Miniature Monday!
Sage Allen & Co. was a department store based in Connecticut. Published in the early 2oth century, these diminutive children’s books feature brightly colored illustrations as well as shopping lists for children’s goods on sale at Sage & Allen. At the close of each story readers find a list of items available for order, such as: 1 Nainsook skirt for 75 cents, 2 Bootees for 50 cents, or Powder for just 10 cents! These pamphlets are illustrated by John H. Eggers.
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#miniature mondays #libraries #reading #books #gif #children's books #book gif #puss in boots #cats #lauraEmily Martin is a book artist and an instructor for the University of Iowa Center For The Book. She earned a Master’s of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Iowa in 1979, and began her career as a book artist at this time. The earliest published works on her website date back to 1978 and 1979, during her time in the MFA program.
Martin joined the staff of Center for the Book at the University of Iowa in 1998. She teaches classes on bookbinding, papermaking, and artist’s books.
She has published more than 90 artist books, first under the press press name Naughty Dog Press (named for her Jack Russel Terrier, Gomez) and then under her own name. These books include completely original works and artist retellings of Shakespeare’s plays, including Hamlet and King Lear. The University of Iowa Special Collections and Archives holds copies of 57 of Martin’s books, with several pictured here.
Pictured above: A day at the beach (N7433.4.M364 A54 1995), My own Kickstarter campaign (N7433.4.M364 M9 2012), The house detective (N7433.4.M364 H68 1999)
Her work can by found in various colleges, universities, and art museums across the United States, as well as the British Library, Biblioteca nacional de Chile, Iraq National Library and Archive, Meermanno Museum in the Netherlands, Tate Britain in London, and Jack Ginsberg Centre for Book Arts in Johannesburg, South Africa (just to name a select few).
Martin has two recent projects of note. The first is an exhibit called Centering the Book, opening in early 2024. Centering the Book is a survey of the Center for the Book’s faculty, students, and alumni. Martin is also beginning a Cicero Research Fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago, looking at their collection of 16th century science books and contemporary artist books focused on science. The working title for this project is Navigational Tools for the Wilfully Lost.
Come and see Martin’s work at Special Collections!
What would our modern movies be without a soundtrack? The musical score is a big part of the storytelling, and has to be carefully considered to match the film.
Similarly, this book talks about the effects that sound can have on our lives, discussing the wide range of expressions it can convey, everywhere from Beethoven to 2001 A Space Odyssey, with matching black line illustrations.
This is part of a continuing series featuring minis in conjunction with the of the new Hollywood Exhibit that is now up in the reading room.
Come check out the music scores on display, we are sure you will love them!
–Diane R., Special Collections Graduate Student
Hardin Library for the Health Sciences
FOX, JOSEPH (1775-1816). The natural history of the human teeth. Printed in London for J. Cox, 1803. 100 pages. 13 illustrations. 30 cm tall.
Welcome to spring, everyone! As we count down to longer days, more sun, flowers in bloom, and a twitterpated animal kingdom, I naturally want to talk about…teeth. So let’s sink our teeth into Joseph Fox’s (1775-1816) The natural history of the human teeth (first edition - 1803).
Joseph Fox was a trailblazer in dentistry who made significant contributions to the field during the early 19th century. Born in London in 1775, Fox received his medical training at Guy’s Hospital. A student of John Hunter and Henry Cline, Joseph Fox was eventually appointed the first lecturer on dentistry at Guy’s Hospital. He was the first dental surgeon appointed to a hospital position and one of the first medical practitioners to devote themselves completely to the care of teeth.
For those with dental anxiety, you can thank Dr. Fox for stressing the need for regular dentist visits. He argued this was especially important for children as they grew and “shed” their first set of teeth.
Fox cared deeply for his profession and wrote and lectured on the importance of improving the quality and standards of dentistry. He stressed that dentistry must have a scientific foundation as it was a medical field.
Beyond teeth, Fox was a passionate proponent of Edward Jenner and vaccination, even offering up his house as a vaccination location, and helped to found the Jenner Society. He was also involved in educational and abolitionist causes.
From 1799 until his death, Fox lectured on dentistry at Guy’s Hospital in London. Based on his lectures, he first published The natural history of the human teeth in 1803 and the companion volume, The history and treatment of the diseases of the teeth, in 1806.
Improving and expanding the work of foundational dental scholars, such as Pierre Fouchard, these were the first works in English to provide instructions for the correction of certain dental irregularities. They also have several detailed and sometimes striking illustrations, including the first to show operative procedures and dental pathologies.
There were many editions, including in other languages, and though much of his theory of oral physiology and pathology was of dubious value, his operative procedures remained in vogue for more than fifty years. Along with the clinical and surgical aspects of the book, Fox also provides his thoughts on the biggest issues in the profession, giving the reader a fuller context of the profession at the time.
The book is bound in blue-painted paper over thin paper boards and rebacked with a thick cloth spine. The book is not only striking for its illustrations but also for the text pages. As can be seen from the image above, the book was printed with slightly larger type and very large margins. Anyone with eyesight as poor as mine is grateful for that.
–Curator Damien Ihrig
Last year, Special Collections and Archives at the University of Iowa Libraries acquired items to form a new collection: the Black Film and Television Collection. In honor of Black History Month, we’re shining a spotlight on a different item from this collection. This week, we’re taking a look at one of the collection’s earliest (and rarest) items: the original poster for the 1919 film The Green-Eyed Monster.
The Library of Congress estimates that 75% of all silent films have been lost, and that number unfortunately includes many of the first films made for Black audiences. The Green-Eyed Monster is one such film. Since we don’t have access to the movie itself, marketing materials like this poster offer a vital glimpse into a formative period of cinematic history and a history that was very nearly lost. Amid a culture of violent racism, systemic inequality, and segregation, Black artists behind and in front of the camera offered their audiences a look at the possibilities ahead.
During the era of segregation, Black audiences were already barred from most movie showings, and there were only a few movie houses open specifically for Black viewers. To see movies like The Green-Eyed Monster, they would have had to attend separate, late-night screenings called “midnight rambles.” But attend they did—there was a demand for what came to be called “race films,” and about 500 movies were released to meet it. During the daytime, theaters might show movies like the notoriously racist Birth of a Nation, but at the stroke of midnight, Black audiences could gather to appreciate Black artistry.
Where does The Green-Eyed Monster fit in?
The Green-Eyed Monster was produced by Norman Studios in Jacksonville, Florida. And while the film featured an all-Black cast, the studio that produced it was owned by a white filmmaker, Richard E. Norman, who sought to cater to an untapped audience. To make his first race film, Norman retooled the script for one of his previous films, The Wrecker, and hired Black actors for the roles. Norman Studios would go on to produce seven more feature-length films with all-Black casts, but the studio died out during the rocky transition to “talkies.”
So what exactly was The Green-Eyed Monster about? While the film itself is lost, the broad strokes of the story remain. As the title indicates, the plot revolves around jealousy, both romantic and professional. Two friends who work for rival rail companies end up falling for the same woman—and competing for the same lucrative contract. To settle both conflicts, these friends stake everything on a race on rails. Given that the poster aims to entice audiences with an “$80,000.00 train wreck,” it’s safe to assume that in this case, the track to true love is a perilous one.
While this poster and the film it advertises represent a form of progress, the most impactful works in the genre of race film were produced by Black filmmakers at Black-owned studios.
Lincoln Studios and Oscar Micheaux
In the early years of cinema, the industry wasn’t centralized in Los Angeles the way it is today, and production companies could be found in cities across the country. One such studio was Lincoln Motion Picture Company, which began in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1916 and lasted until 1921. Its founders were brothers, Noble Johnson and George Perry Johnson, and their 1916 debut was the first-ever race film, The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition. This is widely credited as the first film ever to portray the experience of middle-class Black characters. Its story is as aspirational as its title: a dreamer strikes out to make it in the oil business, excels, and returns to his family a wealthy man.
The same segregation policies that led to the phenomenon of midnight rambles made it especially difficult for a production company aimed at a Black audience to maintain its bottom line. Again, that’s not because these films lacked an interested viewership; their distribution was limited by the racist policies of the time, and so were their profits. While Lincoln was a short-lived venture, its impact can’t be overstated. By the time the studio that originated race films closed down, another Black leader had found his calling in film.
Oscar Micheaux’s Chicago studio, Micheaux Film Corporation, was one such company. Throughout his decades-long career, Micheaux produced 40 films. His features showed Black audiences a world they recognized: a place of struggle and striving, where racism was a constant reality. He also wrote Black characters they could identify with, fully human in contrast to the caricatures in white films of the time.
There are so many other stories to be found in the Black Film and Television Collection. Next week, we’ll dive deeper into Micheaux, his Midwestern connections, and the continued rise of race films in the first half of the twentieth century.
–Natalee Dawson, Communication Coordinator at UIowa Libraries with assistance from Liz Riordan, Anne Bassett, and Jerome Kirby
Last year, Special Collections and Archives at the University of Iowa Libraries acquired items to form a new collection: the Black Film and Television Collection. In honor of Black History Month, we’re shining a spotlight on a different item from this collection each week.
In yesterday’s post, we discussed the original script for 1971’s Shaft, a defining entry in the Blaxploitation genre. Our final spotlight shines on a unique photo book from 1996, when Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman attempted to excavate the history of queer Black women on screen.
Cheryl Dunye and New Queer Cinema
With The Watermelon Woman, Dunye became the first Black lesbian to direct a feature film. This movie belongs to a genre that came to be called New Queer Cinema, a movement in independent film during the 1990s that placed queer characters at the center.
The film was critically acclaimed and regarded as one of the foundational films of the genre, and it was added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 2021.
It also gave new momentum to Dunye’s career in film and television, which continues to this day. Her recent directing credits include The Umbrella Academy, Bridgerton, and Queen Sugar.
Unnamed & Uncredited
The Watermelon Woman stars writer and director Cheryl Dunye as an aspiring documentarian who works at a video rental store. Dunye’s fictional proxy, also named Cheryl, is fascinated by the history of Black women in film, particularly those who went unnamed and uncredited for roles portraying the racist archetypes that were common in the cinema of the 1930s and 40s.
In the movie, Cheryl embarks on a journey to discover the name of Black actress only identified as “The Watermelon Woman.” She eventually uncovers the woman’s real name, Fae Richards, and discovers that she, too, was a queer woman.
A Supplementary Archive
Fae Richards may be a fictional character, but she stands for countless queer Black people whose stories have been omitted from the record. Artist Zoe Leonard, in collaboration with Cheryl Dunye, created The Fae Richards Photo Archive, a series of 82 images that document the life of this fictional character. From candid shots, family photos, and publicity pictures, every image matches a time and place of this character. As the Whitney Museum of American Art explains, “Leonard acknowledges the project’s artifice, encouraging the viewer to recognize that she had to create a story that is fictional, but rings true, because the real life counterparts of such stories went undocumented.”
This statement demonstrates exactly why many archives are, or need to, work to fix the mistakes of the past. As a school with a rich screenwriting history, it is why the University of Iowa Libraries is actively working to collect more stories from Black cinema.
A Century of Black Film
During this series, we’ve looked at four iconic examples of Black filmmaking. But that’s not to say that the work of Black filmmakers can be reduced to four eras, or that the films we discussed are more important than those that didn’t make this list. There’s so much more to discover in the Black Film and Television Collection, and if you’ve enjoyed this blog series, we encourage you to check out what’s available online. As The Watermelon Woman attests, the preservation of these stories, and the names and lives behind them, is vital and rewarding work.
–Natalee Dawson, Communication Coordinator at UIowa Libraries, with assistance from Liz Riordan, Anne Bassett, and Jerome Kirby
Anne Carson is a classicist, poet, translator and essayist born in Toronto, Canada on June 21, 1950. She studied at the University of Toronto for her Bachelors, Masters, and PhD, as well as spending a year at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland studying Greek metrics and textual criticism. Carson has taught at several colleges over her career, including McGill University, the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and New York University. She and her husband recently received Icelandic citizenship.
Carson photo by Jeff Brown from the New York Times
Carson translates and sometimes modernizes Greek and Latin works, including works from Euripides, Homer, Sappho, and Sophocles. She has published ten translations of ancient Greek tragedies, including seven by Euripides, and collections of Sappho’s poetry. She has had a translation staged, a 2015 European and American tour of her translation of Antigone. She also publishes original works of poetry and essay collections.
Carson is a private person, though her poetry is often considered personal in nature. The University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections has her most explicitly personal work, Nox, an epitaph to her brother Michael Carson published in the form of a book-length poem. The siblings were not in contact from 1978 until 2000, and he passed away before they could see each other in person. This is at least the second work Carson created to honor a family member. She wrote an epitaph for her mother using the work of Virginia Woolf in her poem “Appendix to Ordinary Time” in Men in the Off Hours. Nox is a collection of fragments, photos, and writing that form a scrapbook-like work to honor her brother.
–Sarah Dodd, Olson Graduate Assistant
#HollywoodExhibit
There is a new exhibit in the Reading Room: Hollywood in the Stacks!
This little book is part of the corresponding minis exhibit, and provides history about the iconic Hollywood sign. It talks about both the original and the new metal version of the iconic sign, which was put up in the 70’s.
Come check out the rest of the exhibit to see more Hollywood history and promotional items, including a case about Hollywood connections from Iowa.
This is part of a continuing series featuring minis in conjunction with the of the new Hollywood Exhibit that is now up in the reading room.
–Diane R., Special Collections Graduate Student
Last year, Special Collections and Archives at the University of Iowa Libraries acquired items to form a new collection: the Black Film and Television Collection. In honor of Black History Month, we’re shining a spotlight on a different item from this collection.
In last week’s installment, we took a closer look at the poster for 1919’s The Green-Eyed Monster. Now we’re picking up 20 years later, with the spotlight on a lobby card from Oscar Micheaux’s 1938 film Swing, part of the Black Film and Television Collection. Starring Cora Green, Swing is notable as an example of two overlapping genres: race film and musical film.
Like many of Micheaux’s films, Swing it is also a tale centered around Black characters with grand aspirations. And like Micheaux himself, these women are pioneers, willing to make a path through the unknown.
Swing is a story born of the Harlem Renaissance, which by 1938 was declining in the wake of the Great Depression. The movie follows Eloise Jackson (Hazel Diaz) and Mandy Jenkins (Cora Green), two young women from Birmingham, Alabama. Mandy catches her husband (Larry Seymour) having an affair with Eloise, and Eloise flees to start over as a singer in Harlem. Her past catches up with her, however, and through a series of mishaps, it ends up being Mandy who succeeds as a performer on Broadway.
Who was Oscar Micheaux?
Last week’s blog touched on the work of Micheaux, but it’s worth digging deeper into the life of this singular talent.
Micheaux was born in 1884 and grew up with his 12 siblings on a farm in a small town in Illinois. His parents had been born into slavery in Kentucky, but neither emancipation nor a move north could create distance from the realities of structural racism.
The debts Micheaux’s parents had undertaken to keep the farm afloat became more burdensome over time and had educational repercussions for their fifth-eldest child. For a while, they were able to send Oscar to a school in a neighboring town, but financial difficulties eventually forced them to bring him back to work on the farm. This adjustment was difficult for an intelligent, ambitious teen to process, and Micheaux rebelled. Frustrated, Oscar’s father sent him to his older brother in Chicago, where he took work as a porter.
During this stint in the city, Micheaux set his hopes on homesteading to the west. He saved the earnings from his job until he could buy farmland in South Dakota and worked this land for years, a Black man surrounded by a community of white homesteaders. His experience in South Dakota came to an end when a drought withered his crops and his first marriage began to deteriorate. Micheaux committed these experiences to the page, emerging in 1913 with an anonymous, self-published book titled The Conquest, and a new ambition: to make his living as a storyteller.
In 1918, Micheaux would turn much of the material from The Conquest into a new, more fictionalized project, a novel he would call The Homesteader (both books can be found in the UI Libraries Special Collections & Archives). It was this work that caught the eye of the Lincoln Film Company’s George Johnson, who contacted Micheaux and offered to adapt the novel. However, the two couldn’t agree on a direction for the project, and the deal was scrapped. It became clear to Micheaux that if he wanted narrative control over a film based on his story, he’d have to make it himself. And in 1919, the new, Sioux City-based Micheaux Book & Film Company released the silent film The Homesteader.
Swing came almost 20 years after The Homesteader. By the time it was released, Micheaux had made nearly forty movies, both silent films and “talkies.” His contributions had defined the art of the race film and brought the experiences of Black Americans to the screen. As one might expect given the climate of his day, Micheaux was no stranger to controversy and censorship; his stories confronted racism directly, in ways the white establishment found “political” and therefore threatening. As an independent filmmaker in a burgeoning studio system, Micheaux’s budget was often tightly constrained. In 1928, he had to declare bankruptcy, but he continued filmmaking afterward with the same tenacity that had led him to that parcel of land in South Dakota.
Micheaux only made four more films after this one, and by his death in 1951 he had declared bankruptcy again. But in recent years, his contributions to film history have received more attention. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures features an exhibit on Micheaux’s work, and in 2010 the U.S. Postal Service released a stamp in his honor.
Swing and Cora Green
Since Swing was a musical film, it also gave Cora Green a new opportunity to showcase the singing voice that had already made her a star. Green performs two of Swing’s four musical numbers, “Bei Mir Bist di Schön” and “Heaven Help This Heart of Mine.”
Though she was only in two feature films (Swing in 1938 and Moon Over Harlem in 1939), her decades as a vaudeville performer had earned her the distinction of “the highest-paid colored woman in vaudeville,” according to one contemporary newspaper. She was popular enough that during World War II, she toured with the United Service Organizations (USO) to the Persian Gulf, performing for Black troops. Unfortunately, we don’t know what direction Green’s life took after the war, since she vanishes from the record in 1949.
What Green left behind was a limited but unique body of work, and this lobby card is a small piece of her story. In Swing, her voice carries to us through the years, the sound of a new art form just hitting its stride.
Next week, we’ll explore another distinct genre of Black filmmaking: the Blaxploitation film
—Natalee Dawson, Communication Coordinator at UIowa Libraries, with assistance from Liz Riordan, Anne Bassett, and Jerome Kirby
This little book is about clocks (aka machines for telling time) and not, as I first thought, about machines for traveling through time!
It includes a brief history of keeping track of time, starting with the position of the sun.
Can this book help you from losing track of the days at the beginning of the new semester? Probably not, but there are some lovely examples of time telling devices!
^It’s always snack time when the cat is in charge of the clock!
–Diane R., Special Collections Graduate Student
Hardin Library for the Health Sciences
When classes visit, I usually set out several books on a particular subject or time period. Students often ask why some of the books are so much larger than others, especially if one of our “elephant” books is out - folios ranging roughly from 55 to 100 cm (22 to 39 in).
This got me thinking about just what our largest and smallest books might be. As of January 2023, the largest and smallest bound books in the JMRBR collection are the 1747 Tabulae sceleti et musculorum corporis human (76 cm/30 in) by Bernhard Siegfried Albinus (1697-1770) and the 1527 Anatomice, sive Historia corporis humani (11 cm/4 in) by Alessandro Benedetti (ca. 1450-1512), respectively.
ALBINUS, BERNHARD SIEGFRIED (1697-1770). Tabulae sceleti et musculorum corporis humani [Diagrams of the skeleton and muscles of the human body]. Printed in Leiden by Johannes & Herman Verbeek, 1747. 98 pages [40 illustrations]. 76 cm tall.
Let’s start with our big book of anatomy. Bernhard Siegfried Albinus was a Dutch physician, anatomist, and professor of medicine who lived during the last half of the 17th century and the first part of the 18th. He was part of a physician anatomist family, along with his father, Bernhard Albinus, and brothers, Frederick Bernhard Albinus and Christiaan Bernhard Albinus.
Albinus started his studies at the University of Leiden at the age of 12. He studied under some of the most famous medical minds of the day, including Bidloo and Boerhaave, and eventually in Paris with Frederik Ruysch and Jacques-Bénigne Winslow. Albinus then succeeded his father as the professor of the practice of medicine at the University of Leiden, while his brother Frederick, succeeded Albinus as the chair of anatomy.
Albinus wrote many works, but none were as famous or controversial as the monumental Tabulae. It took twenty-two years to make and a great deal of Albinus’s own money. He worked closely with the artist Jan Wandelaar to create the detailed and occasionally whimsical images in the book.
Albinus was driven to execute his vision for the book and was exacting in his work with Wondelaar. The work became so intense that Wondelaar eventually moved in with Albinus to expedite the process. Unlike many anatomists who published before Albinus, he was interested in creating an idealized form of human anatomy, “homo perfectus.” This ideal, as Albinus saw it, meant assembling body parts from different cadavers into a single illustration instead of illustrating a single body.
To help maintain proportion and accuracy, Albinus and Wondelaar developed a hanging grid that was placed in front of the skeletons. To allow for close-up observation to capture finer details, a proportionally smaller grid was placed closer to the skeleton. With Albinus intensely controlling the details of the bodies, some have suggested that Wondelaar must have felt creatively stifled. With Albinus focused on the bodies alone, Wondelaar was then free to express his creativity through the backgrounds.
As can be seen in the illustrations above, he included elements of nature and classical architecture, the most famous of which is his scene including Clara the rhinoceros. Petrus Camper, a contemporary of Albinus and fellow famed Dutch anatomist, was Tabulae’s greatest critic. He criticized the book for its method of assembling the “homo perfectus,” but mostly for Wondelaar’s backgrounds. I suspect Camper was no fun at parties.
BENEDETTI, ALESSANDRO (ca. 1450-1512) Alexandri Benedicti, physici, Anatomice, siue, Historia corporis humani ; ejusdem Collectiones medicinales, seu Aforismi [Anatomice, sive Historia Corporis Humani - Anatomy, or the History of the Human Body]. Printed in Paris by Simon Du Bois, 1527. 167 pages. 11 cm tall.
Now on to our tiny tome, Alessandro Benedetti’s Anatomice, sive Historia Corporis Humani from 1527. Benedetti was born around 1450 near Verona, Italy. Unlike Albinus, Benedetti was not born into a medical family but rather a farming family. Regardless, he eventually made his way to Padua and earned his doctorate in medicine.
After practicing for many years in Greece, in 1490 he returned to Padua as the Chair of Anatomy and Surgery. Benedetti’s lectures were popular attractions for students, other physicians, and the famous. The Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I (to whom Anatomice was dedicated) attended a lecture in which Benedetti dissected an abdomen. Along with many medical works, he authored a report on the First Italian War (1494-1495) recounting his observations as surgeon general for the League of Italian Princes (the Italian army taking on the invading French army of Charles VIII).
First printed in Venice in 1502, Anatomice, sive Historia Corporis Humani was a hit in the medical community. It deals with many medical and surgical subjects, including gallstones, the opening of the female urethral glands, the passage of the bile into the duodenum, the treatment of syphilis and blennorrhagia (it sounds bad - and it is: excessive discharge of mucus associated with gonorrhea), and a method for safely cutting out bladder stones.
Most notably, Benedetti includes a description of nasal reconstruction by means of a skin flap taken from the arm. The procedure is the same as the one the Branca family practiced in Sicily in the middle of the fifteenth century. The Brancas kept the operation secret and never published it. If this sounds familiar, that’s because Tagliacozzi published this so-called “Italian” method in 1597 in his famous De curtorum chirurgia per insitionem which I profiled in the December 2021 newsletter. This method is most often referenced with Taglicozzi, but Benedetti profiled it almost 100 years before him!
Whereas Albinus’s book is all about the illustrations, Benedetti’s book focuses on the text. But that does not mean it is without fun imagery. The banner image at the top shows a few examples of the many delightful illustrated initials found throughout, except for the initial A which was left unadorned. Seems like an interesting creative choice. Or did something go wrong and the printer needed a quick replacement?
–Damien Ihrig, curator of John Martin Rare Book Room
