new seminar classroom is a milestone in the Newberry’s history, and an important piece of ITW’s legacy in Chicago.

Replacing Bartleby The Newberry’s Latest Technological Acquisition

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eneral Collections Services Librarian Maggie Cusick was recently able to scan 192 pages of materials in just 20 minutes. That kind of lightning-quick photoduplication would have been impossible before October 2017; scanning such a large number of pages would have taken Maggie several hours.

The reason for this drastic improvement is the arrival of a new piece of equipment to the Newberry—a KIC Bookeye 4V2 scanner station. The state-of-the-art cradle book scanner was purchased thanks to the generous campaign gift of former scholar-in-residence and longtime Newberry supporter Barbara Hanawalt. The purchase had long been on the wish list for Reader Services staff, who had struggled with its predecessor: a finicky scanner they referred to as Bartleby.

Bartleby certainly had his limitations. He did not scan in color. The quality of the scans he produced was lacking. Using

him was tedious and time consuming. And, perhaps most importantly, he was unable to handle some of the Newberry’s larger materials. His replacement (affectionate moniker pending) solves those problems.

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SPOTLIGHT ON DONORS “The new scanner has been an immense improvement to the Newberry’s photoduplication services. It is significantly easier and more intuitive for employees to use, returning to us time and effort once spent on finagling copies out of an uncooperative machine,” says Rosemary Frehe, General Collections Library Assistant.

Lisa Schoblasky, Special Collections Services Librarian, notes that it’s not just Newberry staff who benef it from the new scanner. “I can now say yes to certain requests for scans when before I would have needed to say no.” Not only can scans now be produced more quickly and in color, but the new high-resolution scanner allows for zooming in

on an image to see the smallest details; this is an invaluable benef it to researchers. Reader Services staff are thrilled to be able to provide faster, better quality scanning services to patrons both in the reading rooms and through remote requests.

As this is the Newberry, where cataloging the past is a high priority, Bartleby still has a home in the building. But he’s been overshadowed by the latest technological acquisition.

When she goes to use the new scanner, Allison DeArcangelis, Special Collections Library Assistant, is relieved to be able to ignore Bartleby. “I used to dread doing scanning jobs,” she notes. “Now it’s actually enjoyable!”

Free For All The Newberry Engages Its Youngest Fans

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hen Karen Christianson assumed the role of Director of Public Engagement, one of her key objectives was to expand Newberry programming to attract new audiences to the library. “Families with children were of particular interest to us,” she says. “Looking around the Newberry’s neighborhood, you can’t help but notice how many young families are in the park and on the sidewalks. Their kids may be too small to use our reading rooms, but we can help them connect to the Newberry through fun, educational programs for children.”

Karen found an enthusiastic supporter for these plans in the Chicago Free For All Fund at The Chicago Community Trust, which began funding free Newberry programs for the

Children enjoy a recent “Second Saturday” program.

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community in neighboring Washington Square Park in 2015.

An initial gift from the Chicago Free For All Fund allowed Karen to expand two existing programs, the Bughouse Square Debates and Make Music Chicago, to include more performers and activities for school-aged children, increasing attendance from families at these two summer events.

Last year, the Chicago Free For All Fund supported a brand new programming series at the Newberry called “Second Saturdays,” in which performers used music, drama, and storytelling to bring the Newberry collection to life for children. “Many people don’t know that the Newberry’s collection includes a wide variety of children’s literature,” notes Karen. “We were able to highlight everything from an 1865 illustrated version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to a recent addition to the Ayer collection called Greet the Dawn: The Lakota Way. Using high-resolution facsimiles, we can connect children and their families with the treasures of our collection.”

In total, some 1,800 guests attended Chicago Free For All Fund programs last year, a number Karen hopes will increase in 2019. “We plan on offering even more ‘Second Saturday’ programs next year. Hopefully, we can introduce neighborhood parents to the Newberry, as well as encourage the next generation of Newberry readers!”

SPOTLIGHT ON DONORS

The Davee Foundation A Musical Legacy

Evelyn Dunbar and Ruth Dunbar Davee

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or more than two decades The Davee Foundation has offered support for critical improvements at the Newberry, including the development and implementation of a new website in 2009 and the installation of the Aeon system for collection management in 2013. For the First and Foremost campaign, the Foundation has chosen to endow a long-term fellowship to support a scholar conducting research related to the Newberry’s vast music collections.

Founded in 1964, The Davee Foundation supports organizations that ref lect the interests and passions of Ken Davee (deceased in 1998), his first wife Adeline Barry Davee (deceased in 1987), and his second wife Ruth Dunbar Davee (deceased in 2011). “The Newberry was of particular interest to Ruth,” notes Craig Grannon, the Foundation’s Executive Administrator. “She did research at the library and always spoke highly of it. When they later moved into the neighborhood, she and Ken enjoyed having it nearby as a resource for educational and cultural programs.”

All who knew her remark on Ruth’s lifelong curiosity and desire to learn. She received her PhD in English literature from Northwestern University in 1942, a time when few women were pursuing advanced degrees. She worked as an educator, teaching at Polytechnic Institute (later Interamerican University) in Puerto Rico, Whitman College, Wayne State University, and Western Reserve University. By 1950, she had started her second career as a journalist, serving as copy reader, reporter, and eventually Education Editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, a position she held for 16 years. She was frequently recognized for her excellent education writing, and later became Assistant Director of the Department of Education for the State of Illinois in Chicago, where she managed the Title One program, a federally-sponsored school program for underserved children in low-income areas.

Ruth was also deeply passionate about music, an interest she shared with her sister, Evelyn Dunbar. Though different in personality (Ruth, fearless and outgoing; Evelyn, quiet and more reserved), the sisters lived together for most of their lives.

Their family recalls that dinner parties at the Dunbar sisters’ home often ended with a musical performance, featuring Ruth on the clarinet and Evelyn on the piano. Evelyn had attended the American Conservatory of Music and played the piano, the harpsichord, and the recorder with skill. She shared her love of music by offering private lessons in her home later in her life, and both sisters worked to instill an interest in classical music in the younger generations of their family.

The Davee Foundation has supported music programs throughout the region, including at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra, and Northwestern University. Establishing the Evelyn Dunbar and Ruth Dunbar Davee Fellowship Endowment at the Newberry will further honor the sisters’ legacy, while promoting use of the Newberry’s extraordinary music collections. “We currently receive many more fellowship applications for music and musicological topics than we can accommodate each year,” says Vice President for Research and Academic Programs Brad Hunt.

“This fellowship will allow us to welcome an additional scholar each year, in perpetuity: a fitting tribute to two sisters who cared deeply about music and education.”

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SPOTLIGHT ON DONORS

Strengthening the Newberry’s Collection A

ll that happens at the Newberry—exhibitions, public programs, research by fellows—is rooted in the Newberry’s collection. The materials that are housed in the stacks building are the foundation of the Newberry, and increasing funds to acquire, catalog, and process collection items is a key pillar of the First and Foremost campaign.

For more than 30 years, Newberry Library Life Trustee T. Kimball Brooker has generously provided funds for the acquisition of materials related to 17th-century French literature. When it came time to support the First and Foremost campaign, it was natural for Mr. Brooker to continue this legacy by contributing to his existing book fund and expanding its scope to include material from the 16th century.

“The recent redefinition of the fund from 17th-century to 16th- and 17th-century literature and its cultural context opens up a much wider range of printers and authors for

consideration. This newfound f lexibility will greatly enrich a collection already strong in many 18th-century materials,” says Suzanne Karr Schmidt, George Amos Poole III Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts.

Since the T. Kimball Brooker French Literature Fund was established, a long line of illustrious Newberry staff, including Suzanne, have had the privilege of selecting materials for the collection. Recent items purchased with the fund include a volume that contains engravings by Claudine Brunand, which was recently on display during the Newberry’s exhibition “Religious Change and Print, 1450-1700.” Brunand, the daughter of a painter and engraver from Lyon, illustrated a poetic interpretation of St. Teresa’s life, which was included in The Life of the Seraphic Mother St. Teresa of Jesus [of Ávila] from 1669.

Gifts for the acquisition of materials speak directly to the core of the Newberry’s mission, and allow curators such as Suzanne to enhance the Newberry’s worldrenowned collection in strategic and important ways.

“We are here to share and safeguard our holdings, but especially to create an ever-expanding context that speaks to new audiences. Continuing to build our collection and redefine our collection areas ensures that we can offer our classes, fellows, public programs and exhibition attendees, readers, and many others direct access to the original materials they need,” says Suzanne.

The Life of the Seraphic Mother St. Teresa of Jesus [of Ávila] with engravings by Claudine Brunand.

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SPOTLIGHT ON DONORS

Booked for the Evening L

ast fall the Newberry hosted Booked for the Evening, an event designed to provide additional support for the library’s efforts to build and care for its collection. Guests met with Newberry staff to view items that were available for bidding: both possible acquisitions as well as items in need of cataloging and conservation work. The event was a rousing success—13 items were acquired thanks to the generosity of donors, and gifts were also made to support vital projects, including

the conservation and digitization of Ptolemy’s Cosmographia.

Mark your calendars now for the next Booked for the Evening event, which will be held on Thursday, October 25.

Booked for the Evening guests meet with conservation staff.

Support First and Foremost The Newberry thrives thanks to the generosity of its donors. As we strive to increase access to our collection, renovate the building to serve the growing needs of our users, and provide everexpanding public programming, that support is more important than ever. Whether you are a reader, seminar participant, scholar, student, exhibition attendee, or just someone who loves the Newberry, this campaign will have a positive impact on how you use the library. By joining our loyal supporters, your contribution will ensure our success, and enable the Newberry to grow and evolve to meet the needs of our users for years to come.

There are three easy ways to make a gift.

• Give online at https://go.newberry.org/ firstandforemost • C all the Development Office at (312) 255-3581 • Mail a check payable to the Newberry Library 60 W. Walton St, Chicago, IL 60610 Attn: Development Office If you would like to speak to someone about your support of the campaign, please contact Katy E. Orenchuk, Vice President for Development, (312) 255-3560 or via email at orenchukk@newberry.org.

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RETROSPECT

Recent Events MEET THE AUTHOR: BEN AUSTEN High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing Cabrini-Green looms in the American imagination as a notorious example of public housing. Ben Austen’s book High-Risers complicates the narrative that many Americans have received through the news. On March 7, Austen and J.R. Fleming—an anti-eviction activist, former resident of Cabrini-Green, and one of the main figures in the book—spoke about the history of public housing in Chicago, the rise of Cabrini-Green, the contradictions between the media’s portrayal of Cabrini-Green and the actual experience of living there, and the future of housing access.

Author Ben Austen (right) and anti-eviction activist J.R. Fleming

WOMEN, RELIGION, AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN CHICAGO AND THE MIDWEST Occurring as the final program in the Newberry’s project Religious Change, 1450-1700, in April, a panel of scholars explored the ways religious women in Chicago have pushed traditional boundaries of leadership and progressive politics while advocating for social conservatism and moral rectitude. Mary Beth Connolly opened the program with her discussion of the Sisters of Mercy, who established Catholic schools that served both Catholic and non-Catholic girls in primary and secondary education in the mid-nineteenth century. Rachel Bohlmann followed with a conversation about how Frances Willard and the Christian Women’s Temperance Union faced opponents who tried to discredit the harms of alcohol-related domestic violence and the importance of women’s representation in government. Next, Karla Goldman discussed Chicago Jewish women’s rich history of public advocacy and civil rights activism. Wallace Best closed the talks with an exploration of two black women preachers in Chicago who cared for their congregations’ spiritual and physical needs in ways that both embraced and eschewed traditional views of women’s roles in the church. Finally, Ann Durkin Keating moderated a discussion among the panelists and a question-and-answer session with the audience.

Listen to public programs at https://soundcloud.com/newberrylibrary A panel of scholars discuss women, religion, and social change in Chicago. Left to right: Wallace Best, Karla Goldman, Rachel Bohlmann, Mary Beth Connolly, and Ann Durkin Keating.

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RETROSPECT

CONVERSATIONS AT THE NEWBERRY Thomas Jefferson and American Democracy On March 14, noted Thomas Jefferson scholars Annette GordonReed and Peter Onuf visited the library as part of our ongoing series, “Conversations at the Newberry.” Tackling the question of how to reconcile Jefferson-the-champion-of-democracy with Jefferson-theslave-owning-aristocrat, Gordon-Reed and Onuf drew a connection between the tensions within Jefferson’s personal life and the tensions within our democratic system of government. Jefferson advocated for an increase in political power among “the people,” even as he (and subsequent generations) placed limitations on who could lay claim to that sacred political identity. According to Gordon-Reed and Onuf, Jefferson defied his fellow Virginia elites by imagining that a “leveling up” would result from giving individuals more rights. But his defiance was not absolute.

Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf. Photo by Anne Ryan

CONVERSATIONS AT THE NEWBERRY Reflecting on an Academic Life On May 2, Hanna Holborn Gray joined Newberry President David Spadafora for a conversation covering a range of trends, developments, and enduring issues within American higher education. Following the recent publication of her memoir, An Academic Life, Gray (who is a Newberry Trustee) ref lected on the role of Jewish emigrés in helping to “de-provincialize” American universities after World War II, the connection between her training as a scholar and her approach to serving as president of the University of Chicago, the responsibilities of being a trustee for a cultural institution, and the importance of a liberal arts education in training people to think critically and negotiate the tsunamis of information we are all bombarded with day after day.

Hanna Holborn Gray and David Spadafora. Photo by Peter Pawinski

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RETROSPECT

Recent Events NEWBERRY ANNUAL AWARD DINNER On April 23, some 200 friends of the Newberry gathered to see the Newberry Library Award for outstanding contributions to the humanities presented to the 14th Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden.

In addition to being the first woman and the first African American to serve as Librarian of Congress, Dr. Hayden is only the second professionally trained librarian ever in that post and the first professional librarian to receive the Newberry’s highest honor. Chaired by Chung-Kyun and Robert Wedgeworth and Sheli and Burt Rosenberg, the event raised significant funds to support the Newberry’s collections and programs.

Describing Dr. Hayden’s career, which began at the Chicago Public Library, Newberry President David Spadafora noted, “Promoting access has consistently been Dr. Hayden’s guiding principle. During her presidency of the American Library Association, she centered her time in office on the theme of ‘Equity of Access,’ and her focus as Librarian of Congress is making sure as many people as possible know about the treasures at the library and how they can use them—in her words, ‘opening up the treasure chest’ for all people.”

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and Newberry President David Spadafora. Photo by Anne Ryan

In accepting the award, Dr. Hayden highlighted the similarities between the goals of the Library of Congress and the Newberry. “The library is an embodiment of the American ideal of a knowledge-based democracy,” she said. “I was so excited to see the Newberry’s first-f loor renovation plans, because we’re planning to do the same thing at the Library of Congress to encourage people to engage with the collection and with staff members.

We take such good care of our collections—we preserve them and conserve them and spend time with them—but if they are not used and we are not growing scholars or engaging people, we will be mausoleums.”

Dr. Hayden plans to return to the Newberry in August to see the Newberry’s new spaces.

From left to right: Newberry Trustee Robert Wedgeworth, Newberry President David Spadafora, Dr. Carla Hayden, Colleen Hayden (Dr. Hayden’s mother), Celia Hilliard, Newberry Board Chair David Hilliard, and Newberry Trustee Burt Rosenberg. Photo by Anne Ryan

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PROSPECT

Upcoming Events Since the Newberry’s founding in 1887, the library has provided programs in the humanities for people throughout the Chicago area and beyond. Today, you can explore history, literature, music, and the arts through public lectures, Meet the Author events, exhibitions, seminars, and other programs. Register to attend these free programs online at www.newberry.org/public-programs.

JUNE

JULY

Genealogy and Local History Orientation Saturday, June 2, 9 am

Genealogy and Local History Orientation Saturday, July 7, 9 am

Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America Meet the Author: Catherine Kerrison Wednesday, June 6 6 pm Author Talk; 7 pm Book Signing

The 34th Annual Newberry Book Fair Thursday, July 26 - Sunday, July 29 Thursday and Friday, Noon to 8 pm Saturday and Sunday, 10 am to 6 pm

Gambling on Authenticity Meet the Authors: Becca Gercken and Julie Pelletier Thursday, June 7 6 pm Author Talk; 7 pm Book Signing Make Music Chicago 2018 Held in Washington Square Park 901 N. Clark St. (across from the Newberry) Thursday, June 21, 2 – 7 pm

Bughouse Square Debates Saturday, July 28, Noon to 4 pm AUGUST Genealogy and Local History Orientation Saturday, August 4, 9 am EXHIBITION

2 – 3 pm Chicago Horn Consort 3 – 4 pm Learn a Tune: Piano Lessons with Mick Archer.

Sign up at http://makemusicchicago.org/play/learn/ click on Washington Square Park 4 – 5 pm BandWith Chicago 6 – 7 pm Windy City Winds

Pictures from an Exposition: Visualizing the 1893 World’s Fair September 28 – December 31

Non-Profit Organization

U.S. POSTAGE PAID 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, IL 60610 www.newberry.org

JULY 26–29

2018

The Newberry Library

Be the First to Shop the 2018 Newberry Book Fair!

Annual Fund donors at the $100 level or more and Next Chapter members receive special access for two to Chicago’s biggest used-book binge. Book Fair Preview Night is Wednesday, July 25, 4–8 pm.

For more information on this and other benefits of membership in the Newberry Associates, please call (312) 255-3616.