The Lilly Library from A to Z: Intriguing Objects in a World-Class Collection

By Darlene J. Sadlier

A beautifully illustrated look inside of Indiana University Bloomington’s renowned library of rare books, manuscripts, and related oddities.

What do locks of Edgar Allan Poe’s hair, Sylvia Plath’s attractive handmade paper dolls, John Ford’s Oscars, and Ian Fleming’s James Bond 007 cigars have in common? They are just a few of the fascinating objects found in the world-famous Lilly Library, located on the campus of Indiana University Bloomington. In this beautifully illustrated A-to-Z volume, Darlene J. Sadlier journeys through the library’s wide-ranging collections to highlight dozens of intriguing items and the archives of which they are a part. Read about life and death masks of John Keats, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Dreiser; Walt Whitman’s last pencil; and vintage board games, mechanical puzzles, and even comic books. Among the more peculiar items are a pair of elk teeth and an eerily realistic wall-mount bust of Boris Karloff. Sadlier writes engagingly about the Lilly Library’s major historical collections, which include Civil War diaries and a panopticon of the war called the Myriopticon; War of 1812 payment receipts to spies; and the World War II letters and V-mail of journalist Ernie Pyle. This copiously illustrated, entertaining, and educational book will inspire you to take your own journey and discover for yourself the wonders of the Lilly Library.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9780253042699

Book preview

Introduction

On Wandering and Wonder

Founded in 1960, the Lilly Library on the campus of Indiana University Bloomington is a world-class rare books and manuscripts library. In addition to paper materials, it also houses a variety of unusual objects related to its individual research collections, including such things as dolls, life and death masks, jewelry, locks of famous hair, an authentic set of Spock ears, painted window shades, a Civil War–inspired panorama called the Myriopticon, and a scrapbook of Midwest wanted posters. These and many other fascinating objects are less well known to visitors than such holdings as the Gutenberg Bible, John Ford’s Oscars, and the Shakespeare First Folio, but they all provoke interest; some are unique, some are charmingly odd, and others, even when apparently commonplace, exude a special aura because of the collections where they are found.

While books and manuscripts are the principle objects exhibited by the library, upon entering the main lobby visitors encounter an impressive full-size wooden printing press. The adjacent Slocum Room features numerous mechanical puzzles from different parts of the world, which the public is encouraged to manipulate. (These are only a tiny fraction of the estimated thirty thousand that compose the renowned Jerry Slocum puzzle collection.) In the nearby Lincoln Room sits a bronze bust of Abraham Lincoln by Gutzon Borglum, who sculpted the figures on Mount Rushmore, and a desk from Lincoln’s Springfield office. Here and in the adjoining Elisabeth Ball Room, small cases often display other objects, such as samples from the estimated sixteen thousand miniature books from the Ruth E. Adomeit collection, John Ford’s Academy Award for How Green Was My Valley, and locks of hair that belonged to Edgar Allan Poe and Sylvia Plath. (One of Poe’s locks is encased in a handsome oval-shaped brooch with small pearls.)

The library’s larger display spaces are devoted to changing exhibitions of books, manuscripts, and other intriguing material. For example, the 2015 exhibit 100 Years of Orson Welles: Master of Stage, Sound and Screen included not only Welles’s screenplays, but also his hand-drawn set designs for his film version of Macbeth, his costume sketches for Five Kings, and a large, colorful broadside for his Mercury Theater productions of The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Julius Caesar. The latter announces, You can’t lose no matter which one you hit!

The Lilly Library regularly publishes catalogs devoted to individual collections and exhibits, but this book has a different aim. In many ways it is a personal tour or wandering through the library—an outsider’s view, although it probably reflects my own research interests in cinema and the culture of the Portuguese-speaking world. It could never have been written without the help of the Lilly Library’s talented staff, but it is not written for professional librarians or specialists. The audience I have in mind is a made up of educated or curious readers who may or may not have special interests. I have organized the contents almost whimsically by the letters of the alphabet, and for each letter I have allowed myself to jump from one topic to another, as a way of indicating the amazing scope of the collections and the wonder I felt at seeing their variety. I assume most people will not try to read the book straight through from A to Z. They can turn the pages, viewing the colorful illustrations and dipping into the text where they like, in the wandering and wonder spirit in which the volume was written. Readers can also dip into the online 3-D supplement that accompanies the book.

In my career as a faculty member at Indiana University, I learned early on about the wonder of many objects when former Lilly librarian Rebecca Becky Cape regularly scheduled time to talk to my students about the formidable Brasiliana collection. While students were impressed by the first editions of colonial Brazilian works we were reading in class, the showstoppers tended to be Theodor de Bry’s sensationalized engravings of Tupi cannibal rituals and the colorful illustrated New World maps. Becky always added a few other items to the show-and-tell to apprise students of the broad scope of the collections. Miniature books and Ford’s Academy Award were always a hit. Everyone loves donning the library’s white cotton gloves to hold the Oscar, and its hefty weight—eight and a half pounds of metal—always surprises those who pick it up. Along with the Shakespeare First Folio, the statuette is one of the objects visitors most frequently request to see.

When I began thinking about writing this book, what interested me was not only the object as historical artifact, but also its part in the life story of the individual who owned it. In most of the commentary that follows, the object functions as a portal or avenue to the collection from which it derives. Consider, for instance, the James Bond 007 cigars, which lead to a discussion of the Ian Fleming papers. Some objects arrived at the library as individual acquisitions and therefore are not part of a personal collection. This category includes a few specially handcrafted bookbindings, one of the library’s specialty areas. Among those discussed in the Bookbinding entry under the letter B is British artist Philip Smith’s extraordinary gothic tower binding, replete with a glass eye, which he designed for J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion.

Some readers may ask what constitutes an object for my purposes. Are books, manuscripts, papers, receipts, broadsides, illustrations, drawings, and maps objects? My answer is yes, unless perhaps in an e-reader or online. That’s why libraries need shelves or storage space to keep them. When we are absorbed in reading a book, we do not think of it as an object in the same sense as a bowl of flowers or a statue. It’s object-ness becomes more obvious when it is rare or unusually designed, and for that reason the illustrations in the following pages tend to feature books, magazines, maps, cartoons, and individual pages that have a strong visual interest. My focus has not been on the history of books and printing, about which there is already a vast literature. I have simply taken the liberty of writing about objects that might strike a reader’s interest, and I should emphasize that the things I have selected are only the tip of an iceberg.

I chose an A-to-Z organization, as opposed to a chronological one, and was inspired by calligrapher Coella Lindsay Ricketts’s engraved alphabet plates and illustrations. Oftentimes I have brought together highly disparate items under a single letter of the alphabet. Consider the letter C, which covers such realia (objects) as campaign buttons and pins, Chez Panisse menus, the James Bond 007 cigars, and a pack of Tramp cigarettes named for Charles Chaplin. Perhaps no two objects better demonstrate the cultural extremes of the collections than the ones represented by the letter Q: Queen Elizabeth I’s Great Seal and Quick Draw McGraw comic books.

A short list of unusual objects was compiled several years ago by an unknown staff member to whom I am extremely indebted. That list was the starting point for my research, during which I spent over a year diving deep into numerous small and large collections belonging to famous as well as ordinary citizens. The excellent library staff was fundamental in calling my attention to many of the objects that I write about. In making difficult choices, I have tended to favor items that concern the history of Indiana—its writers, artists, political figures, and interesting lesser-known people. Not surprisingly, many of the Lilly Library’s collections, like those of composer-actor Hoagy Carmichael and politician-Hollywood censor Will Hays, have strong ties to Indiana. Among other native or adopted Hoosiers discussed in this book are presidential candidate Wendell Willkie; poet James Whitcomb Riley; activist couple Powers Hapgood and Mary Donovan; Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur; Kurt Vonnegut; and the Ball family, known for producing the glass Ball jar.

The collections in the library are, as in most similar institutions, predominantly white and male because it was largely those with money, education, and full access to the public sphere who founded libraries and museums—a practice dating back to the centuries-old wundercabinets, or curiosity cabinets, which were private collections of objects from nature or the arts. The library does have a few major collections belonging to women, most prominently Ruth E. Adomeit and Elisabeth Ball, the latter of whom collected thousands of children’s books and created fascinating assemblages of cutout dolls. And the library’s trove of Latin American materials includes portraits of Inca leaders and a sizable collection of Indian and Peruvian figures painted on delicate pith paper. A few smaller collections, including that of Claudia Hill, offer insights into the African American experience. Among the Asian objects I discuss are a Chinese tapestry-covered six-foot scroll; the Boxer Codex hand-drawn illustrations; Chinese and Japanese export puzzles; and a bust of efficiency expert Harrington Emerson by Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi. One of the library’s acquisitions objectives is to bring greater diversity to the collections.

As someone who enjoys the material aspect of archival research, reading in the library’s collections and looking at objects in their context has been a unique educational experience. It is my hope that the A-to-Z entries, which constitute my own wundercabinet of sorts, will provide enjoyment, information, and a greater sense of the Lilly Library’s importance to us all.

ARMBAND

On Sunday, August 28, 1927, a massive funeral cortege accompanied the bodies of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti from the Langone Funeral Home on the Boston north side, where their bodies had been on view for their many supporters, to the Forest Hills Cemetery, where they were cremated. It was a long journey for the men’s families and the tens of thousands of others who walked the March of Sorrow organized by the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committ ee. Chief among the mourners was committ ee secretary Mary Donovan, who had been arrested by police earlier for raising a placard in the Boston Common that read, ‘Did you see what I did to those anarchistic bastards?’—Judge Thayer. Red felt armbands with black lett ering that spelled out "REMEMBER! JUSTICE CRUCIFIED! August 22, 1927" were distributed to mourners, who were warned by local officials not to wear them until they crossed Scollay Square, the city’s busy commercial center.

There is no indication whether the faded armband in the Lilly Library’s Hapgood collection belonged to Donovan or to her soon-to-be husband, Powers Hapgood, who joined the defense committ ee in 1927. We might say that the single armband represents the twin spirit of the two young radicals, whose lives became intertwined in their defense of Sacco and Vanzetti. Like Donovan, Hapgood had been arrested more than once for protesting. On one occasion police sent him to a psychopathic hospital in hopes of changing his att itude; he was released by a panel of physicians who interviewed him and judged him to be perfectly sane. On August 27, 1927, one day before the funeral, he wrote to his mother about his and others’ arrests: One of my cases came up in court yesterday, also with John Dos Passos, Paxton Hibben and George Kraska. Hebbin was found not guilty … but the rest of us were found guilty of ‘sauntering and loitering’ and sentenced [a] $10.00 fine.… Mary Donovan was arrested night before last for nothing at all but is now facing charges of ‘blocking traffic, inciting to riot, and advocating anarchy.’

Felt armband worn at the funeral of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

Hapgood and Donovan continued to speak out on behalf of the two Italian American anarchists, who were tried, found guilty of robbery and murder, and sentenced to death in the electric chair. The young couple remained defenders of the men’s innocence and united in their political activism for the next two decades.

Born into a prosperous family who owned the Columbia Conserve Company cannery in Indianapolis, Powers Hapgood (1899–1949) went to private schools and graduated from Harvard in 1921.¹ By that time he had already worked as a manual laborer in various states, including jobs as a coal miner in Minnesota and Montana. Those experiences led to his position as an organizer hired by United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) to lead a strike in Pennsylvania mines between 1922 and 1923. Among the papers in the Lilly Library’s Hapgood archive are numerous examples of broadsides or printed ephemera about rallies against the coal companies. One broadside critiques the court injunctions filed against the Pittsburgh mineworkers who were prevented from striking against companies that were hiring nonunion workers. Its bright-red headline, Coolidge-Injunctions and All Kinds of Hell, denounces in particular President Calvin Coolidge: "Coolidge came to Pittsburgh, right into the heart of the struggle, and didn’t say a word about it. But his federal judge and his United States Supreme Court did speak. Union-Smashing Injunctions have legalized evictions, made picketing illegal and organizing impossible. That’s where the Government stands."

Paid for by the Pennsylvania-Ohio Miners Relief Committee, the broadside is an appeal for donations to support the striking workers, who had been evicted from company housing. One of five large scrapbooks in the Hapgood collection has an eviction notice dated April 29, 1922, issued to one of the miners by the Consolidation Coal Company in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. The scrapbook also contains photographs of tent cities that the miners built for their families. The caption under one photograph of a mother and her child states that they died from pneumonia not long after the picture was taken. Hapgood’s job as an organizer lasted eighteen months, after which he went back to working in the mines.

In 1924, Hapgood traveled to England, France, Germany, and the Soviet Union, where he spent two years working and studying conditions in the mines there. Other printed material in the collection dates from time spent in England and includes colorful pro-Labour Party posters, Hapgood’s published articles about the mining situations overseas, and his drafts written in 1925 and 1926 for a projected volume titled Diary of an American Miner Abroad.

Hapgood returned to the United States in 1926, joined the Socialist Party, and went back to work in the mines as an activist. In 1927, along with Mary Donovan, who by then was a rising labor activist, he became a central spokesperson in the struggle to save Sacco and Vanzetti. Hapgood and Donovan married shortly after the men’s funeral and continued to speak out against injustice at memorials to commemorate the two men’s lives. The archive contains several broadsides for these mass meetings. One urges workers to attend the rally to learn more about the new American Terror to the Working Class and liberty’s peril. Another is sponsored by the Save the Union Committee, whose progressive agenda resulted in Hapgood being beaten up and prevented from taking his elected delegate seat at the 1928 UMWA convention in Indianapolis. Ultimately the tensions between Save the Union members, who were challenging John L. Lewis, then president of the International UMW, resulted in Hapgood’s expulsion from the UMWA for being a Red. His lengthy typewritten reply to those charges along with a certificate of his union membership, which had been contested by Lewis, are also in the archive.

In a 1979 radio interview, Kurt Vonnegut recounted meeting Hapgood in 1930 in Indiana and thought he was one of the most absurdly idealistic people I ever met. But Vonnegut admired Hapgood, and years later he used him as inspiration for his character Kenneth Whistler, the organizer-hero in his labor movement novel Jailbird (1979).² In 1932, Hapgood ran unsuccessfully for governor of Indiana on the Socialist Party ticket. In the following years he worked on behalf of Southern tenant farmers, the United Auto Workers, the United Steel Workers, and the International Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers. Between 1941 and 1947, he was the Congress of Industrial Organizations regional director in Indiana.

The collection contains hundreds of letters to Hapgood from family, friends, and a range of individuals—some in the labor movement, and others who were familiar with his work. Among the immense correspondence are letters from John Galsworthy, Max Eastman, Alice Stone Blackwell (a suffragette, journalist, and ardent Sacco and Vanzetti supporter), and Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt. Many of the letters from 1927 are replies to Hapgood’s requests for donations to support a labor paper that he hoped to publish in Pittsburgh. Writing from California on July 18, 1927, Upton Sinclair was impressed with the proposal and provided a list of possible donors. Although unable to donate because of debts to his printer, he offered the following support: I will be very glad to have you run ‘King Coal’ as a serial in your paper as a gift from me. Eleanor Roosevelt’s gracious acknowledgment commends his worthwhile project but says that she is unable to offer monetary assistance. Scrapbooks in the collection document Hapgood’s various experiences as a labor organizer as well as his work on Mary Donovan’s campaign for governor of Massachusetts in 1928.

A separate Hapgood archive contains the papers of Mary Donovan Hapgood (1886–1973), whose activist skills were honed at an early age as the daughter of a Fenian supporter born in Ireland. A graduate of the University of Michigan in 1912, she worked first as a teacher and then turned to labor organizing, eventually becoming a tireless advocate in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti. A frequent visitor to the prison in Charlestown, Massachusetts, where the two men were held for seven years, she was a regular correspondent, especially with Vanzetti, whose many letters to her in the archive acknowledge her efforts on their behalf. An interesting undated handwritten note to her from Vanzetti, possibly passed to Donovan during one of her visits, provides her with instructions for outwitting the prison censors: If you want to tell me something that you do not wish the censor knows—cut in half a lemon, use a new pen point, and write between the … written lines and margin. I will warm the paper and the words will become visible. To prove his point, Vanzetti included a short poem that he had penned in the juice of an orange and then warmed. The lines appear as a light-orange script in his note.

A steadfast friend, Donovan gave the eulogy at the Sacco and Vanzetti funeral, a copy of which is in the archive. It begins, Your execution is one of the blackest crimes in the history of mankind and concludes, In your martyrdom we will fight on and conqueror. In Boston (1927), Upton Sinclair’s slightly fictionalized account of the infamous case, the author refers to Mary Donovan as the Joan of Arc of the defense cause.³ But not everyone was pleased. An anonymous letter postmarked Boston, September 18, 1928, gives Donovan notice: Boston is always ready to see you off to Italy. The good old U.S.A. is no place for you.

In 1928, Mary Donovan was nominated by the Socialist Party for the Massachusetts governorship; although defeated, she remained a political activist alongside Powers Hapgood and continued her efforts for many years following his death. Some of her activities are documented in an unpublished autobiography in the archive titled No Tears for My Youth, which contains a long chapter on the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Other papers in the collection include correspondence, short stories with titles like No Agitator Wanted about workers and the labor movement, and over thirty years of notes about the Molly Maguires, a nineteenth-century Irish society that worked on behalf of Irish American coal miners in Pennsylvania.

AUDUBON

On permanent display in the Lilly Library is the first edition of John James Audubon’s (1785–1851) magnificent Birds of America, a four-volume work based on his original drawings and published by the author himself in London. The volumes were based on sets of prints sold to subscribers and were published between 1827 and 1838. In 1840 in New York, Audubon began publishing a less expensive seven-volume edition, completed in 1844. The first edition volumes are double elephant folios, a reference to their oversized format of more than 3 × 2 feet, while the US edition is a royal octavo, or smaller size, at 6½ × 10 inches.

Weighing in at some two hundred pounds, the original leather-bound volumes contain a total of 435 color plates made by the London engraving and printing firm of Robert Havell and Son. The beautifully hand-colored illustrations of birds are organized according to species and begin with a strutting Meleagris gallopavo, better known as the wild turkey, replete with thick red wattle. According to Joseph Sabin’s Dictionary of Books Relating to America, Audubon elected not to include any commentary with his prints to avoid a copyright law in England that required publishers to supply textual materials to public libraries free of charge.⁴ In 1831, Audubon wrote his Ornithological Biography with the Scottish expert William MacGillivray. Based on his extensive journals and notes, this work served as the textual complement to the original drawings and ultimately appeared alongside the artwork in later editions.

Audubon was a trailblazer in wildlife art. Born in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in Hispaniola (present-day Haiti), he grew up in France and was taken by his father to the United States to avoid being later drafted into Napoleon’s army. He lived on family property in Mill Grove, near Philadelphia, where he hunted, fished, and further developed his talent in wildlife drawing. He married Lucy Bakewell, daughter of a prosperous family in the area, who became a teacher and was his helpmate and support throughout his lifetime. Audubon was a merchant-businessman for several years until the 1819 crash led him into bankruptcy; his hunting skills helped feed his growing family. His bankruptcy was actually the catalyst for his life-changing decision to travel and document the nation’s many birds. The result was an incomparable work of more than seven hundred species posed in natural settings and presented dramatically in life-size color format.

Meleagris Gallopavo, or wild turkey, from John James Audubon’s Birds of America.

Audubon’s perseverance, artistic talent, and ornithological expertise helped him secure financial backing for the drawings’ publication. In 1826, he left Lucy and their two sons for England, carrying with him a partial portfolio of his artwork. Bearing letters of introduction from friends in the United States, he met several well-to-do families who helped him gain still other introductions. In England and later Scotland, he displayed his drawings and lectured to general audiences and naturalist societies on the American frontier life and his search for new bird species. As he wrote to Lucy on December 9, 1826:

My situation in Edinburgh borders almost on the Miraculous. Without education and scarce one of those qualities necessary to render a man able to pass thro[ugh] the throng of the Learned here, I am positively look[ed] on by all the Professors and many of the Principal persons here as a very extraordinary man…. My Drawings were put up in the splendid room [of the Royal Institution Society], all news Papers took notice of them in a very handsome manner, and having continued to do so constantly, the rooms have been well attended even when the weather has in least permitted.⁵

His arrival in Britain coincided with the height of the Romantic movement, when novelists such as James Fenimore Cooper were enthralling readers with tales of the US frontier. To earn money to begin publishing his works, Audubon charged admission to his increasingly popular lectures, which, in turn, fueled greater sales interest in his art. Having engaged Havell and Son, he launched an initial subscription plan to sell small sets of five prints to buyers.⁶ Once completed, the series totaled eighty-seven sets of prints. After Birds, he produced, with the help of his sons, John Woodhouse and Victor, and the Reverend John Bachman, his three-volume The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (1845–1849).

Both the octavo Birds and the Quadrupeds are the focus of Audu-bon’s ledger, recently acquired by the Lilly Library. It contains subscription lists with names and accounts for receivables, payables, and sundries for the period December 10, 1842, to February 14, 1844. These are penned in his son Victor’s hand. Immediately following the lists is a curious page, seemingly in Audubon’s own hand, on which is written Second Course and Acquisition & use of words in little sentences.⁷ Among the many terms jotted down are Indian ink, to wash, to catch, and to pilfer dainties. The page’s purpose is unclear and may have served as a primer or simply a reminder for the aging Audubon, whose first language was French.

The ledger has a twofold purpose. If turned over and upside down, it begins with another long list of subscribers whose names are arranged according to US cities and states. A few are from outside the country, including the British Museum. But the most interesting part of this side of the ledger is the correspondence written in February 1845 on behalf of Audubon by his son Victor to procure additional specimens for the Quadrupeds from the Hudson Bay Company Audubon writes to the company’s president:

Being now engaged upon a work upon the quadrupeds of N. America, in conjunction with the Birds John Bachman D.D., & having processed all