Ever see a book with sunburn?

This is a living relic from the days when our library used to expose the collection to a "healthy" amount of fresh air and sunshine - the light from the sun actually bleached the cover where it wasn't protected by the latticework of the bookstack.

Pretty neat, eh? The moral of the story: even books need sunscreen!

I'm just a barcodin' fool

Although I always sort of kind of regret it when the alarm goes off at 5:30 in the morning, I really do enjoy working on these Monday holidays. The subway is nice and empty and yet still runs reasonably on time, the lines at the Dunkin' Donuts are short, and since we don't have a Depository delivery the desk is fairly quiet unless we get a bevy of visiting researchers trying to take advantage of the rare day off from their own regularly paying jobs as faculty, students, or whatever it is that independent scholars do when they're not writing the next monograph. As it turned out this morning, we didn't get so much as one book page request through lunchtime, nor did we have to retrieve any material from the Cage for Harvard ID holders.

(Yes, we have a Cage. Where else are you going to lock up your problem patrons and/or student werewolves? Okay, just kidding about the problem patrons...)

What we did have, however, was about an entire book truck piled with returns consisting of items without barcodes. Most of these are volumes of periodicals or monographic series, both of which escaped the purview of our "Smart Barcoding Project" (our most recent attempt to get the majority of our holdings online and trackable down to the item level). So when a visiting researcher either pages these things or a Harvard patron asks to have one of them put on hold in the room, it falls on our shoulders to barcode the thing before re-releasing it back into the wild that is the Widener Stacks.

Most of the time we're only dealing with one or two volumes here and there, so my students and staff can fill out a barcode form and I'll generate the item record for it the next morning or thereabouts, but in the case of large amounts of books -- say, an entire run of an obscure 19th century serial -- I'll let the desk workers skip filling out form and just catch the books when they finally get returned. Even though we may lose a little bit of transparency by doing so, this way we can prevent tying up desk workers with filling out dozens of little yellow forms and get the material to our visiting researchers as soon as humanly possible. Besides, most of these items can't leave the Reading Room, let alone the library, so if an emergency arises and we need to locate these materials in a pinch they're not going to have gotten too far away from our Tracing staff.

This morning a couple of visiting researchers' primary source materials were coming off the Hold Shelf, which is why I ended up getting swamped with unbarcoded returns. Thus far I've been able to knock out one of the series, but I'm afraid that the other one may have to wait for tomorrow or later in the week, as not only does it have extremely irregular enumeration (not to mention mostly unhelpful data printed on their spines), but many of the items are experiencing some serious red rot as well and are in generally poor condition overall. So I had better remind myself not to wear light-colored clothing this week!

It melts in your hands

Yick. I love old books, but I hate when their bindings crumble into black or red powder that is a pain in the ass to wash off your hands (or out of your shirt!)...

Interesting find

From a bookplate pasted onto the front inside cover of volume 3 of Travels through the United States of North America, the country of the Iroquois, and Upper Canada, in the years 1795, 1796, and 1797; by the Duke de La Rochefoucault Liancourt (London, R. Phillips, 1800):

Rules of the Boston Library Society.

Not more than one folio, two quartos, or three of smaller size, shall be taken out at the same time; and for each set that is not returned in five weeks, a fine at the rate of three shillings per set, for each week, as long as it is detained.

If any book or books are abused or lost, the same to be replaced by a similar volume or volumes, or the current price for the same to be paid. The delinquent, in such case, will have his privilege suspended till this rule is complied with.

The Library to be open every Thursday and Saturday in the afternoon, from 3 to 5 in Winter, and from 3 to 6 in Summer.

If a subscriber lends a book, his privilege shall be suspended one year.

That one dollar be paid by each subscriber at the annual meeting in March, or when he first takes any book from the Library after the March meeting in every year; and the Librarian, in no case, deliver any Book to any person a second time, without the said assessment's being paid.

That all Books be returned to the Library on or before the 15th of February, in order for inspection by the annual Committee; -- and that delinquents be subject to a fine of one dollar for each set not to be returned.

A number of very valuable books are deposited, which may be examined without being removed from the Library-Room.

Having never heard of this Boston Library Society, I did a Google Search and found the following historical blurb in a finding aid of the Society's archives currently residing at the Boston Athenaeum:

The Boston Library Society (1792-1939) was the earliest proprietary library in the Boston area. It provided residents of Boston with access to the works of American authors, as well as to the classics and to European literature. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Boston Library Society began to lose its proprietors and subscribers to the Boston Public Library. The reduction in its membership made it difficult for the Society to expand its collection and maintain its library. In 1939 the proprietors were forced to close the doors of the Boston Library Society and agreed to operate under the auspices of the Boston Athenaeum. The Boston Library Society Archives consist of records, preserved by the Society and acquired by the Boston Athenaeum, that document the activity of nearly every division of library operations. They occupy a storage space of about thirty linear feet.

Very cool! Two observations about the aforementioned rules:

1. The provision against lending a library volume to a third party is interesting. So I guess file-sharing has always been frowned upon...

2. I particularly like the use of the term 'delinquent' to denote library patrons with overdue or missing materials. Can we bring that back perhaps?

But back to the book itself -- it's a thing of beauty! Each volume of the set includes fold-out maps of North America circa 1800 which are treasures in and of themselves. How amazing that I get to peek at these items for the first time before anyone else in the library, and often for the first time in decades. I wonder how these books came to be in Widener's collection? A search through the Boston Athenaeum's catalog shows that they have a copy of the 2-volume first edition (printed in 1799) in its Rare Book Room, so perhaps when the Athenaeum inherited the Boston Library Society's collection they didn't feel that they needed the 2nd edition as well.

Who knows? Perhaps the Athenaeum never owned this book at all, but it found its way from the BLS collection to Harvard by another route entirely. Perhaps some 'delinquent' borrowed it, never returned it, and later donated to the Widener Library long after the Boston Library Society had ceased to exist. That's a lot of speculation from a bookplate, and I'm sure someone here at Harvard is in a much better position to answer this question than I am, but it's an interesting way to pass the time this morning nonetheless...