‘Bulldog and Panther’ Exhibit Opens

Bulldog and Panther: The 1970 May Day Rally and Yale – Memorabilia Room, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University

Bulldog and Panther exhibit poster1969 and 1970 were politically tumultuous years in the United States and indeed around the world. Unrest in U.S. urban areas and on college and university campuses focused on racial and gender inequalities, the ongoing U.S. war in Vietnam, and demands by students for more responsive and inclusive campus decision making. On 19 May 1969 Black Panther Party (BPP) member Alex Rackley was kidnapped and killed in New Haven by other BPP members who believed he was an FBI informant. In a time of intense FBI counter-intelligence focus on neutralizing the BPP’s influence in U.S. cities, the broad swath of indictments for the murder seemed an overreach to many. The defendants were referred to as the New Haven Nine, an allusion to the famous Chicago Seven, and included Bobby Seale, national BPP Chairman, who had spoken at Yale the day of the murder. Seale was extradited to Connecticut on the approval of California Governor Ronald Reagan, and the trial was set to begin in May 1970. A large protest rally was organized for the New Haven Green, scheduled for 1-3 May 1970. This exhibit explores the events leading up to the New Haven May Day rally, and its impact on Yale, the New Haven community, and beyond.

The exhibit is curated by Sarah Schmidt, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and Bill Landis, Manuscripts and Archives. It is free and open to the public Monday-Friday, 8:30 AM-4:45 PM, through May 16, 2014.

For additional resources on the exhibit see the New Haven Register article on a discussion panel, part of a collaborative series of events inspired by the exhibit hosted by the Yale University Library and Pierson College. The panel, held on February 26th, was moderated by Yale history professor Beverly Gage and featured Kathleen Cleaver, Ann Froines, and John R. Williams. Yale TV also did a feature on the exhibit, with interesting interview segments with Henry “Sam” Chauncey, Jr.

Discover Civil War Treasures

The Civil War Manuscripts Collection is well worth delving into and you will find many gems. The collection is an amalgam of correspondence, journals, photographs, printed materials, and ephemera documenting numerous aspects of the War from a predominantly Union point of view, with many Connecticut regiments and individuals portrayed throughout the papers. There are copious amounts of correspondence of soldiers and officers describing military battles and events and commenting on politics, as well as the challenges of daily camp life. Letters from the wives and families on the home front provide a glimpse into civilian activities.

Women on the home front had the opportunity to support the war effort by organizing fairs through the auspices of the United States Sanitary Commission, an organization founded in 1861 to improve the unsanitary living conditions of the troops. The “Sanitary Fairs” could be elaborate events, lasting for several days to a week or longer, to raise money, heighten patriotism, and promote volunteerism.

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“Group of ladies in charge of the Schenectady North Albany Fair for the U. S. San Comm…” (Found in photograph album, box 14, folder 8)

Journals and diaries abound: volunteers describing their newly-issued uniforms and artillery to recounting military battles; medical facilities and operations described by Bridgeport surgeon, Robert Hubbard; a prisoner of war relating life in a Confederate prison camp, to name only a few.

Journal of a soldier from the Seventeenth Connecticut Volunteer Regiment describing the loss of life in his regiment on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg.

 “On Saturday A. M. July 4, our adjutant reported that the regiment went into the fight on the first day with 369 men & 17 officers, & came out with 91 men & 10 officers.” (Journal labeled “Gettysburg” in box 24)

“On Saturday A. M. July 4, our adjutant reported that the regiment went into the fight on the first day with 369 men & 17 officers, & came out with 91 men & 10 officers.” (Journal labeled “Gettysburg” in box 24)

A large assortment of photographs and engravings of soldiers, officers, Lincoln’s cabinet members, and civilians are of additional interest, as well as ephemera.

Union General Ambrose Burnside, led successful campaigns in Tennessee and North Carolina, however, was defeated badly at the Battle of the Crater and the Battle of Fredericksburg. The term, sideburns, a distinctive style of facial whiskers worn by General Burnside, is believed to have been derived from his surname.

"Gen. Burnside - Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1861 by D. Appleton & Co. in the Clerk's Office of the United States for the Southern District of New York"

“Gen. Burnside – Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1861 by D. Appleton & Co. in the Clerk’s Office of the United States for the Southern District of New York” (Found in box 14, folder 7)

Examples of pictorial envelopes or “covers” demonstrating patriotic and political sentiments.

“Monument to the memory of Jeff Davis” and “Traitor! spare that Tree, Cleave not a single bough! in youth it shelter’d me, And I’ll protect it now.”  (Found in box 32, folder 15)

“Monument to the memory of Jeff Davis” and “Traitor! spare that Tree, Cleave not a single bough! in youth it shelter’d me, And I’ll protect it now.” (Found in box 32, folder 15)

The finding aid, Guide to the Civil War Manuscripts Collection (MS 619), is available on the Internet and is only one of many collections dealing with the Civil War held by Manuscripts and Archives.

Addressing the Challenge of Preserving Born Digital Design Records

In a recent blog post, digital archivist Mark Matienzo wrote about the efforts being made at Yale to preserve the increasing volume of digital records being acquired by Manuscripts and Archives, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and other units of the University Library.  One type of born digital record that is particularly challenging to preserve is the architectural drawing and other design documents created by architecture firms.  In recent years, architects have increasingly abandoned the process of designing on paper, and instead have used software programs such as CAD (Computer-aided design) and now BIM (Building Information Modeling) to generate drawings and complex models that are made up of a series of multi-layered and interconnected computer files—files that can be difficult to recover due to their varied formats and the continually-changing nature of the proprietary software packages.  Given the realities of contemporary architectural practice, how can repositories who collect design records promise to preserve and provide access to these born digital materials?

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Yale University Art Gallery elevation, by Egerton Swartwout, 1929

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Architectural drawing #1, by Gwathmey Siegel and Associates, circa 1968/2010

I recently attended a two-day conference in London, England, “Archiving the Digital: Current Efforts to Preserve Design Records,” which aimed to address this question. Jointly sponsored by the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Victoria and Albert Museum, the conference brought together archivists, curators, preservationists, and records managers from across Europe and North America to discuss what steps firms and institutions have taken thus far to preserve digital design records and what further steps should be considered, from emulation of proprietary software programs to migration of data to common file formats.  What the conference revealed is that resolution of this issue will require—as Mark pointed out in his blog post—a great deal of collaboration among archivists, architects, technology experts, and others.  Although much discussion is still needed, the conference was a positive step forward, an opportunity to contemplate the challenges and opportunities presented by the digital revolution within the design community, and to begin formulating a preservation strategy ensuring the survival and accessibility of these records well into the future.

History of Fight for Rights of LGBT Parents To Be Preserved at Yale

LGBTThe Manuscripts and Archives Department in the Yale University Library will be the future home for the records of the Family Equality Council. A more detailed announcement was posted today on the Yale News website.

The Family Equality Council represents the 3 million LGBT parents in America and their 6 million children. In deeding to Yale all of its historical records documenting the organization and its role in the LGBT family equality movement, the Council ensures the preservation of and researcher access to more than 30 years of materials related to its founding, growth, and expansion. Future accessions to the records will carry on documentation of the organization’s ongoing efforts to advance equality for families with LGBT parents.

Manuscripts and Archives is a major center for historical inquiry and also serves as the documentary memory of Yale University.  The department maintains rich collections in support of research and teaching in the area of gender and sexuality studies at Yale, and actively seeks to add to its collections in this area. We welcome the use of the collections by researchers from within and beyond the Yale community.

What do Emma Goldman, Djuna Barnes, and the Provincetown Players have in common?

Provincetown Players playbill

Provincetown Players. The Seventh Bill (second Review Bill) April 25 … New York.

They were all represented by Harry Weinberger, a native New Yorker and lawyer who was admitted to the bar in 1908. A staunch believer in civil liberties, Weinberger defended many aliens, immigrants, labor activists, anarchists, and other radicals, including Emma Goldman. He also developed an expertise in copyright law and represented several writers and artists, including Djuna Barnes and the Provincetown Players.

Weinberger’s papers, held in Manuscripts and Archives, document 116 cases. The files include correspondence with clients, legal briefs, and writ prepared by Weinberger and his staff, as well as other material relevant to the cases. Among the gems in the collection are Weinberger’s voluminous files on the Goldman and Berkman cases, which include correspondence and copies of The Blast, an anarchist newspaper, and files on compulsory vaccination, which Weinberger opposed.  The papers are a treasure for those studying radical New York in the inter-war years as well as civil liberty in the US.

The Guide to the Harry Weinberger Papers is now available online at http://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/mssa.ms.0553 .

Collaboration Before Preservation: Recovering Born Digital Records in the Stephen Gendin Papers

For some, the phrase “born digital resources” may be unfamiliar, but Ricky Erway, Senior Program Officer at OCLC Research wrote a brief essay entitled Defining “Born Digital”, which provides a handy, working definition: “items created and managed in digital form.” Manuscripts and Archives, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and Yale University Library overall have had a notable history of working with born digital resources over the past ten years. Past projects undertaken within the Yale University Library have included the Fedora and the Preservation of University Records project (funded by the National Historical Records and Publications and Records Commission, in collaboration with Tufts University Digital Collections and Archives), Michael Forstrom’s case study of the George Whitmore papers in the Beinecke [i], the migration of government information on CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs [ii], and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded project Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship (AIMS), a collaboration between Yale, University of Virginia, Stanford University, and University of Hull. In 2012, the AIMS project received an National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Award.

Manuscripts and Archives shares a lab space for working with born digital records and obsolete media with the Beinecke. The lab began as a result of our collaboration with the Beinecke on the AIMS project, and now a few years after it began, we have one of the best facilities in the northeastern United States to work with old computer media formats. Our equipment includes consumer-grade computers and drives for a variety of media formats (floppy disks, compact discs and DVDS, Iomega Zip disks, etc.), as well as some specialized equipment, such as forensic write blockers, which prevent a computer or its operating system from modifying the data on a disk or device during the transfer process. We have recently begun a project to begin arrangement and description for a number of collections that contain born digital records. While MSSA staff including myself will be writing more in the future about processing these collections for this blog, I wanted to write a post about a specific example within one of the collections we are processing that emphasizes the importance of collaboration both within Yale and beyond about our efforts to preserve and provide access to born digital records.

MSSA holds the papers of Stephen Gendin (1966-2000), a lifelong HIV/AIDS activist and writer. Gendin’s activism started soon after he tested positive for HIV as a freshman at Brown University. Gendin was an early member of ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), a direct action-focused group, and he founded ACT UP/Rhode Island in 1987. With Sean Strub, in the early 1990s Gendin co-founded the Community Prescription Service, a business and advocacy group for patients requiring FDA-approved drugs for treatment of HIV/AIDS. With the exception of the born digital records within the collection, Gendin’s papers have been processed. After consulting with Arrangement and Description Archivist Matthew Gorham, who originally processed this collection, and Mary Caldera, MSSA’s Head of Arrangement and Description, I agreed to assist with the processing of the born digital records within the collection.

The born digital records within Gendin’s papers, which were created approximately between 1985 and 2000, were received on a variety of removable computer media, including 3.5″ and 5.25″ floppy disks, a CD-ROM, and a SyQuest 44 megabyte 5.25″ removable hard disk cartridge. While we have established some infrastructure and procedures for working with very common computer media formats, this would be the first time in which we had to work with SyQuest cartridges. While not necessarily uncommon when they came to market, today SyQuest cartridges are now very difficult to read because the original drives are very hard to find.

SyQuest 44 MBs. Photo by portmanteaus.

SyQuest 44 MBs. Photo by portmanteaus.

My first goal was to set forth and find a drive that could read these cartridges, and I turned to my network of colleagues who had similar expertise and equipment. Don Mennerich, a MSSA alumnus and a digital archivist in the Manuscripts and Archives Division at the New York Public Library, has a similar lab as we have within the Sterling Memorial Library, and I scheduled time to visit him. Don had a SyQuest drive that he was not able to get working, so the first order of business was to see if I could help him make it work. After spending about an hour or so there, we made no progress, but he agreed to lend me his drive on the condition that he could visit our lab at Yale to transfer data from a SyQuest cartridge in NYPL’s holdings if I was able to get it to work. I did some research on SyQuest cartridges and found documentation about how to write-protect them thanks to Al Kossow’s Bitsavers project, which is an online repository of software and documentation for old computers. Kossow, a former software engineer at Apple, is the Robert N. Miner Software Curator of the Computer History Museum.

Write-protecting the SQ400 disk cartridge. [iii]

I brought the drive to our lab the following week, and tested it with similar combinations of hardware. After remembering that Michael Forstrom, an archivist at the Beinecke, had brought over an Apple PowerBook G3 “Wallstreet” laptop for our potential use in the lab about three years ago, I realized that I could likely get the borrowed drive working with that computer, and asked Gabby Redwine, the Beinecke’s digital archivist to confirm this. The “Wallstreet” PowerBook G3 has been described by Doug Reside as “Rosetta machine” given its ability to act as “a translation aid for those wishing to transfer information from one encoding to another.” [iv] In particular, the PowerBook in our lab has a SCSI port, to which we could connect the SyQuest drive, as well as a drive for Zip disks, with which we could transfer the data to a more recent machine. After a bit of trial and error, I was able to get the PowerBook to recognize the drive and to read the disk, which appeared to contain several databases.

Transferring the SyQuest cartridge in the Gendin papers (click for video).

Even though we were able to read the cartridge, my colleagues in Manuscripts and Archives and I still have a good amount of work in front of us to process the born digital records in Gendin’s papers and to integrate the description of those records into the existing finding aid. In the words of Erin O’Meara’s presentation from the OCLC Research Past Forward conference at Yale University this summer, “no one cooks the bacon alone.” In other words, one person cannot do all of this work in isolation – it requires collaboration within the department and institution, and it requires drawing on a variety of expertise, including knowledge about the collection and its creator, that of the archivists who have previously processed these and similar collections, and those of us who have expertise and knowledge about current and obsolete computer technology.

Thinking beyond this sort of collaboration, it should be clear that, as MSSA’s digital archivist, even I needed to draw on a strong professional network to be able to even begin doing this work. Our lab did not have the equipment necessary to work with these materials, so I had to connect with colleagues like Don and Gabby, and use community resources such as Bitsavers as my base of resources and knowledge for obsolete and now rare storage technology. Ben Fino-Radin, formerly the digital conservator at Rhizome, writes in his post “It Takes A Village To Save a Hard Drive” about the experience of recovering and transferring the work of artist Phil Sanders during the New Museum’s XFR STN exhibition as one that needed to leverage a grassroots network that brought together equipment, practicing artists, cultural heritage and preservation professionals, computer history experts and enthusiasts, humanities scholars, and beyond. While more and more academic research libraries such as the Yale University Library grow their capacity to work with born digital content, it is clear that we will not be successful unless we also continue to develop and leverage a strong community based on expertise, trust, and collaboration.

In that spirit, I will continue to share the information that I gain in working with these materials, both on this blog and in other channels such as the Yale ERecs blog about my work and my discoveries. In particular, I will be writing a more detailed blog post about the work I’ve undertaken with the media and records in the Stephen Gendin papers and in other collections I help to preserve and make accessible for our patrons.

References

[i] Michael Forstrom, “Managing Electronic Records in Manuscript Collections: A Case Study from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.” American Archivist 72(2) (2009): 460-477.

[ii] Gretchen Gano and Julie Linden, “Government Information in Legacy Formats: Scaling a Pilot Project to Enable Long-Term Access.” D-Lib Magazine 13(7/8) (2007). doi:10.1045/july2007-linden

[iii] SQ555 Removable Cartridge Drive: OEM Technical Reference Manual. SyQuest Technology, June 1990, p. 2-5. Available from bitsavers.org.

[iv] Doug Reside, “Rosetta Computers.” Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Gabriela Redwine, and Richard Ovenden. CLIR Publication No. 149. Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources, December 2010, p. 20. Available from http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub149/.

Obedience to Authority in the Archive

Stanley Milgram, whose papers are held in Manuscripts and Archives, conducted the Obedience to Authority experiments while he was an assistant professor at Yale University from 1961 to 1963. Milgram found that most ordinary people obeyed instructions to give what they believed to be potentially fatal shocks to innocent victims when told to do so by an authority figure. His 1963 article[i] on the initial findings and a subsequent book,  Obedience to Authority and Experimental View (1974), and film, Obedience (1969),  catapulted Milgram to celebrity status and made his findings and the experiments themselves the focus of intense ethical debates.[ii] Fifty years later the debates continues.

The Yale University Library acquired the Stanley Milgram Papers from Alexandra Milgram, his widow, in July 1985, less than a year after Milgram’s death.  Requests for access started coming in soon after. The collection remained closed to research for several years until processed by archivist Diane Kaplan.  In addition to the correspondence, writings, subject files, and teaching files often found in the papers of academics, the collection also contains the data files for Milgram’s experiments, including administrative records, notebooks, files on experimental subjects, and audio recordings of experimental sessions, debriefing sessions, and post-experiment interviews.

Tape of Obedience to Authority experimental sessions, Condition 3. Stanley Milgram Papers (MS 1406).

Of particular note are the data files for the Obedience studies.  The material is the most widely studied portion of the collection, despite the 75 year restriction (unless the subjects’ names are redacted from the files) and a requirement that researchers pay to have the original reel-to-reel audio recordings reformatted if they want to listen to them. This last requirement was necessary to preserve the originals, and once a tape had been reformatted and redacted it is made available to other researchers at no cost. Over the last 20 years, researchers have funded the reformatting and redaction of approximately half the recordings.  Manuscripts and Archives has just embarked on a two year project to digitize and redact the remaining audiotapes with funding from the University of Virginia. Newly available recordings will be described in the Guide to the Stanley Milgram Papers.

I recently had the opportunity to attend a conference of scholars from around the world whose research focuses on the Obedience experiments. The 2013 Obedience to Authority Conference held in early August in beautiful Bracebridge, Ontario.  The conference brought together scholars and students in a variety of disciplines including psychology, sociology, history, philosophy, ethic, business, and law to discuss the experiments and their continued significance. I was struck by the fact that interest in Milgram and the experiments is still very high as demonstrated by the Bracebridge conference, another to be held at the Yale Law School in October,  as well as the number of citations in the literature even today.  Two works, The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram by Thomas Blass (2004) and most recently Behind the Shock Machine: the Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments by Gina Perry (2013) further attest to the staying power of the experiments in the collective consciousness. The story most often told is the story Milgram himself promoted. However, as researchers such as Perry delve deeper into the archives, a more rich and nuanced picture of the experiments and the man behind them is emerging.

[i] Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 67, no, 4 (1963)

[ii] Arthur G. Miller, The Obedience experiments: A Case Study of Controversy in Social Science (1986)

Paul Newman’s Brief Career at Yale

Paul Newman (left) as Hippolytus, Son of Theseus, in a November 1951 production of Phaedra in the Experimental Theatre at Yale.

Paul Newman (left) as Hippolytus, Son of Theseus, in a November 1951 production of Phaedra in the Experimental Theatre at Yale.

Paul Newman matriculated at Yale University in the Fall of 1951, pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree in the Department of Drama, School of Fine Arts, as the Yale School of Drama was then known. He stayed for only the 1951-1952 academic year, withdrawing after the first year of a three-year program that he would have completed in 1954.

The University Archives collections in Manuscripts and Archives contain vast documentation about the School of Drama in its various forms through the years, including production photographs, playbills, and programs documenting much of the 20th century work of YSD students and faculty. Sadly, there is little in the way of visual or printed records documenting Paul Newman’s year at Yale. There is evidence in the records of two productions in which he acted.

  • In Phaedra, “a play in verse freely adapted from the French of Jean Racine, writted and produced by Robert Collington Ackart — a Drama 140 production,” Newman played Hippolytus, Son of Theseus. The play ran from 12-16 November 1951 at The Experimental Theatre. We have a program and three photographs from this production in two different collections, the Yale School of Drama Records (RU 728) and the Yale School of Drama Photographs and Posters (RU 397).
  • In Beethoven, written by Dorothy B. Bland and directed by Frank McMullan, Newman played Karl van Beethoven as a man. This was one of the school’s major stage production for the year, presented in the University Theater, and ran from 20-23 February 1952. Newman’s credit in the playbill reads: “Paul Newman (Karl) is making his first appearance on the Yale stage. He is a first year student of play production from Shaker Heights, Ohio, and another veteran, with summer stock experience.” We have a program and over a dozen photographs in RU 397 from this production, though only one of the photographs clearly depicts Newman.

We don’t know why Paul Newman left Yale without completing his M.F.A. in Drama here. Perhaps he got a better offer? It is clear, though, that his career as an actor wasn’t hampered in any way by not completing the course of study he undertook at Yale in the 1951-1952 school year!

What Do Judy Schiff and Cindy Crawford Have In Common?

Cindy Crawford (source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cindy_Crawford).

Cindy Crawford (source: Wikipedia).

Judith Schiff (source: http://news.yale.edu/videos/archivist-judith-schiff-centuries-elm-and-ivy)

Judith Schiff (source: Yale Daily News)

Find out tonight on The Learning Channel’s Who Do You Think You Are? genealogy series this evening, Tuesday, August 27th, at 9 PM Eastern time. Our esteemed Manuscripts and Archives colleague Judy Schiff, in her position as Chief Research Archivist in the Yale University Library and New Haven’s official historian, helps Crawford trace her lineage back to the idealistic Puritan reformer Thomas Trowbridge. Read more about this in Joe Amarante’s article in yesterday’s New Haven RegisterIt is always amazing to see the links and ties that connect people to New Haven through its nearly four centuries of existence!

The Providential Louise Bryant Papers

In my early days training for public services at Manuscripts and Archives, I was introduced to reprographics services by way of a researcher’s request for material from the Louise Bryant Papers, MS 1840, a collection documenting the life of the American radical leftist writer known most famously for her first-hand reporting on the rise of Socialism in Russia during the 1917 October revolution.

I was given an hour or so make copies, and while I dutifully did so, I couldn’t help but be transfixed by what passed through my hands. I already had some familiarity with Bryant (even beyond seeing Reds), but once I surveyed her correspondence, her photographs, and her drawings, I really had a sense of who she was as a person — all at once, I understood why researchers work with primary source materials. This, like Manuscripts and Archives’ receiving her papers unintentionally with the donation of the William C. Bullitt Papers, “in a single trunk … originally collected and saved by Bryant, not her daughter or Bullitt”, was a welcome revelation. MS 1840 has remained a personal favorite since.

Flash forward about six years to last week. A task had come to me that meant my necessarily perusing every folder of twenty-four boxes of Louise Bryant Papers. Once again reintroduced to her expressive, weird, and sometimes drunken drawings, I felt it was a prime opportunity to share them. One might consider them naive, sure, but many of them are quite funny (she’d been a political cartoonist prior to her storied work as a journalist) and allow us a privileged glimpse into some aspects of her character.

Another Great Victory for Democracy

I found that Bryant continued to draw throughout her life. During her various world-wide travels, she’d occasionally make a quick sketch of a location or of a person that she’d see to presumably later describe textually in an article or essay.

From Bryant’s journal, “Trip to Bokhara”, Jan-Feb 1921.

While many of her drawings are undated and unsigned, context provides clues that she continued to draw for pleasure late into her life, with a particular fondness for caricatures, women’s fashion, and social commentary.

Mr. Hoover in Repose

In 1924, Bryant gave birth to her daughter, Anne Moen Bullitt. In MS 1840’s Series III: Visual Artworks, comprising drawings in pencil, ink, and watercolor, one can find drawings by both Bryant and a young Bullitt individually, drawings that they made for each other, and even a paper doll that it appears they each had a hand in making. In looking at this material, I couldn’t help but think about the descriptor of the series in the finding aid, “While some of the artwork is signed by Bryant, much of it is unsigned and therefore might be the work of someone else.”

I then stumbled onto folder 9 in box 18 which contains a single sketchbook with very little writing. The drawing style here differs significantly from much of the other visual material in the collection: representational drawings are made loosely, with visible gesture lines, display confident, naturalistic shading and advanced pencil handling. Further, the book is composed almost entirely of landscapes.

I immediately considered another drawing I saw earlier in the collection, most likely pastel and gouache drawn on the inside of a previously published book cover; I’d thought it was a preliminary mockup for a book cover of William Bullitt’s 1926 satirical novel It’s Not Done and had noted its style, altogether different from Bryant’s other work.

Drawn on the verso of the dust jacket of Knut Hamsun’s novel, Benoni.

Via web search, I was able to determine that this image is either an homage to a Robert Minor illustration for “The Masses”, or, however unlikely, a drawing by Minor himself. Further research led me to discover that Bryant, Bullitt, Minor, and others of “the Masses crowd” all lived near one another at Mt. Airy, New York. Could it be that the sketchbook of landscapes was the work of Minor, perhaps given to Bryant to eventually find its way into her trunk at the Bullitt home?

Robert Minor’s cover for the July, 1916 issue of “The Masses”.

Speculation, yes, but Minor’s published cartoons bear some stylistic parallels to the hand that composed the landscapes. Still, none of the cartoons attributed to him that I was able to find depict objects, plant life, or structures. I contacted Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library to enquire about their collection of the Robert Minor Papers, but as their finding aid suggests, the collection holds no drawings.

Alas, the hunt is stymied for now. I can only hope that further research bears out or dashes my admittedly wild assumptions — either way, I’ll know Louise Bryant a little better.
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