Moving In and Moving On

Today the BC Law Library bids a fond farewell to our colleague Dorothea Rees, who is taking a new position at BC's O'Neill Library on the main campus. Readers of this blog know Dorothea has provided expert assistance in the digitization of the Brooker Collection of Legal and Land Use Documents, undertaken jointly by our two libraries.

When we received the gift from Mr. Brooker, we were very fortunate that a finding aid accompanied the documents. This finding aid is a table that contains fields for each document, including document number, date, personal names, place names, type of document, and a brief description. Dorothea has been carefully comparing the data in the finding aid against the documents themselves, making additions, deletions, and corrections as needed. Her stellar and careful work ensures that every document in the digital collection is consistently described and hence searchable (and findable!) by researchers. (By the way, we hope researchers will contribute their own tags to our images, but that is a topic for another day.)

Though I will miss Dorothea and her invaluable assistance, I am delighted to welcome Kelli Farrington to the Brooker Team. Kelli will pick up where Dorothea left off, and she is already hard at work on the next batch of metadata. So thank you, Dorothea, and welcome, Kelli!

Photo: Kelli Farrington (L), Dorothea Rees (R)

What Lies Beneath

Sometimes all the magnificence of a rare book is on full display - perhaps it features a jeweled binding, illuminated paintings, ornamented clasps, or fine printing. Other times its beauty is hidden away, possibly in a fore-edge painting. Or perhaps its charms are literally under wraps, such as the scrap paper used to line the inside covers of the book and bind them to the pages. For these endpapers (also called pastedowns), early printers used whatever materials were lying about: scrap paper, excess pages from large print runs . . . and even illuminated vellum manuscript pages, as in our example here.

Our copy of a Corpus Juris Civilis was published in Paris in 1559. It was bound in three volumes, all of which feature a fine calf leather binding and the gold tooled initials "RB" in honor of an early owner, Dr. Robert Bysshop. Open the covers of all three volumes, and you will be surprised by beautiful illuminated manuscript pages featuring Latin text and early musical notation.

These volumes, donated to us by Daniel R. Coquillette, are some of my favorites in our collection. If anyone knows how to read the notation and sing the music, I would love to hear it!

I Spy a Lawyer . . .

We just acquired a terrific piece of art: an illustration of a lawyer, Serjeant John Humffreys Parry, created in 1873. The artist was Leslie Ward, a prolific English illustrator and caricaturist better known by his pen name, "Spy." Between 1873 and 1909, Spy drew many images of lawyers and judges for Vanity Fair magazine. His drawings - some flattering, others not so much - were accompanied by acerbic biographies that brought members of the legal profession down to size and proved immensely popular with the public.

Of our subject Serjeant John Humffreys Parry (1816-1880), Spy wrote that "he drapes himself in his gown with the movement of a Senator of melodrama . . . with these antecedents and talents it was natural that he should soon present himself as a Candidate for Parliament. . . . [H]e has great abilities, and by them has raised himself in his Profession to be quite one of its successful men, so that his is a name which gains much favour with Solicitors and gives much confidence to clients. . . . [H]e earns an income large enough to make any man a Conservative."

For more on Spy and his illustrations, see Morris L. Cohen, The Bench and Bar: Great Legal Caricatures from Vanity Fair by Spy.

Plus ca change . . .

Today's featured item from the Brooker Collection is a letter written in 1853 by J. Currier, Jr., of Warner, New Hampshire. He writes to a Mr. Hayward that due to a shortage of funds for the school district, "a female would answer their expectations as well as a male teacher; and the amount of school money being less than usual, to pay a male teacher what would be considered any thing of a fair compensation would so shorten the school as to make it advisable to employ a female teacher."

What is particularly appalling is the writer's matter-of-fact tone, though those of us who watch Mad Men have seen plenty of this sort of thing - and worse. Hat tip to my ever vigilant colleague Dorothea Rees for bringing this letter to light!

Insulting the Angels (with a hat tip to Alice Hoffman)

My colleague Dorothea Rees unearthed today's gem from our library's Brooker Collection of Early American Legal and Land Use Documents. Document #1824 is a brief handwritten agreement to arrange a substitute for a (presumably) wealthy man eager to avoid military service.

It states in full: "It is agreed between Amos W. Pike & Peyser Drake & Co. - that the latter furnish the said Pike a substitute either for the Army or Navy for the sum of eight hundred & seventy five dollars (875 D.) Portsmouth August 2 1864 Peyser Drake & Co. by W.M."

Until February 1824, it was perfectly legal to pay a $300 fee to the government to commute one's service, or to hire a substitute. After that time, legislation abolished commutation, so the only way to avoid service was to procure a substitute. The price for substitutes immediately skyrocketed - hence Mr. Pike's steep fee of $875. (This figure amounts to about $12,300 in today's dollars, using the Consumer Price Index.)

In her short story collection Blackbird House, one of my favorite books of all time, Alice Hoffman wrote movingly about this very issue in a story entitled "Insulting the Angels."

New Exhibit in the Rare Book Room!

Please visit us - either virtually or the good old-fashioned way - to view our Fall 2010 exhibit, Recent Additions to the Collection. These books, manuscripts and memorabilia enhance our holdings in key areas and enable us to better understand the way law was published, acquired, studied and practiced in England and America in centuries past.

Highlights include a selection of early English law dictionaries, a stunning group of lawyers’ private library lists, signed modern first editions from contemporary political figures, and some unusual memorabilia connected to the legal publishing industry in late nineteenth-century North America.

Here is a handout describing the entire exhibit. As always, more images from our collections are available on the Rare Book Room’s flickr site, Boston College's Digital Collections, and of course on this very blog.

The exhibit will be on view through early December 2010. Please visit us if you can!

We Will Be Closed August 16-20

The Rare Book Room will be closed for exhibit work the week of August 16-20. Watch this space for news about our Fall 2010 exhibit, coming soon!